Interesting that you view the patent as a sword. Depending on your view of mutually assured destruction, you could also view the patent as a shield.
Certainly this is what I was told when I started filing them at my mega corp. 3K for filing, 10K bonus if granted and helping shield the product in case we are served. Our patents can be horse traded to settle a dispute. Because I believed in our team, product etc. it was easy to think we should be capable to defend ourselves; we were the best and that meant the stragglers would come for us using any means available, including patent trolling.
Are you the legal department? Do you know what your legal team does with it? Do you really trust your management team to be good stewards?
The only upside to patents as originally formulated was they actually traded an implementation blueprint for exclusivity. A worthy trade. Many patents don't even do that anymore, and devolve down to "draw the rest of the owl" tier parking lots on ideas. IP attorneys have done nothing to skew away from this outcome.
The entire idea of defensive patents makes a mockery of the original intention. "Patents are so fucked that the only recourse is to get your own patents so that even though you may inftringe others' patents they likely also infringe yours and would lose as much as they can gain by enforcing their purpoted exclusivity." MAD.
Curious why you say that it mocks the original intention.
If they're infringing on you, and you're infringing on them, then it nets out. By patenting your own developments, you allow yourself to legally net out. If you don't patent it, then in the eyes of the law it is not equal. Seems like its a quantification of intellectual property, which doesn't mock anything.
The issue at point with the patent system is that it was intended to incentivize innovation, and the evolution of the State of the Art. The building of large general patent portfolios by wielded by NPE's as a financial instrument does the exact opposite.
So while you might "net out", said netting out is not helping society actually advance, in fact it makes it more difficult to do so as you try to avoid potholes created by patent x-1 in your own journeys to actually innovate/invent.
The moment you get a self'sustaining finance engine implementable from a legal construct, it will be beaten reoeatedly, as fast and hard as possible til all the money possible can be extracted.
Like many weapons systems, patents can certainly serve defensively as well as offensively. In this case, defending against others using them as offensive weapons.
Patents can also have some marketing value.
The one thing the do NOT do is universally stop infringement in real time, which is what people think they do.
If you have a new product/technology, a large company that wants to use it will simply go ahead and litigate it later. You will have a ticket to sue them. They'll have their defensive wall of patents, and maybe you'll make a deal and settle out of court. If not, you'll try to stay afloat and if you manage to fund the suit, in 9-15 years after all the appeals, maybe you get a big judgement.
If it's a small or Chinese company, they'll just run with it, you can sue them, if you're lucky, you'll get an injunction to have products seized at the ports by customs, and you'll never collect a penny at the end because the company will be long dissolved. They'll have stolen some of your market with impunity.
Medium-sized companies might actually respect a patent, because they are intending to stay in business, but don't have unlimited resources.
Certainly this is what I was told when I started filing them at my mega corp. 3K for filing, 10K bonus if granted and helping shield the product in case we are served. Our patents can be horse traded to settle a dispute. Because I believed in our team, product etc. it was easy to think we should be capable to defend ourselves; we were the best and that meant the stragglers would come for us using any means available, including patent trolling.