[aplorbust]

To finish the story with some original thought, lets ask why this tactic works.

Perhaps it works because of the expense of determining which patent claims could realistically survive a motion to dismiss, i.e., the hourly rate of the patent lawyers hired to do this analysis and the number of hours they take to do it. The larger the stack of potentially assertable claims that need to be considered, the greater the cost. Quantity not quality.

If that process of determination, separating wheat from chaff, filtering out all the nonassertable (junk) claims, was less expensive than simply paying for a licenseFN1, then perhaps this tactic would not work.

FN1. Use imagination if believe this is impossible to achieve.

[dctoedt]

That's correct; many patent claims are written in long, dense paragraphs, without line breaks, subdivision numbers, or other "signposts" to guide the reader. I'm convinced that often this is often more than just laziness or incompetence by the patent attorney — it's intentional obscurantism, to make it more difficult and expensive for others to determine whether or not they infringe and whether or not the claim is in fact legally patentable. [3]

[3] http://www.oncontracts.com/multi-sentence-claims/ (self-cite)

[trhway]

>Perhaps it works because of the expense of determining which patent claims could realistically survive a motion to dismiss, i.e., the hourly rate of the patent lawyers hired to do this analysis and the number of hours they take to do it.

or may be because a patent court case is more like rolling a dice with very significant potential damage. Business likes predictability - license is just a static cost to be factored into the price of the product - vs. high risk gamble. And software patents i think are worst of the worst in that regard (nevermind that i have several of them myself :).