For instance, check out the annual report of, say, Texas Instruments: an amazingly large fraction of their revenue is from “royalties”. Savvy corporate managers are fond of saying, “There’s nothing quite as nice as ‘IP’ (intellectual property) revenue: discover something you don’t need, license it — and sit back and enjoy the checks rolling in every month...”
***A few years ago I worked for a $multibillion company that was recently acquired by TI. Their approach to IP was amazingly short sighted, focusing only on things that would become products. It wasn’t until a meeting between the field engineers and the legal department that the approach changed, because I pointed out to them that I had approached Legal on several patents that were outside of our own product scope. At the time, they were not interested. But during the meeting they claimed they WERE interested, that their focus all along was on generating patents. So I talked about several of my projects that were turned down. Their policy changed on that day. They had missed out on hundreds of patents from field engineers & others that could have generated revenue.
I did a 'suggestion of the week' project for most of a year. Every single suggestion I submitted was rejected ~ only to be adopted about 2 years later once it was outside the scope off the program and eligible for consideration for award.
Corruption is corruption.
Most of government is like that; most likely any large company that inserts its lawyers between patent proposals and marketing is like that too.