The United States Patent and Trademark Office has always been infamous for having astonishingly lax enforcement of their own rules and the laws of the country in general, and pretty much granting any patent application that it receives, with about the only requirement being that the patent form is correctly filled.
Infamously, it has granted probably hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of patents that should have been invalid because they do not fulfill the requirements of the law nor the rules of the USPTO itself (such as, for example, granting patents for inventions and methods that have existed for decades and were not invented by the people filing the patent.)
The general policy of the USPTO has pretty much always been one of "grant all patents by default, let the private corporations and citizens fight about it between themselves in court." That's how you get completely ridiculous patents, of things that are not patentable according to the law of the United States, of things that have existed for literally decades, and all kinds of other patents that should have never been granted in the first place. It's pretty much if you fill out the form correctly and pay the fee, you get the patent, pretty much regardless of what it is. It's almost automatic.
Patents can also be sold. In other words, if you own a patent, you can sell it to someone else.
This has, for many decades now, given raise to one of the shittiest assholes in the entire US economic system: Patent trolls.
These are people or companies who get thousands and thousands of patents, tens of thousands of patents, by either filing them (and pretty much automatically getting them) or buying them from other companies or people for cheap, and then they use those patents to extort large megacorporations for millions of dollars.
What makes then "patent trolls" is that they have zero intention to actually do anything with the patented things. They are not protecting anything. They are not manufacturing or selling anything. Literally the only thing they do is to get patents to extort large megacorporations with. It's a 100% extortion scheme: "Pay us money, or we will take you to court."
And the scary thing is that it works: The vast majority of megacorporations will pay. And they will do so even when the patents are completely invalid and should not have been granted in the first place. Why? Because it's actually much cheaper for the company to pay the extortion money than to fight in court to have a hundred patents nullified.
And that's precisely what the patent trolls rely on: They are specifically relying on corporations thinking like that. They are specifically relying on the corporations deciding that it's just cheaper to pay than fight hundreds of patents in court.
And one of the main reasons is not only that such litigation could take years and cost exorbitant sums in legal fees, but moreover and most important that, usually, the corporation will not be allowed to sell the disputed product while the lawsuit is ongoing, until a verdict is reached. And that alone incentivizes the corporation to pay the extortion money, no matter how invalid the patents may be. Not being able to sell a product could literally cost them hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue. And patent trolls are explicitly banking on that. "Pay us 10 million, and we'll grant you permission to sell your product for hundreds."
It's essentially a legal form of "nice business you have there, would be a shame if somebody were to happen to it."
These patent trolls are literally organized criminals who operate technically within the law, who have found a loophole in the law thanks to the lax behavior by the USPTO. It's literal robbery because the patent trolls only extort money, they don't contribute anything to the economy. They are the scum of the earth.
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