For example, set up an EFF like non-profit whose mission is to invalidate bad patents. Then these tech. companies can just throw money at the non-profit as a preventive strike against patent trolls working in their solution space.
(And once the emperor's clothes are shown to be gone, that IP is worth zero.)
Microsoft (yes, even the polished up, lipstick on a pig, "new Microsoft") benefits from "bad patents" waaay more than it loses to a few random patent trolls. It actually lobbied to stop the elimination of "business method" patents, which are just lawyer-written garbage.
http://bgr.com/2013/05/01/microsofts-android-licensing-agree...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/11/20...
Fortunately, business method patents are on their last legs thanks to Supreme Court's "Alice" ruling, but they can still cause damage (or profits, depending from which perspective you're look at it):
http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2015/08/04/are-business-method-pat...
Also it would be in the trolls interest to be able to continuously sue a company rather than bankrupting it and destroy a revenue stream.
The problem comes when the bar for "inventive" and "novel" and "non-obvious" is too low, and a guy or girl in a garage facing the problem to be solved is just as likely to reinvent the solution independently. Often, it's the problem that shapes the solution, rather than any particular inventiveness.
It turns out, other engineering disciplines also have this problem, but because their times to market are much longer and more expensive, and their times of prior art are much longer (and thus the foundations are more well known/documented) it doesn't quite rise to the immediate existential threat that it does for independent software developers.
I'm not sure that follows. Do you think the ability to keep and preserve trade secrets is the same for all those fields? Keeping a trade secret in software that runs on end user' computers seems much more difficult than keeping the technique used in a chemical reaction a secret. I tend to think that just about everything software related would otherwise be out there and available.
I'm also not sure that coaxing trade secrets into the open is a significant reason that patents are good. At least, I have trouble thinking of cases in any of those fields (much less software) where I think that the overall rate of scientific progress in the world is better as a result of knowledge disclosed in a patent. Do you have examples? In particular, for something software related that is better known today because it was disclosed in a patent which has since expired?
There are important ways that software is different.
One is that software is inherently abstract. If you're making a battery or a machine or a drug, it matters what materials you use, what the temperature is at different points, how long the product lasts, how much it costs per unit to manufacture, etc. In software there is none of that. But without any of those constraints the inherent result is unreasonably broad patents.
This combines on the other end with the fact that software has effectively zero reproduction cost, so there is trivial cost for adding support for things. Which means combinatorial explosion. "You asked for a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding a banana and the entire jungle." If you're making batteries and you use A, B and C then it doesn't affect you if someone else has a patent on the combination of D, E and F. If you're making software there is no unit cost to adding support for everything from A to Z, so you do. But then it doesn't matter which combination of things someone patents, you end up unwittingly infringing it because you support everything and the patent covers some subset of everything.
The result is unworkable. The system can't function when everything infringes everything.
When it's business as usual, these companies rather enjoy the benefits of having large portfolios filled with patents of dubious validity. They don't want to get the ball rolling on something that may end up costing them money in the long run, like drawing attention to the dubious nature of most patents or starting an initiative that may backfire by invalidating some of their own IP.
You'll find this is common with big companies. The law governing a certain type of conduct may be a totally incomprehensible, unpredictable, and uneven disaster, but incumbent players don't mind because for the most part, it enables them to scare off any upstart challenger by intimidation. The challengers who are too foolish to back down will generally struggle to keep representation and eventually end up completely destroyed (see Facebook v. Power Ventures), which makes a fine example to warn off any other cheeky upstarts who think they'll play hardball with the big conglomerate. These big companies know that their peers won't press the legal matters or try to get the law improved because they benefit from the same effects. Instead, two big companies with beef will, after some legal posturing, eventually come to a mutual licensing deal (which may be in the form of a settlement) where they each send the other a large check every month to license the patents that could be construed as covering components of each others' products.
The matter is only pressed when there's no mutually-beneficial agreement to be had, like in Oracle v. Google regarding the Java API; Google wants the right to re-implement the Java API as they see fit, without having to pay royalties, and Oracle wants the right to exact payment from anyone implementing the Java API. Indeed, some Sun insiders consider Google's refusal to license Java components (they had apparently been in talks at some point) as one of the final blows that forced Sun to sell.
However, the way that that intellectual property law is written, it's difficult to have firm, universally-applicable precedents established. Fair use is fundamentally a case-by-case basis, which means even if Google gets it established that their use of the Java API is fair (afaik, it has already been established that APIs are protected under copyright, so fair use is the applicable defense), it doesn't necessarily apply to anyone or anything else. That means big companies can still intimidate little guys by threatening to drag them through 10 years of ultra-expensive court proceedings, plus the risk of a judgment finding damages, injunctions, etc., if they don't immediately comply with the BigCo's demands.
Convoluted and murky law benefits the massive corporations, who would much rather pay lawyers a few million to dispose of a plucky competitor than actually have to fight that competitor in the marketplace.
Why would Google need to pay royalties to duplicate the SSO of 37 Java API's that were open sourced in 2008? If you really think companies should have to pay royalties for using the SSO of an API then perhaps we should start with Oracle paying IBM for their use of the SQL API's.
If you really want to do something about this, you need to get political and change the rules. A stronger combined effort into lobbying would be a much better approach to solve this problem once and for all. It would also open up a path for other issues such as crypto, net neutrality and immigration that's also important to all of these companies.