It's been mentioned here before, but judges are rarely amused by the kind of "overly clever" deductive reasoning that smart people like to use to claim that they've defeated the text of some law. The law is not code for you to exploit... If the judge thinks you're trying to pull a fast one, you're going to have a bad time.

I realize the Microsoft-now-owns-github-so-a-clever-multi-way-merge-could-exhaust-every-patent-ever argument was a bit of a joke, but still, everything related to that 1993 case seems murky enough that I wouldn't want to rely on it.

While this is a nice hack the usual protections of having patents belong to an non- practicing entity would still work, i.e. this sadly won't work against patent trolls, only against honest companies.

Unless the trolls had bought the patents from a company that had assigned themselves a license.

As far as I'm aware, its quite common to retain rights to a patent portfolio, when selling it on.