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Ask Slashdot: When Is Patent License Trading Not Trolling?
LeadSongDog writes "A piece in yesterday's Forbes offers arguments on why not all 'Non-Practicing Entities' are 'Patent Trolls.' Comments here on such businesses are often critical. Is there a right way to trade in patents for profit without abusing the process?"
From the article: "The Founders’ decision to foster non-practicing entities and patent licensing proved crucial to America’s rapid technological progress and economic growth. Patent records from the nineteenth century reveal that more than two-thirds of all the great inventors of the Industrial Revolution, including Thomas Edison and Elias Howe, were non-practicing entities who focused on invention and licensed some or all of their patents to others to develop into new products."
Great example - just not for their cause.
Forbes supports patent trolls, what a freaking surprise.
I'm of the opinion that if you didn't create it, and your entity exists to do nothing than extort people for royalties on your patent ... you are a patent troll.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Patents are meant to protect ideas that are both novel and non-obvious; most patents today are neither, as proven by the fact that so many people are doing similar things independently.
Oh and you win no points for using Edison as an example; the man was a troll, pure and simple.
okay we have 3 different groups to deal with
1 inventor type that don't market anything (they invent and then sell to a Maker)
2 Makers that have on staff inventor types (they make stuff "with our patented..."
3 Leech types that just beg, borrow , steal and Buy patents (Holding Corps that only send bills around)
Trolls are type 3 not type 1
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
More of less the article says that NPEs encourage innovation by allowing people to sell patents. Everyone agrees that patent trolls/ NPE by being willing to buy patents help to make having a portfolio of patents a valuable asset. That's not a point in question. The point in question is whether the damage NPEs cause exceeds the benefits of their funding since the money for those buys comes from lawsuits. And Forbes doesn't even attempt to answer that question. Lots of terrible things often have some side advantages that don't come close to covering the downside of the terrible thing.
Those patents covered actual working models, not taking something that already exists, slapping "Mobile" in the description, and suing small businesses that are using it.
This article is out to lunch and written entirely to benefit the patent troll industry (which now finds itself drawing unwanted attention).
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
A company should only be allowed to use a patent in court when it is active in the field the patent describes and the use of the patent by other organizations reduces the market potential of this company. Exception are research organizations of course, for which market value must somehow be redefined. A very effective troll-be-gone method.
I believe someone else that blatantly abused patents is Westinghouse, he would do the same as Edison. I still hear from people how Westinghouse had been innovative. But he would invest in innovators, then patent them under his name, or hold an exclusive license to the patents.
Since a patent is a government granted privilege, if you don't market your patented device, you must allow somebody to do so at a reasonable price, set by the government, if need be. If you want to consider patents as property, let's levy taxes on it and use eminent domain where necessary. (See the Wright Brothers patent on lateral control of the airplane)
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The problem is junk patents.
Imagine you invent a device that pulls water out of the air for free (unlike anything cold, which will do it for $$$). Anywhere. Even in a desert. This is a great innovation. I have zero problem with you selling your patent to someone else. The problem I have is that right after you invent this, a horde of lawyers will storm the patent office and patent things like drinking water that came from your device. Watering a lawn with water that came from your device. Making beer with water that came from your device.
The problem is the ridiculous deluge of patents for trivial and obvious things. They litter the business landscape and make it impossible to solve any real problem without tripping over them as you solve 100 trivial problems in obvious ways along the way. Cuz you know, who ever would have thought that the optimal number of clicks to buy something in would be 1? That must have taken a talented team of web developer (singular) literally hours to do.
The vast majority of patent holders flat out don't have the resources, connections and/or skills to take advantage of their inventions.
Being able to design and patent a flying car doesn't mean you have the money or skills necessary to construct one.
The difference between licensing and trolling is not actually highlighted in the article which is focused on the history of patent system in barely 200 words.
I want the five minutes of my life back.
Unsatisfied I'm off to av.com to search for real online debate on this issue.
Mostly the difference is real licencing has something useful people pay to use; trolling is trying to license something useful that people already use without paying: eg. when prior art exists from expert groups but the licensing costs are slightly lower than proving it in court.
There are firms who's business model is to hire very smart people to innovate, invent, research, develop, and then patent - with the hopes that some firm will license their IP - and do all the nitty gritty manufacturing and distribution work - and then pay them a fee. It's a perfectly logical arrangement - some are great at inventing while others are great at making and marketing.
Win/Win.
Then there are those who buy or acquire IP - many times very vague IP - with the sole purpose to extort via the legal system.
Acid test: are the principals of the firm JDs (Folks who sat for the BAR?) - Trolls.
Any IP firm run by or owned by lawyers are Trolls.
... is not that patents are bought and sold (this should be perfectly valid for valid patents). The real problem is that there are so many bad patents ... things that are not innovative at all ... things that don't fulfill the need to have a patent system. Once people start to understand what patents really are supposed to be, then we can solve the problem. It's not about trolls or software patents or things like that. It's about what justifies the government taking property rights away, and how that concept has been corrupted by corporations since the middle 1800's.
Read more ...
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Does an entity make more money by licensing its patents, or by extorting those who may or may not be infringing on its patents?
If it's the latter, the entity is a patent troll. If the entity does not license its patents at all, or demands exorbitant fees, it's definitely a patent troll.
What if a bank, B, loans money to a startup, S, that is a small company where inventors have a few of their own patents, P. As part of the collateral for the loan, S assigns rights to B for the patents until the loan is repaid.
Startup S goes belly-up. The inventors blow through the cash and have nothing but the patents assigned to B.
B places S into receivership and sells rights to P.
By your definition of "patent troll", B and anyone buying rights to P are "patent trolls", but I don't' see it that way. If you wanted to remove all patent trolls, you will also make it almost impossible for a start-up company that only has intellectual property to get start-up capital.
Until 1880 this was not a problem.
Up until that point, there was a requirement of production of a working model, also known as a Reduction To Practice. After 1880, you could patent whatever, and get away with never having produced anything other than the speculation that your idea might be reduced to practice using some future engineering or technical ability which did not exist at the date of filing.
One common alternative method of patent reform is to bring back this requirement, and to place the model in escrow. In the limit, this permits future study of the model, whether it be hardware, or a process patent for software. This would incidentally remove patent protection from soft processes, such as business model process patents, which people tend to find very objectionable as abuses of the patent system.
In theory what a NPE does is actually quite admirable. You're an inventor and you invented something and you have a patent and big companies rip you off. They know you can't afford to fight them so they just do what they want. So you sell your patent to someone like Intellectual Ventures who goes after the big companies for you. Now no one can make your widget bolt without paying you, as it should be.
And look what's happened - even giant companies are scared shitless to defend against patent lawsuits. In that respect, the idea worked.
In practice though what happens is minute, even trivial things get patented and NPE's go looking for people to sue, using a byzantine series of shell companies and borderline gaming of the legal system. Whereas the inventor of the widget bolt has to make the exact specifications of how his bolt works open to the public (who could also just figure it out by looking at it) software companies don't have to make the source code of their patented inventions available to anyone.
NPE's to me are like the NRA or PETA - organizations/concepts which started out with noble intentions (responsible gun ownership, don't torture animals) and just strayed way off the mark.
Schnapple
What makes a troll a troll is the behavior of trying to get money from people for doing what they are already doing. There is no value add. A legitimate non-practicing entity, on the other hand, gets money by getting people do do something new that they were not already doing.
The distinction is clear and simple. If you approach me and tell me I need a license to do what I'm already doing, you're a troll. That's the only way to be a troll.
1) If you approach the company BEFORE you they come out with the product, you are not a patent troll - even if you have to sue them to pay for it.
2) If you ask a reasonable price - as in 10% of the added value you offer, not 10% of the total cost, then you are not a patent troll.
3) If you try and succeed to obtain money within 5 years of filing your patent, rather than waiting 10 or more years, you are not a patent troll.
4) You did not buy the patent from someone else, but rather developed it in house, (or made the registered inventor a partner in your firm - with a seat on the board if you are public), then you are not a patent troll.
"Is there a right way to trade in patents for profit without abusing the process" - as long as it's not illegal, in a capitalist society somebody will find a more 'efficient' way to do things.
You patent things just to patent them and hope to eventually extort money from others as opposed to actually using said patent.
You can tell a patent troll by the extortion amount they have calculated to cost you. When they are just below the litigation costs and it has nothing to do with the worth of the patent to the customer, it becomes quite obvious.
Don't let the ignorant convince you otherwise.
Trolling is when you great a broader patent in order to try to claim royalties on existing patents.
This nonsense about people trying to protect their rights, or license their patent, is trolling is a pile of crap.
Generally supported by anti tort groups(i,e, insurance companies) that want to strip inventors of their rights.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes, most of his patents were put in his name, but that's not why he was evil.
Software patents are a fraud designed to line the pockets of lawyers.
Glad I could clear that up for you.
1) A Patent Troll is a person or entity who tries to extort payments from any entity for utilizing a patented process or design that should never have been patented.
2) A patent holder seeking to receive compensation for the utilization of a patent shall not be deemed a 'Troll' if said patent holder is me.
Was NOT a great inventor. He was a businessman that took credit for his employees work. He also worked them like dogs, and lied to them. He may have been needed at the time to coordinate/etc, but that doesn't mean he should get credit for what he couldn't do.
Just read some of Tesla's notes about what happened, the guy was a total 'bag.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Type 3a firms are good--they buy patents from inventors and seek out companies who want to bring in new ideas by buying or licensing a patent.
Type 3b firms are patent trolls--they buy patents and seek out companies already using the patent in order to extort money from them.
The problem is that in many fields (like software and computer design) there are simply so many engineers working on any given problem that it is almost impossible to avoid the simultaneous/independent invention of any given idea. In that environment, telling one inventor that he has to pay someone else because they did the paperwork first is an insult to his intelligence. This is compounded by the fact that so many ideas are either a) mathematically optimal, which anyone could derive and everyone wants to use, and/or b) part of an interoperability standard where licensing constraints reduce competition, derivative works, open-source tools, etc.
I'm not saying that Edison wasn't smart and didn't accomplish anything, but do keep in mind that in a lot of cases he just simply improved what others did before him, profiting off the heavy lifting that others did. He promoted things that weren't really all that good to begin with such as the current wars. It's known that he took credit for things that were actually done by people who worked for him. And finally, it's not well known today, but you can research how his motion picture patents put the early motion picture business under his total control and it took deliberate, illegal violations of his patents to get the movie industry established in Hollywood. In fact, one of the reasons Hollywood got started was to be completely on the other side of the US from Edison and thus in a place harder for him to control. If I remember correctly the US government eventually had a conversion experience and invalidated those motion picture patents when it became convenient for them to do so because Edison was basically using them to prevent all competition. Then again, maybe he is a perfect example for this kind of discussion but not because he benefited society but precisely because his goal was pure old greed and to use his patents to remove competition so he could make more money.
It lists Qualcomm as an NPE!?!?! WTF!?! I guess it's because they don't FAB the chips themselves.
Qualcomm sells chips THEY DESIGN using their IP, they just CONTRACT OUT the device to others to build. How is that NOT an Practicing Entity?!? They also license out their patents for worldwide standards (WCDMA) that they may not have any part in the manufacture of the devices that use that standard.
So by the Authors' definition of NPE, Apple is also an NPE because they contract the assembly of their I-devices to other companies and don't actually FAB their A7 processors?
Meh.
Layman's answer:
It's trolling when the party seeking to enforce their patent rights has no intention of selling an actual working implementation on the open market.
If the purpose of your company is to make money by licensing an idea, rather than selling a product or service that incorporates that idea, then you're a troll. The system shouldn't allow you to feed on other companies and individuals that are using that idea in their own products or services.
Nobody cares if an inventor sells a patent to a manufacturer or a service provider who will actually use it, that's how the system is supposed to work. But holding companies and the builders of defensive portfolios should have no place at the table.
Also, just because business has been conducted a certain way up till now, doesn't mean that's the best way to conduct business. Thomas Edison wasn't a saint, he ruthlessly exploited the inspiration and perspiration of everyone who worked for him and went to great lengths to crush his competitors. WE CAN DO BETTER, is the point.
When you have entities taking advantage of what you invented, and you have no choice but to involve the courts to force them to do the right thing.
Anything else is a troll.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Any .... firm run by or owned by lawyers are Trolls.
Too true.
There's got to be a better way to run our legal system than lawyers.
No sir. First I appreciate not being lambasted for confusing "who's" with "whose".
There are quite a few noble lawyers. They may sound like dicks to most of us, but their job is to represent their clients - even if their (the client's) troubles are dickish..
Where IP firms deviate from that is that the lawyers ARE the clients, and hence the conflict.
When the lawyers ARE the clients is when you run into trouble - my dear kind person.
Patents - and copyrights - should only belong to People, not artificial fictions such as corporations, limited partnerships, or trusts, which should only be able to lease rights to them for the current renewal cycle, which should end with the death of the Person. And probably only be renewed once after the first patent period, or during the lifetime of the Person who has the copyright, or until their minor children (if any) reach adult age.
Corporations are not People. Never will be.
The purpose of patents was supposed to be to encourage innovation by allowing an inventor to spend money researching and inventing, and then recover that money or turn a profit off the fruits of that intellectual property.
The issue is when an inventor doesn't actually spend money on research and development. When they patent a trivial idea that many people may have thought of but nobody has patented. Or maybe people have patented. Maybe people have patented and created works from that idea.
The issue is that the patent office approves patents where there exists prior art or conflicting patents, or they patent obvious patents. Patents should not exist for those 'ideas' but the patent office can not afford to investigate every patent application rigorously. They rely on courts to invalidate bad patents.
Then the problem is courts. Courts are not well equipped to work against patent trolls. It is also very expensive to defend yourself. The trolls take advantage of this to offer a settlement less than the cost of successfully defending yourself.
Maybe the issue isn't the patent system at all. Maybe it's the legal system surrounding the patent system. Maybe when you apply for a patent, instead of getting full approval, you get provisional approval. A less rigorous investigation of your patent needs to be done, which relieves stress on the patent office. Then, if you want to enforce that patent in the future, a professional investigation of the patent is done. If the patent is valid, it gets full status and are able to continue in the enforcement of the patent. If the investigation reveals that the patent is too obvious or in other violation, the patent is invalidated and the applicant is charged for the professional investigation. If the patent holder can't be determined or contacted by the patent office prior to the professional investigation, then the patent is invalidated.
This would put the burden on the applicant to ensure that their patent is fair and valid. Occasional misjudgments might happen, but an occasional penalty for a generally legitimate research operation wouldn't be a big deal. However, an operation that makes its living off of shady patents would constantly be paying to have their patents invalidated, prior to any cost of legal defense by any third party. The third party would just have to recognize that the patent claimed to be violated was provisional and somehow require a full investigation.
Most patents that exist do not get legally enforced. Many of these are legitimate patents. The existence of these patents and knowledge of their legitimacy is enough to cause people to respect them even without a formal investigation. A company with a legitimate patent would not have a worry about an investigation prior to enforcing their patent. However, a company who builds their business on hand-wavy fake patents would end up running the lottery and paying a lot of penalties.
It would still be necessary to be able to fight against a patent which has been legitimized in court, it could have been done in error. But it shouldn't be until the patent has been reviewed extensively and deemed valid that it could be used to cause other parties financial hardship.
A Patent Troll is a term used by a practicing entity to describe a patent holder that tries to collect license fees, usually in a hostile fashion, for use of their perceived intellectual property. Instead of calling them a "Weenie" they're a Patent Troll. What we all have to realize is that history has numerous examples of NPEs and Inventors who created novel inventions but weren't necessarily the prime manufacturer involving the technology. Thomas Edison and Rudolph Diesel are two inventors that come to mind but there are many others. What's missing from the conversation is what is a novel invention and that's the crux of the matter. When you start allowing patents for icons and rounded corners that's not a novel invention and it's a glaring deficiency within the patent system that allows it. That's why I don't think you should focus on NPEs or Patent Trolls per sey, but should go back and say "What is patentable?" If software patents are valid, then they need to describe something that's not obvious and novel; they should have a limited life span, say 7 years to ensure that you don't have companies monopolizing whole sectors of technology because they were there first. If you raised the bar and reduced the life span of Software Patents, you'd then find a lot of tech R&D money freed up that's currently feeding lawyers
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
And the cause of junk patents is the distorted economy of issuing patents. USPTO gets paid for every patent they issue, good or bad, yet are immune from lawsuits from the businesses they negatively impact by their bad behavior.
The term for this immunity is royal perogative.
When one allows an entity to create fictional wealth all accountability is lost. The first great killer is the allowance of the earning of interest. Loans can not be paid back as private contracts create a demand to print enough money to honor the contracts. If you don't believe it make it a game. Get four buddies in a room and have each loan the next $100. in a circle at 8% interest due in one hour and forbid any money but the eight $100 bills to be in the room. If there are four people in the room then it will take $132. to pay off the loans and that $32. does not exist.
Checking accounts, charge cards, and stocks and bonds all create the same issue. Bank do this as well as they give out loans thousands of times greater than the money they actually possess. Once this stuff is allowed then an ever growing debt and collapse of a nation is an absolute.
All of these schemes exist as so many people fear doing labor. There are always people seeking to scheme to avoid labor or giving anything of value for their wealth. This is a treason against humanity as well as a treason against a nation. Yet we have people that love wars because they invest in military supply firms. Evil is among us.
Patent is based on the same constitutional clause as copyright. It is meant to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by granting temporary exclusive rights to authors and inventors. A patent held by someone other than the inventor goes against that. Grabbing a buck by stifling progress is what corporations that buy patents do. I am not aware of a single case where a corporation that bought out a patent promoted progress.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
A patent troll does not:
- invent, patenting the inventions to help fund more research
- build working kit out of research, patenting the results to help fund building more kit
- buy up patents to piece together innovations, and bring those to market
- buy up patents to produce kit to sell
A patent troll is not even
- a broker, bringing inventions and/or production capacity and/or markets together
- a patent pool, protecting a number of entities from legal action
A patent troll is simply:
- An entity that buys up patents to harass other entities with
- a party that cares no a whit about what the technology means, only what it can be monetised for
- a pretador looking for damages to sue for
- though it might settle for (outrageous) licensing and/or royalties
In short, a patent troll is entirely agnostic to the essence of why patents exist, does not present a positive addition to our technology base, does not produce anything useful, and is bent solely on abusing the system as much as possible for short-term gain.
Our beef is not with non-abusive entities you might also shove under the conveniently non-threatening "non-practicing entity" moniker. Our beef is with patent trolls, and the damage their abuse does.
In that sense, articles arguing that trolls are nice, really, because the author can come up with NPEs that aren't trolls, are deliberately confusing the issue and therefore not helpful.
Of course, the person who invented the LASER would never have been able to gat a patent with Reduction to Practice, and last I checked, the LASER was pretty damn useful.
You are wrong about the laser. You need to read:
The Laser Odyssey
Theodore Maiman
ISBN: 0970292704
The original inventor of the laser almost lost out on his patent because he believed that there was still a "reduction to practice" requirement. The difference in the time to invention to reduction as a period of a bout 3 years.
Patents slowing down progress by discouraging use and hindering competitors is not new, but has been going on since the beginning of the patent system. The beginning chapter of Against Intellectual Monopoly details the case of the steam engine, where progress in efficiency and adoption of the steam engine was effectively halted for the duration of Watt's patents, only to take off right after they expired.
Once Watt’s patents were secured and production started, a substantial portion of his energy was devoted to fending off rival inventors. In 1782, Watt secured an additional patent, made “necessary in consequence of ... having been so unfairly anticipated, by [Matthew] Wasborough in the crank motion.” More dramatically, in the 1790s, when the superior Hornblower engine was put into production, Boulton and Watt went after him with the full force of the legal system. During the period of Watt’s patents the U.K. added about 750 horsepower of steam engines per year. In the thirty years following Watt’s patents, additional horsepower was added at a rate of more than 4,000 per year. Moreover, the fuel efficiency of steam engines changed little during the period of Watt’s patent; while between 1810 and 1835 it is estimated to have increased by a factor of five. After the expiration of Watt’s patents, not only was there an explosion in the production and efficiency of engines, but steam power came into its own as the driving force of the industrial revolution. Over a thirty year period steam engines were modified and improved as crucial innovations such as the steam train, the steamboat and the steam jenny came into wide usage. The key innovation was the high-pressure steam engine – development of which had been blocked by Watt’s strategic use of his patent.
The above is just a short section, they go through the case very thoroughly (with references), and it is worth a read. Interestingly, the steam engine is often quoted by patent proponents as an example of patents working like they are supposed to.
Upon the death of the patent holders, the IP will still be transferred to either personal estates or will be retained by their companies. Mafia-style hits will not gain the IP in this way.
The next step to turning a "licensing organization" into a legitimate business is to have it advertise its portfolio, in a market analogous to Programmer's Paradise, rather than remain silent until ambushing real businesses with threatened litigation.
Imagine if you got ads instead of C&D letters! "We hear you're working on nails for building houses in hurricane-prone areas. We can save you tons of expensive R&D and get you to market quicker if you license our patent that documents the measurements and manufacturing process for Hurriquake® nails."
I have no problem with licensing of patents. What I find absurd is the notion of transfer of patents. If someone invents something they ought to be able to profit from it even if they don't produce. But what sense is there in allowing trolls to buy innovation rights from others?
"Patents: license them or lose them. No sales or transferes allowed." Soon as they make me king.
like for fish? or posting comments on a forum? never heard of a patent trolling before.
A company can be a non-practicing entity in the sense of not producing an actual product and still be a valid and useful part of the economy if they are genuinely providing the know how that goes along with the patent. The quoted article makes reference to Thomas Eddison, and it is true that he primarily focused on actually inventing rather than building and selling his inventions. But (at least most of the time) when he licensed the patent he also provided the knowledge and advice needed to actually produce those inventions.
Todays patent trolls do not do that. They often don't actually know how to create the product in question or how to use the patent if some possible licensee actually wanted to pay for consulting. Instead they wait for someone else to build something that sort of looks like it might be covered by the patent and then sue. Eddison provided value to the world, they do not.
Software Engineering is pure logic, filtered through languages, APIs, etc. Given this problem and this desired outcome, there exists only a limited set of possible "logical devices" that will get there. In this sense, all programs are math, and thus should not be subject to patenting at all.
There is also the very blurry line between patents and copyright re software. Google vs Oracle comes to mind.
I am showing my grandma how a threaded discussion system works.
Just to make it realistic: Your argument is total bull and you are a bad person.
That' a bit of a stretch of the definition. Neither Edison nor Howe fit the common definition of NPE since they actively promoted their patents. In contrast, the NPE hides it in a deep dark corner and sits back until some poor slob steps in it.
Most NPEs don't even do the inventing, they just buy up patents from people too broke to ever get their patent into practice.
Did we pass an amendment that no one remembers? Patents are not part of the free market--they are the complete opposite conceptually. A patent is a limited monopoly enforced by government. Also the U.S. Constitution specifies the original author and no one else. There is no provision for trading or hoarding them, because they are not private property to dispose of at the whim of the applicant, much less a rights-less tax entity like a vulture capital corporation. And U.S. code doesn't supersede constitutional requirements, despite Disney's objections.
I think the USPTO should collect a $100,000 transfer fee every time a patent moves between owners other than the original author. All these patent disputes cost the taxpayer millions. I am all for punitive, predatory taxation of extra-constitutional activities.
You have a valid point. It's also worth noting that the NRA regularly supports bills requiring background checks, mandatory training to get a CHL, etc. Of course as you said they also have to watch out for slippery slopes.
MOST patent suits are filed by one of twelve companies. There are hundreds of companies who actively try to license their IP, like Arm and Bell Labs do.
The "good" scenario is in fact the common one. The bad scenario is the one you see covered on Slashdot.
Also from time to time Slashdot covers a story of proper patent use, but in a totally misleading way so as to make it sound bad. For example, last week we had the story of Cisco wanting to come to the rescue when a big bad patent troll was suing defenseless defendants. The big bad wolf in that case is a nonprofit organization and the "defenseless victims" are AT&T, Comcast, Level3, and Time Warner.
Most patent trolling is done using obscure "inventions" that barely (if at all) satisfy the criterion "innovative".
It's perfectly fine to invent something, patent it and then license it to companies to get it build. Invent -> patent -> license -> build. That's how it should be if you can't or won't manufacture yourself. This encourages invention and production of novel products.
But what patent trolls do is to find someone that builds something, find a patent that is marginally relevant, demand license fees. Often fees just below the cost of a taking it to court. The intention of buying up patents is so that they can demand license fees from 3rd parties that are (already) producing the goods. While this might still encourage invention it harms production. And what good is a new invention that is never produced to anybody but the patent troll?