> So you can't be a patent troll if you weren't one three years ago? Not sure where you got that. I meant if you don't exist for the sole purpose of asserting

> So you can't be a patent troll if you weren't one three years ago? Not sure where you got that. I meant if you don't exist for the sole purpose of asserting a patent, you can't be a troll. > In much the same way as a toy soldier can "claim to operate independently" after you release it having wound it up and pointed it in the direction you want it to go. 1. Actually, Nortel was already hitting firms up for licensing those patents before they went down. It was already "wound up and pointed in the right direction." Everyone knew what was coming. The companies that bought them did so to manage their own risk. They are now simply going after the rest of the industry that failed to do so. 2. Rockstar is now suing giant corporations like Google and Samsung. You think they wouldn't get the FTC and DoJ involved if they could prove anything? >Compared to cost of trial and appeals ... Those are the only concrete costs. Everything else is handwavy (public opinion? Really? Impact on stock? The weather has more impact) or highly unlikely (injunctions). The companies IV goes after can certainly afford to take them on. > pro-plaintiff Federal Circuit judges I'd encourage you to lay off Timothy Lee's articles about the Federal Circuit and actually look up statistics about their decisions. > Of course there isn't. For a startup fighting is equivalent to bankruptcy and the settlement comes with an NDA. 1. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it's not proof that evidence is being suppressed either. claiming something is a problem without sufficient evidence is not a very strong evidence either. 2. Evidence always leaks out. All those other trolls no doubt have NDAs, yet we hear of them. If so many startups are getting hit, where were the VCs in this whole thing? Nonetheless, there's something in the works about making these "nastygrams" more trackable. That will give us enough data to see how much of a problem this really is. Until then all we have is a outrage driven by a media hungry for rageviews and informed by PR.