By defining costs that way you do bring down the overhead, i.e. what they have to pay up-front, but not necessarily the actual costs. If I am a lawyer doing my

By defining costs that way you do bring down the overhead, i.e. what they have to pay up-front, but not necessarily the actual costs. If I am a lawyer doing my own patent trolling, and that takes up 10 hours of my time that I could otherwise have sold to someone for $x/hour, then $10x is a cost associated to the patent trolling, even if I didn't actually have to transfer that money to someone else.