Are You a Patent Troll?

According to a March 21, 2005 article in Managing Intellectual Property, the speakers at a "Patent Trolls and Patent Property Rights" conference on March 14 agreed that some strategies labelled as "patent trolling" can have legitimate business purposes.

For example, Peter Detkin, who coined the term "patent troll" while at Intel (but now works for reputed troller Intellectual Ventures) now beleives that enforcing patents for technology that a company has itself not developed into a product is not trolling. Hewlett-Packard's vice-president of licensing, Joe Beyers, reportedly echoed those sentiments and suggested two defining criteria: 1) a company whose primary business model is to acquire patents and assert them against another company, and 2) a company that is only interested in money and not, for instance, cross-licensing. The worst patent trolls send out thousands of letters to companies, threatening lawsuits if they do not receive payment.

"In the end, we're all in violent agreement here," Detkin reportedly said at an Intellectual Property Owners Association conference on patent reform. "Patent quality is the real issue."

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