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Trolls generally don't announce what they're selling up front and the sealed settlements generally prohibit anyone saying what they're paying, but it appears that they want about 7-8% for each patent, which means that if your product has more than 4-5 patents in it, your patent payments will quickly become larger than your payroll. If it has more than 12 or so, your software becomes impossible to produce.

Sewing machines had this problem years ago, where rather than patenting a thing, people had run up patents on every little individual piece of the thing from the motor to the needle, so now you have patents on interactive help menus and file dialogs and filesystems in addition to patents on finding out how long you have to wait for your bus to arrive. The solution back then was The Sewing Machine Patent Combine which pooled together the patents and paid the members their share of the royalties from them. Setting aside how it would permanently destroy free (beer or speech) software, that worked fine when there were only 3 patent holders, but history has shown that the more holders there are the more likely someone is to fuck over the combine for profit (eg Rambus screwing over JEDEC by not disclosing its patents to the pool). Why would someone settle for a fraction of the patent pool when they could suck 7-8% direct from the source, especially when the proceeds would have to be divvied up between tens of thousands (if not more) patents?

Yes, but a dollar figure sets a minimum bar for the cost of the device. If 100 companies when after Apple, all claiming 2.5% of the cost of the device, the device would have to cost at least 2.5 times what it costs. Percentages are an impossible and unfounded way to demand royalties from another group.

Actually, Apple Reality Distortion Field notwithstanding, pretty much all patent royalties are based on a percentage.

This study puts the average royalty rate for a patent in the electronics industry at about 4.5%. The $1/device Apple is requesting would be about 0.2%. As way of comparison, Here are royalty rates other companies are asking for essential LTE patents. They range from 0.8% to 3%. Motorola's 2.25% is a bit on the high end but within the norm. Apple's requested 0.2% OTOH is off the scale at the low end.

Based on what 5 minutes of googling turned up, Apple is going to lose this, and lose it badly.

As far as I know we haven't outsourced our UAV development, so back to the topic of the article about UAV's and lets try to compare what they have copied.

Of course you mean we haven't legally outsourced our UAV development to China.

Sorry if it came across that way; certainly wasn't the intent. Indeed, Peter's efforts here even left legal professionals impressed: "It turns out that New Zealander Peter Calveley is one of the actors who provided the motions for computer-generated elves and orcs in Two Towers. He also has been laid up of late due to an accident (I can relate). He has now put his free time to use taking on a David and Goliath effort against Amazon...I have to admit, I was quite intrigued by the whole affair given that a Request for Re-Exam is not something average citizens take on in their spare time. After some correspondence, we spoke by telephone briefly -- since I was unwilling to write about his efforts if this was all a scam. I found that Calveley is extremely bright and has his own inventions and understands computer patents and procedures quite well. He has the time and will to do this even if it won't bring him a direct benefit."

The reason given for the fact that the boots were not commercialised before the fall of the Communism was that they were classified as a military secret. Very frustrating for the inventor, but nearly all western patent regimes allow the government to classify any invention as a military secret - in the US they're called "Secrecy Orders" - see http://www.bitlaw.com/source/mpep/120.html and http://patentbaristas.com/archives/2006/12/06/is-t he-government-keeping-more-inventions-secret/ for more information.

Better yet, there's obviously no way we can know how many inventions are covered by such orders, or what they cover.

Note that this has nothing to do with Communism or capitalism, which is the thesis the author's trying to build. The R&D regimes are actually identical: invent something militarily useful and it will dissappear from public knowledge.

From another article:

"Justice Thomas, dissenting, felt that a patent licensee in good standing must breach its license prior to challenging the validity of the underlying patent pursuant to the Declaratory Judgment Act, 28 U. S. C. 2201. 546 U. S. 1169 (2006). He held the opinion that the Court has consistently held that parties do not have standing to obtain rulings on matters that remain hypothetical or conjectural and that this was such a case."

The drug industry has a Congress-approved methodfor extending patents past 20 years, and the issue keeps popping up.