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So-called patent trolls may actually benefit inventors and the innovation economy, according to a Stanford intellectual property expert. Stephen Haber ( https://politicalscience.stanford.edu/people/stephen-haber ), a Stanford political science professor, suggests in new research that concerns about too much litigation involving patents is misguided.
A patent troll is a person or company that buys patents – without any intent to produce a product – and then enforces those patents against accused infringers in order to collect licensing fees. Some say the resulting litigation has driven up costs to innovators and consumers.
To the contrary, Haber said, his research with Stanford political science graduate student Seth Werfel shows that trolls – also known as patent assertion entities, or PAEs – play a useful intermediary role between individual inventors and large manufacturers.
http://scienceblog.com/77142/patent-trolls-serve-valuable-role-in-innovation-stanford-expert-says/
[Abstract]: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2552734
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mth on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:51PM
Not so fast: that they might play a useful role doesn't mean that they are a net benefit to society.
And I'm not entirely convinced the role is as useful as the article suggests it is. What is called an "inventor" when it comes to patents is the person who applied for the patent. Unfortunately, many patents get accepted that are not actually inventions in the real meaning of the word: a lot of them are obvious ideas dressed up in fancy language. Being able to let a middle man threaten and execute lawsuits to get money for a patent is only a good thing if the patent itself actually contributed something useful to the whole of human knowledge.
The root of the problem is that poor quality patents get accepted and it is very expensive to get them overturned. Patent trolls make that problem visible: since they don't make any products, they use lawsuits to profit from their patents and lawsuits are public; if a manufacturer does some kind of cross-license agreement with another manufacturer, the exact patents involved usually don't show up in the media.