This is a situation where the locally optimal solution is globally suboptimal. You're doomed to a death of a thousand cuts if you play along with patent trolls, even if each cut is comparatively small.
Clearly "let's cooperate and put trolls out of business" isn't happening right now, and other than the possibility that no one has thought of it before now (doubtful) there are two obvious reasons:
- For a given case where a troll sues multiple parties, each party is relying on the other defendants to cooperate, but the lowest risk alternative is to settle early and be done with it. The patent troll knows this, and will try to cut down the number of cooperators until all are forced to settle.
- Since most cases don't offer much resistance and often settle, patent trolls are able to fund an expansion of their operations, and they simultaneously gain credibility ("you'd better settle, Microsoft already did").
So the historical practice of settling with trolls works against companies who would think not to do so, and any group of companies that tries to band together in defense is in a situation where defection ruins the defense, and the incentive to defect starts high and increases with each additional defection.
As Mr. Crutchfield says, it's a shakedown that exploits a peculiarity of the patent system (namely, the combination of the ability to sell patents with the ability for NPEs to bring infringement suits). This is an emergent property of the legal system. The right approach is to change the system.
I doubt I'll have to convince many here that nothing of value would be lost if NPEs were no longer allowed to bring infringement suits for dormant patents.