Its a defensive patent scheme. Remember the old days of the internet where people would take boring business model X and patent "doing X on the internet" and try to make millions or billions? The idea is if it costs $5K to file a patent and you think there's a 1 in a 1000 chance of someone actually inventing room temp superconductors soon-ish, then you net profit if you license your patent for more than $5M which seems quite reasonable. Say, for example, GE discovers and commercializes room temp semiconductors, it would be a lot cheaper and faster to pay this guy off (despite him doing nothing) for perhaps $10M than to fight him in court and try to explain to a completely non-technical judge that the guy didn't actually invent anything. Any one patent will almost certainly not pay off, but file enough patents and you'll win the lotto eventually. Somebody out there working independent of the patent guy will eventually invent an actual real world room temp superconductor and the patent guy will get a lot of money for doing, well, essentially nothing.
Really, everyone should be patenting everything in science fiction. We can do the "doing X on the internet" thing with drones. Why hasn't someone patented the idea of "delivery of bags of dogfood ... via drone", that was a classic of dotcom 1.0.
Really, everyone should be patenting everything in science fiction. We can do the "doing X on the internet" thing with drones. Why hasn't someone patented the idea of "delivery of bags of dogfood ... via drone", that was a classic of dotcom 1.0.