patent troll

The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour  · 20 Aug 2019  · 297pp  · 83,651 words

everything from hate crime to sharing leaked nude images on the internet, the term metastasizing so that there can now be everything from ‘gendertrolls’ to ‘patent trolls’. Politicians often use the term to deride their social media critics, which at its most cynical works to deprive the criticism of its political substance

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

by Cory Doctorow  · 6 Oct 2025  · 313pp  · 94,415 words

end up forgotten, along with its server logs, web designs, and custom T-shirts. But early this century, a new kind of predator emerged: the patent troll. Patent trolls buy up junk patents—some even have “R&D labs” where they manufacture their own—and then use them to extract huge amounts of money

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from productive businesses. Patent trolls have no products. In fact, the polite name for them is non-practicing entities (NPEs). The only thing they manufacture is litigation threats. They use

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victim will be on the hook for if the case goes to trial. (US patent law provides for triple damages for “willful infringement,” so a patent troll can argue that once you’ve been notified that you’re violating their patent, you will have to pay three times over if you lose

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by some of the biggest cable and satellite companies in the United States, and Acacia had to find another racket. But that was then. Today, patent trolls often emerge victorious from the courtroom, sometimes winning hundreds of millions of dollars from companies like Apple and Samsung. That’s thanks to the Eastern

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District of Texas, whose courts are notoriously sympathetic to patent trolls. This has given rise to a regional patent troll industry, so that dusty office buildings in small towns like Marshall, Texas, are the nominal headquarters to hundreds of companies whose

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-artist term for a city where the local law is on the side of the swindlers and not the marks. It’s home turf for patent trolls, who produce nothing but own the right to sue for rents. If G+ Communications, maker of nothing, takes $142 million out of Samsung as punishment

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exist at the sufferance of rents, where conflicts between rents and profits are almost certain to settle in rents’ favor. He’s got a point. Patent trolls, after all, aren’t the only form of IP troll. (Recall my definition of IP law: any law or regulation that allows a company to

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for themselves and their patrons by terrorizing people who pasted a photo into their blogs or quoted a news article in a discussion forum. Like patent trolls, copyright trolls typically set the price for a “license and settlement” below the cost of consulting a lawyer to find out whether you should pay

The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism

by Matt Mason

of it would have been possible without a little help from another dedicated group of innovators: pirates. CHAPTER 2 The Tao of Pirates: Sea Forts, Patent Trolls, and Why We Need Piracy The Principality of Sealand © Bobleroi.co.uk Drift a few miles east from Harwich, a town on the southeastern coast

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their ability to innovate and create value, not file lawsuits. But for some, frivolous lawsuits are the entire business plan. These companies sometimes get called patent trolls: they don't invent or make anything themselves, they just buy patents that already exist—or register patents for good ideas already in the public

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all. The only purpose they serve is to make money by suing other people who are. Forgent Networks was a company accused by critics of patent trolling when they purchased a patent to JPEG digital image compression in 1997, a widely used technology that had been freely available since 1987. In 2004

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has not gone unnoticed, and laws are being proposed in the United States and many other countries that will make patent trolling of this kind much more difficult in the future. But patent trolls aren't just going after private businesses; they also have their sites set on our most priceless assets. Our attitude

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and entire nations have responded with the pirate mentality, raising the stakes with worldchanging consequences. And nowhere are the stakes currently higher than in medicine. Patent trolls going after human gene sequences have already cost us lives. “Companies raced to beat the Human Genome Project in order to patent genes such as

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designed to protect. Copyright periods are being extended by governments, and the entertainment industry continues to push that they be extended even further. Like the patent trolls fighting with pirates, there are also sample trolls out there, acquiring the copyrights to old songs (often very dubiously) and suing artists who have sampled

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: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1996), p. 165. CHAPTER 2 THE TAO OF PIRATES: Sea Forts, Patent Trolls, and Why We Need Piracy The Principality of Sealand Bureau of Internal Affairs. www.sealandgov.org/history.html. George Pendle, “New Foundlands,” Cabinet Magazine, no

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&A: Jobs on iPod's Cultural Impact,” Newsweek, October 15, 2006. www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15262121/site/newsweek/print/1/displaymode/1098/. Associated Press, “‘Patent trolling’ firms sue their way to profits,” MSNBC, March 18, 2006. www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11860819/. Kristen Philipkoski, “Monsanto Prevails in Patent Fight,” Wired, May

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy

by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake  · 7 Nov 2017  · 346pp  · 89,180 words

issues of intangible property continue to be contested. Global trade negotiations founder on disputes between the United States and China over piracy and fair use. Patent trolls pursue their controversial calling in the courts of the Eastern District of Texas or of Moscow. Controversies arise when companies try to push the limits

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their contemporaries with their willingness to enforce patents to stop other people’s research on steam and flight, respectively. Patent trolling can be thought of as a pure-play form of this strategy. The patent troll buys up patents, often from defunct companies, and goes around seeking to enforce legal rights against anyone who

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might otherwise benefit from the spillovers of the original investment. There are good reasons to deplore patent trolling—but it is a pretty straightforward consequence of the spillover characteristic of intangible assets. If the law isn’t strong enough, companies can lobby to

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in 1976 and 1998 mean that this won’t happen until 2023. And who knows what new laws might be made between now and then. Patent trolls and copyright lawsuits catch our attention because they are newsworthy, but other ways of capturing the spillovers of intangible investment are more common—in fact

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further danger of strengthening IP laws is that it’s possible to do so in uneven and partial ways that favor incumbent rights-holders and patent trolls (both of which groups often devote significant resources to lobbying), while doing little to encourage new intangible investment. There is, however, a good case for

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(Kay), 205 Oulton, Nicholas, 41 ownership, of intangibles, 211–14 Parlophone records, 59, 61 Pasteur, Louis, 64 patents, 76, 153, 165, 213; blocking, 113–14 patent trolling, 78–79 Patientslikeme, 152 PayPal, 78, 184–85, 187 pensioners, 121–22 Pepsi Co., 49 Perez, Carlota, 146 Pets.com, 42 Pfizer, 31 Piketty, Thomas

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay

by Guy Standing  · 13 Jul 2016  · 443pp  · 98,113 words

income, not to areas that would maximise the public good or benefit the less well-off. PATENT TROLLING AND HOOVERING In the USA, the monopoly rents gained from patents have spawned a lucrative industry of ‘patent trolls’: firms that produce nothing themselves but buy up unexploited or undervalued patents with the sole intention of

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pay up simply to avoid lengthy and expensive legal procedures. Nevertheless, there were over 5,000 US lawsuits in 2014, driven by multiple filings by patent trolls, frequently aimed at big tech companies. Apple claimed in 2014 to have been the subject of nearly 100 patent lawsuits in the preceding three years

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the main smartphone manufacturers suing each other in various combinations and in various countries, with damages claims running into billions of dollars. Patent thickets and patent trolls have become impediments to innovation in the IT sector because companies cannot move without stumbling over someone else’s patent and having to pay licensing

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are part of an arms race. Any successful large company needs a large portfolio of patents to fend off potential lawsuits by rivals and by patent trolls.’13 Besides hoovering up others’ patents, corporations have devised clever tactics to extend patents or the rental income from them. The pharmaceutical industry does this

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy

by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson  · 30 May 2016  · 324pp  · 89,875 words

the deal was only $9.5 billion). Even then, Google ostensibly acquired the company just for its patent portfolio, which helped Google defend Android against patent trolls and competitors. By the end of the year, Google already had sold off Motorola’s Home division for $2.35 billion. Scarcely a year later

The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire

by Tim Schwab  · 13 Nov 2023  · 618pp  · 179,407 words

central role in how global health is managed.” * * * IN 2011, THE popular podcast and public radio program This American Life broadcast an extraordinary story about patent trolls—people who make money suing companies for infringing on their patents. Often these are frivolous lawsuits, based on overly broad patent claims. But

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patent trolls know that it’s cheaper for companies to settle the cases with payments than to go to trial. “Today, lots of investors and innovators in

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what it’s supposed to,” host Ira Glass noted. “It’s not promoting innovation, it’s stifling it. Because patent lawsuits are on the rise. Patent trolls are on the move. Patent lawsuits are so common now that it’s hard to find even one semi-successful startup in Silicon Valley that

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, he said, “invests in invention.” He continued: “I think you would find almost anyone who stands up for their patent rights has been called a patent troll.” This version of the story—the invention-forward narrative—had found a warm reception a few years earlier in the New Yorker. Writer Malcom Gladwell

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and podcaster Marc Maron went public, calling the effort a “shakedown” for money. And IV became the public face of this expanding, invasive species, the patent troll. “In other words, Intellectual Ventures goes around to companies and says, hey, you want to protect yourself from lawsuits? We own tons of patents,” journalist

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it to make profits. On paper, then, it appears the Gates Foundation controls a for-profit arm of one of the world’s most notorious patent trolls. As the Global Good project took on a higher profile at IV, it was seen as PR to humanize or redeem the company from its

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time, included Microsoft and Bill Gates (personally). Global Good created extremely valuable public relations to correct IV’s image as the world’s most notorious patent troll. It positioned Nathan Myhrvold to tell the world that IV was doing “god’s work.” That’s great for IV, but what did taxpayers get

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

by Clive Thompson  · 11 Sep 2013  · 397pp  · 110,130 words

on an invention to one person creates artificial scarcity. It is a crude device, and patent offices have been horribly abused in recent years by “patent trolls”; they’re people who get a patent for something (either by conceiving the idea themselves, or buying it) without any intention of actually producing the

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invention—it’s purely so they can sue, or soak, people who go to market with the same concept. Patent trolls employ the concept of multiples in a perverted reverse, using the common nature of new ideas to hold all inventors hostage. I’ve talked to

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–85 panopticon, 236–37 Papert, Seymour, 188–93 Pariser, Eli, 230–31 Park, Clara Claiborne, 132–33 partisan online discourse, 261–63 Patel, Rupal, 19 patent trolls, 64 Pearce, Katy, 269 penicillin, discovery of, 60–61, 63–64 Penny, Laurie, 77 Perry, Rick, 24 Phaedrus (Plato), 68–69, 118 photographic literacy, 105

Makers at Work: Folks Reinventing the World One Object or Idea at a Time

by Steven Osborn  · 17 Sep 2013  · 310pp  · 34,482 words

important. Osborn: Unless your business is extorting money out of other companies, then it is. Mota: Unless you’re a patent troll. Did you see that someone actually tried to patent being a patent troll? Osborn: I saw that. That was brilliant. Mota: I loved that. Intellectual property is more a construct than a

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fostered the emergence of business practices that took advantage of intellectual property mechanisms. And that’s what we’re talking about in the case of patent trolling, or secretive information, or traditional content, music, movie, and book businesses. These business models are based on the fact that the legal tools are there

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution

by Pieter Hintjens  · 11 Mar 2013  · 349pp  · 114,038 words

them by capturing users and then taxing them without mercy. Your mobile phone bill is a case in point. The dream of every self-respecting patent troll is to get patents on a widely used standard, CSIRO-style. Owning a standard allows the owners -- usually a consortium of firms, often including

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patent trolls -- decide who gets to implement it. This is how large firms keep control of the audio and video encoding markets, the mobile phone market, WiFi,

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The

by Mariana Mazzucato  · 25 Apr 2018  · 457pp  · 125,329 words

Hacking Capitalism

by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

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