Re: According to the patent lobby...
I wrote some of the software that MS claimed was infringing. It was not, and MS finally backed down after a fight.
By my calculations, MS would have made somewhere between $50M and $100M out of my efforts.
When one of the phone vendors wanted me to investigate something, they offered no payment. I was feeling a bit grumpy that day and suggested they'd paid MS for the use of the software so perhaps they should ask MS for tech support too.
You can't get too twisted up about this because you'd just end up a bag of ulcers.
According to one of the lawyers I dealt with, MS has a huge patent portfolio that is well orgaised and indexed. They have people going through the patents and trying to see how these might be applied. Anything that looks like it might be close to infringing is thrown on the pile. This is a huge revenue stream for MS, so it pays to spend a few million per year organising it into a profitable money spinner.