So where has the profit, paid as bonuses to executives and shareholders, come from?
The UK water companies were paid extra to fix the infrastructure and the cash paid by the public has increased.
If you take a step back and look at your comment, you might realise that you are making the same point: businesses don't have to take any particular path...
Nokia must be desperate for cash.
Developing video codecs is a painful exercise as some part of the implementation almost always relies on prior art. The company that I worked for were sued for our implementation of an MPEG-2 codec, because of a similar patent owned by a troll.
These cases are what hold innovation back and are only attractive to the trolls because of how many h.264/h.265 codec instances are running out there.
The usual technique is to go for the little guys first and then move up the food chain.