At it’s most basic, a patent is a piece of paper you can wave around and hopefully scare off others from your idea. But, until a judge somewhere bangs a gavel and says Yea or Nay, it’s nothing more than asswipe. A patent fight is insanely expensive-- even for multi-national corpos. Hence all the cross licensing agreements among them.

Source: I’ve held a minor niche patent, (it wasn’t worth the money spent beyond the cool factor), and I knew a person who held a patent on what was basically a rectangle with drilled holes in it. He wanted to sue another manufacturer that was was doing a direct knock off. He got told straight up 1.You can’t afford it. 2. It wouldn’t stand up in court. 3. So don’t bother.