"lost wealth"? How can we lose money we don't have to begin with? Revised title: "The Opportunity Cost of Patent Trolling: Estimated at $80B/yr" What is a pa

"lost wealth"? How can we lose money we don't have to begin with? Revised title: "The Opportunity Cost of Patent Trolling: Estimated at $80B/yr" What is a patent? Ask that question and you get a wide variety of answers. Does it require the grantee to do anything? No. Except pay fees. Does it give the grantee permission to manufacture, market and sell anything? No. Does it guarantee the grantee protection from competition? No. So what is a patent? It is a right to sue. (And thereby a right to threaten to sue.) And currently, I believe the patent office is granting around 200,000 of these annually. The number keeps increasing. Are rates of innovation in line with this the number of grants? What percentage of patents are actually practiced? Are the numbers of new technologies and products reaching the marketplace increasing in line with the increases in the number of grants? Are there more inventions or more inventors, or do inventors just need more and more protection year after year? How about the rates of patent litigation and threats of patent litigation (patent trolling)? Ah ha. We can talk about innovation and incentives, motivation and effects, and get lost in academic arguments about inventors and economics, but it does not change what a patent is: Pure and simple, it is a right to sue. And selling this right to sue (or should we say licensing it), now by the 100's of 1000's each year, has itself become a major source of revenue for the government. It's a business. Grant the right to sue indiscriminantly one hundred thousand times or more each year and you just might start to see some grantees exercising their right to sue (or threaten suit) ... without any intention of ever manufacturing, marketing and selling anything. Never underestimate the path of least resistance. Manufacturing, marketing and selling versus threatening patent litigation and asking for compensation. Which of those two do you think is an easier route to profits? The point that many miss is that only one of the two is actually using the patent. That's because a patent is a right to sue. It grants no other permissions. It carries no obligations other than the need to pay fees. As such, trolls operate squarely within the system. They are exploiting patents for their true worth. Patents are expensive to prosecute and maintain. Go figure. As others point out, the system is the bigger problem. You do not need to be an expert in intellectual property or economics to figure out what incentive is created by granting the right to sue, a hundred thousand times each year.