37,000 is a bit more than <i>lots</i> of patents. Nikola Tesla had around 300, presumably all his own inventions, and Thomas Edison had just over 1000 (US) from his own work and his employee&#x27;s work. Those set an upper limit on what geniuses can produce in a lifetime for pre-IT Industry patents. (eg: before patents got out of hand.)<p>Does Ericsson employ the equivalent of 1000 Teslas? That seems unlikely, so I&#x27;m guessing many of their patents are relatively trivial or vaguely generic. Otherwise they wouldn&#x27;t have been able to produce so many of them.<p>On a practical note, how can Ericsson make use of a patent library that large? I don&#x27;t mean licensing, I mean how do their engineers make use of the existing patents to create new inventions and products? It must be as bad as software developers trying to use a huge standard library (like .NET) which I guess I find surprising.