That's probably completely wrong. The patent landscape has changed dramatically in the past 5 years. The likelihood they could extract significant sums of money from these patents drops every day.

I'd really love to read the summary of the patent landscape that explains that.

This might be a good starting place, "Software Patents: A One-Year Review of Alice v. CLS Bank" (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2619388)

Like I said, depends on who you ask. The point isn't the amount but that some people value it for the IP, not net income.

I mentioned this in another comment but how does Yahoo even know that its intellectual property wasn't taken?

Is it unreasonable to suspect that a company that has had multiples breaches of security of this extent might also not have had its IP taken out from underneath them as well?

when you patent something it's always in the public domain, that's the point of patents, except that the ownership isn't public domain just the knowledge of a particular tech. but yes, nothing guarantees that tech they had in the pipeline isn't being stolen right now.

but if the details of a patent have been stolen the patents still have value, except for when the exact implementation of a patent can be circumvented due to access to plans.

What if you ask Verizon?

If you ask Verizon, this leak was a great way to get a better price on a deal they already wanted to have happen.

with the way things are going, they just need to wait a few more months to get a even better deal.