The "missing paragraph"

For those of you, like Leo, wondering how a big body of patents necessarily protects against another big body of patents, it's this:

The software patent landscape is so screwed up and so many lousy, worthless patents have been granted that any useful software of any size is statistically almost guaranteed to infringe on a number of them. Since companies like Microsoft and Amazon have been seeking such silly patents, other companies have taken to doing so as well.

So IBM, Novell, and many other companies hold huge bodies of patents on trivial and obvious crap just like MS does. If Microsoft chooses to go after people with a huge portfolio of useless patents, there can be a war of useless crap patents vs. the same rather than needing to prove each and every one of Microsoft's patents invalid.

The idea is to overwhelm Microsoft or other companies with the same thinking as Microsoft with as many or more counterclaims as there are claims, and eventually the plaintiff would agree to cross-license some, some patents (probably on both sides) would be invalidated by the courts, and perhaps the big mess the Patent and Trademark Office has allowed would get some notice outside the industry.