A hypothetical company that didn't make anything, but generated high quality patents and licensed them out to other companies would be one thing. I don't know o

A hypothetical company that didn't make anything, but generated high quality patents and licensed them out to other companies would be one thing. I don't know of many companies with that business model, probably because it's hard to generate useful inventions without actually building things / writing code and seeing what happens, but there might be a few out there. A patent troll is a company that generates low quality patents. These are designed to be as broad a possible, so that said company can sue as many people as possible for infringement. Broad patents tend to contain very little information that could be useful in actually building working technology. It's like Leonardo daVinci takes out a patent on flying machines on the basis of his impractical drawings, and then sues the Wright brothers, who did all the hard work of actually designing a functional airplane. The patent troll doesn't even have to have a legally winnable case in order to make money, the point is just to create enough doubt that the target company decides it's easier to settle out of court, rather than waste a bunch of money in a lawsuit. In my opinion, such behaviour is pure rent-seeking. Additional footnote: As a taxpayer in a country where the government gives significant funding to universities and university research, I absolutely do expect the universities to generate free knowledge for everyone (including companies).