I also enjoy watching a parasitic, degenerate, and incompetent company like Microsoft pay a lot of money to a small company, since they've destroyed a lot of small companies by their illegal activities. But, the patent system is important even than extracting revenge against an ugly monopoly.
Without knowing the actual law, the comments here are probably based on conjecture, but the key point of patents is they should promote innovation, not impede it. It's not clear in many of these cases that it's doing that.
Also, Rambus does make useful technology, and has been used in computers, and is used in the PS/3. Of course their incessant litigation sometimes buries that fact.