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He was never a valuable source for anything [...]

You're entitled to your opinion on this, but it is not shared by some very credible people in the intellectual property universe:

- Managing Intellectual Property (ManagingIP) magazine has put me on its annual list of the top 50 most influential people in IP five times so far (2005, 2006, 2012, 2013, 2014).

- IAM (Intellectual Asset Management) magazine named me one of the IP personalities of 2011 (and had me on some other ranking that I can't find at the moment).

- Canadian IP lawyer Barry Sookman conducted some research on the leading IP and tech law blogs. According to his analysis (published in early 2013), my FOSS Patents blog was the #3 U.S. patent law blog at the time.

- I have received invitations to speak at conferences organized by universities and around the globe (in the U.S., literally from California to New York) and at commercial conferences in the U.S., different European countries, different Asian countries, and New Zealand. Only for logistical reasons I have had to politely decline except for invitations in my home region. I have spoken at the renowned Max Planck Institute for IP and Competition Law in Munich, at the Munich University of Technology (three times already), and the University of Bayreuth, where I shared a panel with a judge from the patent-specialized division of Germany's equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court (see page 2 of the conference program), who is also widely expected to become one of the top-ranking judges of Europe's future Unified Patent Court. This incredibly well-respected patent judge and I both addressed the same topic, from our different vantage points, and had a panel discussion with questions from the audience and our moderator, a Switzerland-based patent law professor.

- Professor Thomas Cotter (University of Minnesota), an expert in comparative patent remedies (he travels the world to research differences between national patent laws), wrote this post about the significance of FOSS Patents earlier this year. Professor Cotter's independence is underscored by the fact that he has in recent years signed amicus curiae briefs supporting a core Apple position (on FRAND) and opposing a core Apple position (on design patent remedies).

- I could give more examples, but suffice it to say that any of the above references easily outweighs whatever a blog like Groklaw may have written about me over the years.

nobody cares about RIM

Except for their massive patent portfolio - which will be essential in the coming legal showdown.

If you want to quibble about the source then go to the original sources:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOGoZFzHkhs
http://www.iam-magazine.com/blog/detail.aspx?g=cff2afd3-c24e-42e5-aa68-a4b4e7524177

Or more than one dictionary:

http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/patent+troll
http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/patent-troll.html
http://www.techopedia.com/definition/28564/patent-troll
http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/patent-troll
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=patent+troll

Anyway, the dictionary.com definition doesn't describe Apple either.

They're an investor in the biggest patent troll around, Intellectual Ventures.

http://www.iam-magazine.com/blog/Detail.aspx?g=2f9ac708-83af-42b9-9d3d-5fdf39fdc482

No they are not you truth-twisting recoiledsnake-inthegrass. They invested in "Defendant Invention Investment Fund I." which is an investment fund that invested in IV. Saying that is the same as investing in IV would be like saying the common man on the street with a mutual fund "invested" in Altria tobacco company and trying to hold that against him. You muckrackers remind me of political campaign miscreants that dig and dig and dig until they find something that they can twist put a nice headline on and feed to the gullible public. Well, guess what, the typical Slashdotter isn't quite as stupid as you think so fuck off, liar.

> Because last I checked this specific anti-trust complaint is about Nokia and Microsoft backing patent trolls.

Did you really check it? Or are you just wearing your fanboy blinders?

  They're an investor in the biggest patent troll around, Intellectual Ventures.

http://www.iam-magazine.com/blog/Detail.aspx?g=2f9ac708-83af-42b9-9d3d-5fdf39fdc482

Yes, a money value can be put on what they earn from patents, though experts disagree wildly on the figure. A commonly touted figure for IBM's annual patent royalty income is $1 billion (that's right, spelt with a "b") - basically, some analysts consider only the straight licence income, others figure that the patents add value to sales of product and other parts of the IBM balance sheet ... but nobody puts it under &100 million p.a. http://www.iam-magazine.com/blog/Detail.aspx?g=9be3f156-79b1-49f4-abf1-9bee7e788501

Where monopolies do harm the market is where the system is abused. The obvious solution to that is a system which isn't terribly open to abuse. Many of today's patent laws were put together at a time when nobody imagined that a company might patent a genetically modified seed and then sue farmers for saving some from last years' crop for this year, or that a huge economy around software (which changes far faster than many other fields of innovation, and is thus not well served by 15-20 year monopolies) would develop.