As far as anyone on the outside can tell, this is their sole business model: leveraging patents not to build competitive products, but simply to strong-arm others into forking over money when they create something that stumbles into the broadly worded language of the intellectual property protections.

via ‘Patent trolls’ put brakes on S.F. transit app – SFGate.

He was confident the patents in question were bogus, loose legalese describing obvious ideas. Moreover, the service that he received his data from, NextBus, already had a license to use those patents.