Lambda the Ultimate

Patents are supposed to be formal specifications of inventions that contain enough information for someone reasonably skilled in the art to reproduce the invention. I'm curious as to whether anyone is working on automating patent comparisons for the purpose of establishing violations. My shallow understanding is that proving systems might have something to contribute to that problem, or at least a significant enough subset of it - at least for "software patents".

Having such a system might be a good weapon against big firms that file suits that take ages to verify and primarily serve to feed the pockets of lawyers (apologies for the cynicism there).