curious to see more detailed data, this seems to include research companies that, in fields like pharma, are real companies and their major product is patents.
Not only pharma: What about ARM? As much as I know, they even don't have a chip factory. They just deal with their chip-designs (I am not sure, if it falls under copyright or the patent system -- but it is just a chip design, some ideas and such they are selling).
The ARM holding company makes designs and maintains the ARM instruction set and licenses them to manufacturers or designers under a processor license, (for a specific processor without modification), a POP license, (a processor optimized for you if you can't do it yourself), or rarely, an architecture license. Architecture licenses allow you to do whatever you want as long as it implements the ARM ISA. Apple holds an ARM architecture license for the Cortex A15 used to develop the Swift core in the A7 and A8.
Yes, you are right. But the distinction that should divide trolls from non-trolls (at least, as much, as the big corporations wanted) was mainly, if a company produces something related to the patent. And that is in my opinion the worst classification you can find (it is handy of course for the big corporations).
