If you cant compete sue them off…Yeah.
The BS with these IP suits isn’t so much that IP is worth protecting in our modern society, but how it’s done. The way patents are written these days with an eye to ye ole legal traditional means that the applications are basically unintelligible to those outside of a very specific legal niche; even those who did the “inventing”. These are two of the patents in question: http://news.priorsmart.com/surefire-v-4sevens-l5h5/#pat-6222138. They’re 20+ page explanations of relatively simple ideas, which is in part necessary because the patent office doesn’t request working samples (thus the age-old joke of perpetual motion machines). Over half of what’s there is gibberish, and even if the were a cohesive description, it’s so hard to understand to the people doing the work that infringement is a matter of interpretation.
I’ve signed my name on 100+ page patents “translated” by law firms from docs supposedly written by myself where I have no idea how/where they got the terminology or diagrams or anything, and this is standard practice. The intellectual property is so far removed from what’s done (and lack of any perceivable technical expertise among the parties involved during litigation) that any infringement might as well be incidental.