Edited sentence: In other words, cross-licensing is the mutual sharing of patents between companies without an exchange of a license fee if both patent portfolios are about equal in value.Large corporations can force small companies to share their patents with the large company in a cross-licensing agreement or face legal problems from the large company which has patents that are infringed by the small company.Large corporations like Microsoft use this method to pile up more licenses for technology developed by other companies.They have many patents that can be used for such cross-licensing