Patents have become a costly and controversial part of the business world: In every sector of the economy, companies spend an increasing amount of time defending, prosecuting, and worrying about the billion-dollar lawsuits that could be on the horizon. Seemingly overnight, we have seen the rise of an entire class of companies—monetizers, or so-called patent trolls—that do nothing but buy up existing patents and then sue manufacturers for violating them. As many critics have begun to point out, what we are seeing is a system of profound importance in American life that has careened out of control. Patents, meant to encourage innovation, today are increasingly threatening to strangle it.

Patent reform has become a debate in legal circles, with fingers pointed at everything from the way patents are issued to the way courts handle them. But to properly fix the patent system, the American patent establishment—the courts, agenie,scies, and lawmakers that handle patents—will need first to address something more basic. It will need to change its prevailing view of what a patent is.

A bedrock principle of today’s patent law—and the way most Americans intuitively understand patents—holds that a patent is a deed of ownership to a clearly described idea. It’s how we were raised to think about inventions: You thought up a brilliant new product, you own the rights to it. That notion is deeply ingrained in patent law as well.

This is compelling and easy to understand, and within the legal sphere it’s the dominant way patents are discussed. But this is ultimately the wrong way to think about patents. And it is not just wrong; the fallacy involved is costly and harmful to the economy. A far more useful way to think about patents, one that offers us a way out of the damaging wars in our most innovative industries, is to look at what really happens with a patent: Patents become no more than a starting point for negotiation. A patent is a document that gives its holder an opportunity to bargain, a seat at the table—not an absolute right to everything that springs from an idea.

Describing a patent as no more than a starting point will be heresy to many. Our system was built on the notion that a patent sets definitive boundaries around an invention. But appealing as it is, that view of a patent is simply an impossible standard: Any patent with real innovative value will see its meaning emerge only over the years, as its innovations take root and are more clearly understood and explored. We can argue over its scope, boundaries, and value at any given time, but we can’t pretend they are clearly defined at the outset.

With two influential patent cases currently before the Supreme Court, the United States is about to have a chance to think once again about what a patent really means: what it gives you rights to, and whether there should be areas out of reach of patents entirely. If we get it right, we can take an important step toward allowing patents to once again serve their intended purpose of protecting peoples’ inventions while also encouraging the most useful, exciting innovations they might spawn in the future.

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We call patents a form of “intellectual property.” This is a comforting way to think about them, and it brings to mind other forms of property, such as real estate. Patents, however, are quite different from ordinary types of property. Rather than a physical object you can measure or touch, a patent is a verbal description of something that may not even exist in tangible form.