There are companies in this world whose sole business is to hold patents and figure out ways to turn them into money from purported infringers. Such companies consist of single file drawers in law offices. They don't care about being unpopular; in fact, natural selection probably ensures they are run by active schmucks.

There is a thread of thinking in the plaintiff's bar generally, and in the intellectual-property bar particularly, that goes like this:

    People do X.
    If I had ten cents for every time someone did X, I'd be a rich man.
    Therefore the right to charge to do X, if it existed, would be valuable.
    Therefore it exists.
    Therefore I have a right to charge anyone who does X ten cents.
    QED.

Examples of the principle:

Maybe you're too young to remember this, but back around 1987, Apple floated a trial balloon of charging a licensing fee to use the Macintosh OS and Toolbox APIs. There was some stammering that somehow people would still bother to learn these APIs because they would still be openly documented, and developers who were sufficiently-small or sufficiently-noncommercial, or sufficiently-whatever, would be allowed to use them for free. The principle: If I had a dime for every program people sold for my computer...

People buy music in one format (primarily CDs) and format-shift them for archiving, mix, and portability. The record industry says that if it had a dime for every copy a customer made for his own use...

The people who believe these things, because they have that lunatic syllogism in their heads, actually think they have a Perfect Right to demand their dimes. It's the people who are denying them their Dime Property who are the pirates and lowlifes. The Dime Property Lobby thinks it's very unfair that you call them "desperate" and undeserving of friends.