Apple Inc (AAPL)

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It's a mistake to depict patent trolls as victims of theft. Many of them maintain a mere postal presence in the the eastern district of Texas in order to sue in that friendly forum on patents of dubious validity, counting on the asymmetric costs of discovery that will be incurred by actual operating companies to extort nuisance settlements from them.

The trolls have overplayed their hands. In the Alice case the Supreme Court has begun the process of unwinding a two-decade lapse in quality among many software and business-method patents that cloak ordinary problem-solving processes in computer technology and call them inventions.




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