Assignment 8 part 2- continued definition of Patent Troll

While the first post explained that patent trolls do not look for licensing deals before and rather wait for an infringement to sue, many times their end goal is licensing. Basically patent trolls use their patents as legal weapons and bargaining chips rather than intellectual property to produce anything useful for society.

As a result many patent trolls do not even invent the patent but will commonly buy underpriced patents often times from failing business who are liquidating their assets. They will find patents that do not have much use at all but are potentially vague and can be used to either sue other companies or to black mail them.

While the initial definition kept talking about lawsuits that the patent troll can do, in most cases the cases never actually go to court. Because of exorbitant court fees the patent trolls rarely actually want to go to court. Likewise, other companies being threatened would almost always just pay a licensing fee of sorts rather than go to court. Many times it is a simple financial calculation that even if the company does not believe it is in any way violating a patent and is confident they can win the court case they will settle for a bogus licensing deal so as to avoid the legal fees, because regardless of the outcome they will be forced to pay the many times millions and millions of dollars in legal fees.

Because most of these cases do not end up ever going to court the patents that are considered the best for patent trolling are actually the extremely vague ones that in many cases most experts believe should never have been issued in the first place.

Lodsys is a company that produces nothing but owns a patent that in vague terms gives them the intellectual property rights for in app purchases. As a result they send out infringement letters to mostly small app development companies, most of which will simply agree to a licensing fee rather than going to court. However, 11 companies have take Lodsys to court over this and both Apple and Google have requested an analysis of the validity of the patent. A process like that can take years to produce any sort of result.