You are condoning extortion. Perhaps, indeed, the individual should negotiate terms -- but for the same reason that if the Mafia showed up to your doorstep, packing heat, then it would be wise to take their demands seriously.
Love it or not - it is the rules of the game. Someone came up with the idea before you and they registered that idea before you. Vague or not - they had the foresight - and they are indeed entitled to being proprietary.
If you do not like it - challenge it. If you can not afford to challenge it - negotiate for 'fair-use'.
If you think otherwise - you are an amateur.
No, they aren't. Upthread you claimed to be an attorney -- you should know better than to suggest that patents cover ideas. They don't. They cover implementations. Having an idea and going "ME FIRST" does nothing to get you protection.
Software patents are patents on ideas. They are a perversion of the patent system and are a plague. Using them to try to get licensing deals is blatantly extortion, and patent trolls know this; setting their settlement costs just shy of what it would cost to mount a competent defense. There is nothing good about this and it isn't even consistent with the rules of 'the game' you love so much.
Hardly; most newsworthy cases are of patents that have sufficient prior art in academia and industry that they should have been rejected in the first place, and/or are so blindingly obvious that every failed Y2K-era dot com considered and rejected them as a pivot while they were shredding their stock for use as packing material.
I wish I had the foresight to created idea/feature patents like 'Allowing users to reply in a forum-like setting in order to generate even more conversation'. That way, I could sue Y-Combinator for 'profiting wildly from my idea.' Perhaps the good folks over at Y-Combinator can take a page from your book and give me a percentage stake in every single start-up they help to seed.
If you do this, you'll be labelled a sucker and get bombarded by more patent trolls. Unless you're an Apple or Google, your business is sunk then. Most every business violates hundreds if not thousands of patents. Simply owning a computer means you've violated many patents.
It is 100% necessary - and though there might be casualties such as what is going on here - if we did not have Intellectual Property Rights - we would be at a disadvantage.
My suggestion is anyone being sued connect with the individual suing them and work out terms - everything is negotiable. Why not cut the owners of the patents in on a % of revenues?