troll
Pronunciation (trol)
n.
A supernatural creature of Scandinavian folklore, variously portrayed as a friendly or mischievous dwarf or as a giant, that lives in caves, in the hills, or under bridges.
Source here.
Patent trolls, as the term is generally accepted, are testing small and medium sized businesses in Korea. (Source article in Korean) The news article introduces several instances in which small or medium companies producing MP3 players were urged by patent trolls (mostly from the U.S. and
the EU) to license their patents and pay license fee.
According to Wikipedia,
Patent troll (also “patent pirate”) is a derogatory phrase coined by former Intel assistant general counsel Peter Detkin in 2001. Originally, it described an individual or company with a patent portfolio containing important, fundamental software patents, which it never intended to commercialize. Instead, a “patent troll” would actively pursue a strategy of looking for potential infringers and proposing license agreements to companies. Where the patent troll is unable to achieve a licensing agreement, it threatens, or enters, patent infringement litigation. To avoid litigation, companies often choose to settle by purchasing a license. Today, “patent troll” is used
to describe a number of businesses using similar patent strategies.
Source here.
As I understand, the key element that differentiates a patent troll from a “patent child” (trolls are believed to eat children) is whether the individual or corporation does a production activity based on the patents. Hence, the battle between two terms: “Non-Producing Entities” v. ”Patent Trolls.”
Joe Beyers, IP-licensing chief, Hewlett-Packard, says in his
CNet.com article:
Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO)’s definition of patent troll is “a company or business function whose primary business activity is to acquire patents for the purpose of offensively asserting them against other companies.”
I couldn’t read the definition from IPO’s website because it is subscription based. You may check it out at http://www.ipo.org/
Yearly membership fee is around $200 give and take. Indeed, they think they have intellectual property within their password protected website that they own where the associate with each other. Hence, the name Intellectual Property Owners Association
website.
Other website
introduces several patent trolls like Acacia, Myhrvold, Pat-Rights, Inc., TechSearch. It also introduces famous corporte patent trolls.
* Fritz Teufel, patent troll of IBM and Bitkom
* Tim Frain, patent troll of Nokia and EICTA
* Thierry Sueur, patent troll of Air Liquide, MEDEF and UNICE
* Christian Nguyen, patent troll of Thales, MEDEF and UNICE
* Harald Hagedorn, patent troll of SAP
* Wilhelm von Lieres, patent troll of Siemens
* Marshall Phelps, patent troll of Microsoft, formerly IBM
So, Joe Beyers and those who think it’s apt to call them “patent trolls” think patent legal system shouldn’t be abused by those who use patents to extort money from innocent producers while they themselves don’t produce anything.
On the other hand, Nathan Myhrvold who can be said the leading figure in patent trolling (as in “troll”-ing and “trolling”) said that
There isn’t any hard data to support … . This is a great example of people having a bunch of anecdotes…I don’t see that it’s wrong to invent without making products.
Source here.
It isn’t easy to refute Myhrvold’s argument. The beauty of the current legal system is that a loophole, if there is any, is always exploited by some smarties and such exploitation always rises to such level as to invite modification to the law. As of now, there clearly are problems of patent system in some technical industries.
As Professor Peter D. Junger wrote on his blog:
Of late, however, the Supreme Court has evidenced an increased willingness to review decisions of the Federal Circuit in patent cases. When one couples that with the fact that there is more and more evidence these days that software patents impede rather than support the progress of science and the useful arts, I am almost willing to predict that within the next few years the Supreme Court will once again declare that claims in patent applications describing computer
programs are not patentable and that therefore so-called software patents are not valid.
, it is very suspicious that the patent system is working properly in the computer software industry.
One of the examples that illustrates the problem is the most recent Eolas v. Microsoft case. Read the overview of the case at Wikipedia entry of Eolas.
The inventor of the World Wide Web and the Director of the W3 Consortium Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote to Under Secretary of Commerce, asking to invalidate this patent, in order to “eliminate this major impediment to the operation of the Web”. In a remarkable turn of
events, the leaders of Open Source Community sided with Microsoft in fighting the patent due to its threat to the free nature of the Web and to the basic established HTML standards. The specific concerns of having one company (Eolas) controlling a critical piece of the Web framework were cited.
Source here.
It tells us something that the leaders of Open Source Community sided with Microsoft. And think about how many electronic goods are made without a software pre-installed on them? Therefore, this is not an issue confined in the software industry It expands all
over to industries that utilize computer software.
But again, how are we gonna stop patent trolls? Do we want a law that prohibits using a patent for garnering license fees without actually using the patent? We should be reminded that there are a number of inventors, individual or corporate, who invent without intending to produce products themselves. Are we gonna ban them altogether? nbsp;Or do we have somethng else?
