To share something I learned today that, apparently, everyone else already knows: The “polite” term (i.e., the one its lawyers would use) for a patent troll is “a non-practicing entity”, or NPE. NPEs, that is, are entities that hold patents but engage in no business other than suing other businesses for infringing on them.
There’s an argument to be made that NPEs are nothing more than a reasonable response to the phenomenon of “defensive patents”: It’s almost impossible for a business to sue, say, IBM, because IBM holds so many patents than almost every business on earth is infringing some of them. If IBM were sued for patent infringement, it would simply turn around and countersue for infringement of its patents. Any business that wishes to sue a company with an extensive defensive patent portfolio must make a choice between being in the business of business, or being in the business of litigation. NPEs are just businesses consciously set up to make the latter choice.
You can also argue that NPEs represent an elegant market solution to the problem of monetizing intellectual property; instead of having to undertake lengthy and onerous litigation, the individual patent holder can simply sell out to an NPE once a patent can be shown to have value. In this way, it can be said that NPEs encourage the development of patentable technology.
You can argue those things, but they don’t seem persuasive to me. The existence of NPEs seems to me a symptom of a badly broken IP regime. I’m not sure how that regime could be fixed, but a reduction in the scope of patentable ideas and/or the time for which patents are granted seems a reasonable place to begin.
