This. I don't even want to know how many patents we're all infringing on in everything we ship. We all just sort of sweep this under the rug. No one ever does a technical/patent analysis. Is patent check part of your deployment pipeline? I highly doubt it. There's probably tens of thousands of broadly worded software patents out in the wild. The only thing that keeps the industry safe is how difficult it actually is to do that analysis because of the inherent complexity in both software and patent law.
I have one counter example. I used to work at Samsung's R&D a few years ago and there patent analysis (and filing patents) was obligatory for every developer. They had been bitten by lawsuits a few times so they learned.
