if a company sells the patent to a "troll", but retains a license as part of the deal, i would consider that to be working as intended. it's basically a way to

if a company sells the patent to a "troll", but retains a license as part of the deal, i would consider that to be working as intended. it's basically a way to outsource the legal protection if a company sells it to a broker, and it eventually gets traded or licensed to a company that develops it, i'd also consider that working as intended if patents keep finding their way to companies that have no intention to either develop it themselves, or license it to others, and keep suing companies that do develop things, i'd consider it a failure of the system pharma patents get traded to non-developers all the time, but pharma patents mostly do their job of incentivizing innovation. there's still flaws, but the troll problem isn't a big issue in that space