Patent trolls really seem like a cartoonish kind of evil. I'm curious if there is any steel man argument for their existence? Do they add any value at all or are they just a pure drain?
Non-practicing entities (NPEs) are like HFT. They’re not something that was deliberately created, but are an artifact of deliberate policies we created for other reasons. NPEs are the byproduct of the fact that patents are treated as transferable property rights. That general principle has value. For example, you can sell patents if a company goes bankrupt, which makes it easier to attract investment on the front end. If the patents are good (cue debate about what, if anything, counts as a “good” patent) NPEs can serve valuable functions such as reducing transaction costs. (Multiple inventors can sell to the NPE, and implementers can have a one-stop shop for licensing.)
Depending on how to define patent troll, yes or no.
If you define patent troll as only someone who asserts clearly invalid patents or makes unsupported and unreasonable assertions of infringement? No argument for their existence.
But many of the so called patent trolls do assert facially valid patents with reasonable infringement theories. There is an argument that they provide liquidity and value to inventors who can't really afford to sue themselves. Lets say you invent a widget that reduces the cost of producing batteries by 10%. But you don't own a battery company so you can't monetize it. You can sell it to a troll who will do it for you. Or if you were a company that revolutionized the telecom industry, but missed the smartphone boat and went bankrupt. Those patents still have value and added to the industry. Trolls can get you that value.
I'd still say that the patent laws don't really reward true innovation in most cases. But that goes for non-troll patents as well.
If a patent is being upheld for the right reasons, it's not a troll. The patent troll is the definition of a bad actor in this arena. There's arguments for and against patents, and especially so software patents - but there's not many arguments for the existence of bad actors.
This is the definition I have seen almost everywhere, but I do not like it. Non-practising entities like ARM and patent-owning universities I would never consider trolls just for being an NPE. On the other hand, even practising entities may engage in troll-like activities, asserting a patent beyond its scope to bankrupt a smaller competitor, because legal costs are not usually awarded in the US for such lawsuits (e.g. Nuance vs Zi). It is just that in a lot of cases, if not most, the troll is a non-practising entity.
Patent trolls really seem like a cartoonish kind of evil. I'm curious if there is any steel man argument for their existence? Do they add any value at all or are they just a pure drain?