Re: If Huawei agreed an payment plan with Ericson
> I bet the original inventors of these patents got a one-time bonus of €1000 or so
As a recipient of several of these, I can agree that the original inventors will get such sums. But at the same time they are drawing a salary and are tasked with investigating such things on behalf of a company, with the use of expensive company resources to do these investigations. In a lot of these patents, not necessarily all, it would be difficult for someone to actually come up with the idea, prove it worked, and then spend the time and effort needed to get it into a standard, as well as forking out the large sums of money required to pursue the patent in the first place.
Yes, some patentable things can be bashed together in a garden shed, but increasingly in many areas, it takes a large investment to some up with small incremental ideas that together form part of a larger whole. I'm not bitter in the slightest about my patent awards.
Sure, there are problems in the whole area of patent law, but I'm not sure being able to trade ownership rights is one of them.