Employees of companies are instructed specifically to avoid reading patents, to avoid the chance of hitting the triple damages from "wilful patent infringement"

Employees of companies are instructed specifically to avoid reading patents, to avoid the chance of hitting the triple damages from "wilful patent infringement". (I suppose they could read expired patent definitions, but at least in tech, those are likely much less relevant.) I imagine this also has the effect that they have no idea what technologies could theoretically be licensed from the patent owners, so, even if both parties would be willing and could agree on mutually beneficial terms, the transaction isn't initiated in the first place. (In cases where technology is licensed, I suspect the discovery mechanism involves the patent owner advertising and promoting their thing, rather than people looking at the patent stream.) The "archive that people maybe start looking at 20 years later" might be worth something. I wonder, though, if similar or greater benefits might be gotten by encouraging companies to dump their secrets (or parts thereof) into some archive where they will remain heavily encrypted and guarded for a few decades.