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Apple is one of the biggest patent trolls in the world (by any of several metrics, the most meaningful in my personal opinion being the total amount of damages
by veidr 13y ago
Apple is one of the biggest patent trolls in the world (by any of several metrics, the most meaningful in my personal opinion being the total amount of damages sought from infringement of patents not in use in any product). Just google 'bockstar'.
I think there is some conflation of 'patent troll' vs 'non-practicing entity'. The latter is a subspecies of the former. After multinational conglomerates got good at exploiting the (busted) US patent system, more specialized parasites -- of course! -- evolved to exploit it even more efficiently (by not producing anything, nor having any assets vulnerable to counterattack).
But just because you make products doesn't mean you aren't a patent troll. Honeywell and Apple are perhaps marginally better then Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures... but only because they are patent trolls who also produce things of value (to some people).
Patent-trolling-wise[1], they are the same.
[1]: Hyphenating only the last pair of words in an ad-hoc-compound adjective is not as bad as patent trolling, but still bad, IMO.
- shmerl 13y agoYes, people often think that "troll" can only refer to non producing entity. It doesn't. If we go back to the analogy, fairy tale / fantasy troll would usually fix the bridge and demand toll from anyone passing by. While clearly racketeering, the troll can argue that he added value to the bridge. Same goes for patent trolls. Some are complete parasites, and there are patent trolls which produce some stuff, while being racketeers at the same time. The common logic here is that racketeers want money for something they didn't really do (the troll didn't build the bridge, some company didn't really make or invent the tech that they demand money for and so on).