That reminds me the story of one of my friends, who worked for IBM in a 3rd world country. Basically the role of their whole department was customer support + QA, fixing low-level bugs on IBM products developed by other teams (in different countries). They received a visit from one of the higher-ups in IBM, for an all hands meeting with the basic message of "We checked our statistics and we don't see any patents issued by this department. What is happening? Surely you do a lot of innovation, why don't you patent it?!"

Every big software company does this. It's a ridiculous arms race, but you have to play or risk getting sued to oblivion by a patent troll.

This doesn't work for patent trolls. Patent trolls, by definition, don't have a business outside of patent licensing and suing for patent violations. The Mutually Assured Destruction of an IBM fighting a Samsung over patents doesn't hold for 3 lawyers in three levels of LLCs and a handful of near expiring patents suing a Samsung.

At one of those big companies I worked at a co-worker was working on a patent that read something like displaying health information from a JSON payload on a mobile application. For some reason I couldn't find it, so I assume it was rejected, but yeah this happens.

Why don't big companies lobby for better patent laws then?

Sometimes they do, very successfully. Several prominent tech companies backed efforts to neuter patent trolls in the prior decade, to positive effect. Patent trolls are one instance where big tech's interests are largely aligned with smaller tech companies, as both hate them.

In the recent case of TC Heartland vs Kraft Foods, some large companies (Apple, eBay, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Walmart) supported the effort to abolish being able to file patent lawsuits in most any venue (a concept which helped lead to East Texas becoming the capital of patent lawsuits in the US). Often you'll have big companies fight eachother in situations like that, as big pharma was on the other side of that, arguing in favor of being able to sue in any venue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TC_Heartland_LLC_v._Kraft_Food...

Why would they want to do that? They have the money to play the game... it's startups and disrupters to their business who don't have the money to do it. When the day comes when a startup challenges one of these companies, one of two things will happen: they'll be forced to sell or they'll get sued to oblivion. Just the threat alone keeps startups from operating in their space and getting investors, etc. These companies don't want to compete with you.

I think because a) this is a huge additional investment b) they still have to invest in patents until (if) the system changes c) then the whole playing field is changed, and that's also a huge risk

Status quo is almost always safer if you're one of the biggest.

They did lobby for better patent laws--that's how we got first-to-file and inter-partes review.

Nokia did (and probably still does) this as well, plus it gives inventor a share in revenue generated by the patented invention. Some ex-colleagues had made a small fortune out of this back in heydays. No wonder Nokia still holds so much important patents.

For comparison, Red Hat does too, but that's redundant now :)

Every big corp pays employees to file patents. I don't know that it's a factor for promotions at my employer; certainly not up to Eng 3 or 4, and no manager has told me that I would be promoted if I filed patents.

It's definitely not all big corps, Amazon does not for instance.

No surprise there. Amazon doesn't pay employees much more in any benefits.

Ages ago, Robert X. Cringely (an earlier avatar) had a column about just this. It concluded, as I recall, "So weep not for IBM. They may hold a patent on it."