Being a cudgel in legal battles is quite a lot of value though, that's basically the point and is how patents are meant to support and reward innovation.
There's a second part to the idea of patents though they protect innovations with the idea that once they expire other people can implement them and software patents fail abjectly at that second. There's no meat the the implementation, all modern software patents seem to boil down to connect a client to a server and display the results on an interface. There were some genuinely useful patents back in the 80s it looks like for stuff like MP3 encoding.
Also there should be some additional value to people not just companies for the government to be granting legal monopolies, and it should also be restricted to things that are actually implementable not extremely vague system level diagrams.
From what I understand, those sorts of vague software patents are far far harder to get today - in theory they never should have been granted. Unfortunately, mistakes were made, but in recent years the legal system is catching up to that, and hopefully as those older patents expire newer patents along those lines won't be granted
"On June 19, 2014 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International that 'merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform [an] abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention'"
Software patents end up being so vague that basically every large company is violating some in some way. They don't get in legal battles with eachother often because the resulting legal decision will be somewhat random and risks huge retaliation in counter-suits.
It's not discontinuous - that's just the theory behind patents. Patents give inventors a legal "cudgel" as the commenter before put it, which makes innovation more profitable. Patents are just a legal construct, the idea is that having a patent on an invention gives you access to legal tools to protect a temporary monopoly which makes innovation more profitable, so you don't have to worry about investing money in innovation and then losing all of your profits because of copycats. However well that actually works and whether or not it ends up being a net positive for innovation is a different question, but all a patent is is a legal tool to stop others from using or making money off of your innovation, as enforced through lawsuits in the court system.
