I was reading Steve Eichert's blog entry titled “Way to go Sun” where sun is aggressively taking down websites that are supporting the java community.
It seems that some companies hit a phase where they have more lawyers than engineers and they aggressively try to protect old revenue streams or product uniqueness within the market. Companies need to protect their products, but certain companies seem to start going over the top. Take Apple in the late 80's in their scorched-earth “look-and-feel” compaign to protect the mac. The industry might look very different today had they put that money into developing their platform instead of lining the pockets of lawyers.
I worked with an embedded device communication protocol in '98 and '99 and the company that established the protocol had to have a 100:1 L/E ratio. They published a management protocol and charged everybody $50,000 for the toolkit and tried to charge additional licensing fees for each device you talked to. Nothing worked - their base tool, the protocol, everything. We wrote an open protocol based on COM and put it through an independent standards organization. Needless to say, they tried suing everybody and their uncle. I was contracting at the time and even the CEO of that company asked who I was. It definitely helps having an obscurely pronounced last name because they kept asking my name and never made contact when the lawsuits got handed out. All suits were summarily dismissed by a judge who told them “I don't want to see these kind of lawsuits out of you ever again”. The company was a “bubble” company in the market and their shares trade for far less than a 10th of what they traded for in '99. I don't mention the company name because I wouldn't be surprised if they would throw lawsuits out as a reflexive action.
If an L/E ratio existed, you could get an idea when a company is agressively innovating or when their sacred revenue streams are dying on the vine and they are consumed by fighting to protect them. I doubt the ratio would be possible to enforce (just outsource the lawyers). But that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing - maybe it would drive the lawyer employment market out of the country!