But is there really no difference between a legitimate NPE and a patent troll?
Paul Allen, the billionaire investor and co-founder of Microsoft (MSFT), is now an avowed patent troll.
The term "patent troll" describes firms that acquire patents so that they can later extract settlements from companies on infringement claims.
Typically, a patent troll will offer a startup an opportunity to settle at the outset usually for a price which is lower than the cost of defending the lawsuit.
Two such companies, the New York Times and OpinionLabs, came to light after filing suit against the patent troll yesterday, seeking declaratory judgements to invalidate Lodsys's patents.
ENGADGET: New York Times, OpinionLab sue Lodsys seeking declaratory judgement
For perhaps the first time in U.S. corporate history, stockholders of a public company will vote on May 23 on whether to turn a technology innovator into a patent troll.
"We have been reviled as a patent troll, a renegade outfit that buys up patents and then uses them to hold up innocent companies, " Myhrvold wrote in a 6, 479-word Harvard Business Review article published last year.
For years Silicon Valley worried that Myhrvold's IV would become a giant patent troll, a secretive extortion vehicle that would not produce anything but would assert its patent hoard in a barrage of licensing schemes and expensive lawsuits.
To be sure, we are plagued by a new species of patent litigant these days, the so-called patent troll, who buys up questionable patents in hopes of extracting payments from deep-pocketed companies eager to avoid the expense of litigation.
Of course, this is also a bit of a deal with the devil -- Intellectual Ventures might be the most infamous patent troll in history, and HTC and Samsung have essentially decided the risks and cost of doing business with IV are more favorable than the risks and cost of going to court.
ENGADGET: HTC and Samsung license entire Intellectual Ventures patent portfolio, gear up for war
In the hands of a troll, every overbroad software patent is a weapon with which to sue and extort huge settlements and increasingly they seek thousands of smaller settlements from startups and other companies that lack the financial and legal resources to defend themselves.
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