That's the patent licensing game. Played all the time.

...and made possible by totally clueless (or worse) patent office staff. Perhaps they are able to tell obvious or previously widely used (and thus unpanentable) configuration of gears, levers, springs and pistons, but come anything involving more than 19th century science or technology, they are lost. As the result, we have seen use of XOR for drawing a cursor on computer screen patented, as well as use of metadata in HTML pages (years after those meta tags become standardised), infamous Amazon '1-click' 'technology', or a naturally-occuring gene (not method of sequencing it, not use of proteins it encodes, the gene itself).

What's next?