You said ... “Sounds like what this company does. No products, no employees. They just own patents.”
Yep, it’s happening all over the place to many companies. It’s time to fix the problem ... in the law!
This is why both Apple and Google spend more money on their legal departments than they do on research. Our system is broken and has been almost from the time of its inception. Unfortunately, it is not any more likely to be fixed than it would be for Obama to balance the budget. There are too many lawyers living off the fruits of the true innovators; they will ensure that no meaningful reform is ever made.
There really is almost no way for the public to know who the real innovator really was once the lawyers get their claws into it. There are so many ways that the system is manipulated.
Patents have turned into a sick game with their volume. At least it isn’t as sick as the game of copyrights. Nobody actually READS the patents because they don’t want to raise any suggestion that they ripped one off.