This is a great strategy if your lifelong dream is to get rich off a legal settlement. It's not at all instructive for startups.
Note the delay from filing the patent to having it issued: theirs was unusually fast. The last patent filed in my name took over 8 years to issue, and Arbor had very excellent IP lawyers. That's 8 years before you can even file a suit.
Assume you instantly find a deep-pocketed violator of your patent. Add up to a year just to get to the point where you're ready to sue, and several more years to pursue the lawsuit. Spend --- according to this article --- several million dollars just in legal each of those years.
Then flip a coin to see if you get anything back.
Patents are a waste of time for startups. If your company is even around for the entire window of time needed to execute this strategy, you've done something wrong.
Excellent points about the article but, in my view, it is too extreme to say that patents are a "waste of time for startups."
Patents can and do help startups with their positioning for funding, among other things, though software patents usually are a waste of time, as is any strategy based on the idea of using patents to take on a large player in the marketplace, unless one wants to become a patent troll.
But every hour spent on patents (and babysitting patent lawyers takes many, many hours) is an hour not spent executing on the core business. So you have to ask yourself, what's going to improve my positioning more: the same freeze-dried reconstituted IP PowerPoint strategy used by every other VC-backed company, or N x $50,000 more revenue?
Just speaking from considerable experience that a minority of startups can benefit hugely from a good patent strategy (e.g., saw one of my early-stage fiber optics clients get to $400M annual run rate and multi-B valuation, with the dozens of patents filed by its founder proving to be a major factor in valuation at interim funding, at IPO, and at ultimate merger with JDSU).
I find your overall logic compelling, however, as I have seen startups use patents all too often for empty positioning, at considerable cost.
Note the delay from filing the patent to having it issued: theirs was unusually fast. The last patent filed in my name took over 8 years to issue, and Arbor had very excellent IP lawyers. That's 8 years before you can even file a suit.
Assume you instantly find a deep-pocketed violator of your patent. Add up to a year just to get to the point where you're ready to sue, and several more years to pursue the lawsuit. Spend --- according to this article --- several million dollars just in legal each of those years.
Then flip a coin to see if you get anything back.
Patents are a waste of time for startups. If your company is even around for the entire window of time needed to execute this strategy, you've done something wrong.