Instead of wasting money on lawyers, why don't they focus their time and efforts on making great products? In a young space, such as printing, companies that behave like this usually go out business eventually.
They are a company that sells very high price equipment to very few people. All the company structure is optimized for that. The engineers, the sales channel, everything.
They simply can't compete in a market of low cost 3D printers, selling in the millions, like Silicon Graphics could not compete with NVidia selling cheap cards for gamers.
The purpose of patents is to give new companies with brilliant ideas some breathing room where they can grow their business.
I don't know the background of the given companies in this situation, but it's possible that 3D Software was being muscled out by a bunch of kidz with a flashy kickstarter and a nice promo vid.
On the same note, more cash != success and that goes for startups. It is all down to execution. If you are not executing, don't have market awareness, and your engineering is not up to snuff then you do not deserve to survive in the marketplace. You should not use draconian laws to offset your mis-execution.
To develop a physical product takes a long time, with a lot of (costly[1]) trial and error. You'll start with single items, then move on to batch production (10s-100s) on a few versions to test proof of concept. Depending on the size of the market, you may move on to mass production. For each scale increase, the start-up cost is higher, and the unit cost is lower.
If I develop a product, and in doing so show it has great potential, I've done most of the hard work. It's then easy for someone to go straight in at the top end with relatively little investment, because I've already proved the concept and sucked up the risk.
It's fair that people are able to protect their investment for something like this, otherwise it's not possible to compete against larger players.
Physical manufacturing is not the same as software.
[1] Relative to developing software, that is.
These kids are bringing 3d printing to the masses because the IBMs of the 3d printing won't do it on their own.
There is a balance between granting monopolies(patents), and making those monopolies eternal, or not respecting or giving credit to the creators of something.
And yes, there is a balance, and I'm not suggesting it's been reached. I just want to dispel the notion that it'll all be hunky dory with no patent laws.