0. Large companies much prefer to settle patent disputes with "Okay, you might have a case for patents A, B, C. We have a case for you infringing on our patent

0. Large companies much prefer to settle patent disputes with "Okay, you might have a case for patents A, B, C. We have a case for you infringing on our patents D and E. We like your patents F and G. What do you like from our portfolio? Okay, and we'll throw in these 300 random patents to show we're willing to reduce our ability to drown your lawyers in paperwork. How about you throw in 200 random patents to bring down the size of your paperwork arsenal? Do we have a deal?" Edit: so at some point in the patent portfolio cross-licensing negotiation, there's a pure numbers game, so for large corporations there is some value in patents nobody is ever going to implement. At least that's my recollection from 15 years ago about why Google paid me as sole inventor of a patent. (I was working on indexing, and thought "Oh no, if someone does X, then indexing becomes incredibly harder, basically DRM for the web. Webspam could hide more easily. Oh, but if we patent X, that might make my life easier in the future." The patent lawyer zeroed in too much on my mention of CAPTCHA as a possible use case, so I'm not sure if Google could really use my patent to prevent its use as DRM/Webspam hiding. At some point, I decided pushing back against the lawyer to make the patent more broadly applicable might not be good for society. I didn't feel strongly enough to turn down my patent bonus, just strongly enough to stop pushing edits back to the lawyer.)