There's a difference between willful and non-intentional infringement. If you use H.264 and you get sued by MPEG LA, you can be damn sure that they'll win and t

There's a difference between willful and non-intentional infringement. If you use H.264 and you get sued by MPEG LA, you can be damn sure that they'll win and that you'll pay up a fortune for it. On the other hand, patents really aren't so broad and those that are can be and have been overturned in court for being too general - with exceptions of course, of which you hear because they are so outrageous (like Amazon's 1-click patent). In reality, it's really hard to prove that something is infringing on a patent, if the infringement wasn't intentional. In the Oracle versus Google case, Oracle was hoping they'd get Google with copyright infringement (of APIs no less), the patents involved being just in case the copyright infringement claims wouldn't work. Google won on all fronts. The reason for why threats of patents infringement are so dangerous is because few companies are willing to make a stand and would rather settle.