Glow,
You from the beginning of your posting here have tried to conflate legitimate NPE's with Patent Trolls. They are not one in the same. Legitimate NPE's such as Chanbond serve a much needed function in our patent system keeping big tech companies from running roughshod over small underfunded patent owners and the fidelity of the patent system in general. Even Director Iancu, the current head of the USPTO, has made similar statements.
The term "Patent Troll" is a pejorative term coined by big tech companies and used by their lawyers, lobbyist, and bought and paid for politicians in order to cast all NPE's in the negative light of the "troll". They have been highly successful in their brain washing of America. But thanks to Iancu, the new sheriff in town, a new day has come.
Legitimate NPEs such as Chanbond employ a rigorous due diligence process to ensure that the patents they license are of good quality and highly likely to be upheld as valid by the courts and by patent office trial boards. Just as companies that manufacture products do, a legitimate licensing firm generally will resort to litigation to enforce its valid patents only after protracted good-faith negotiations with potential licensees have proven unsuccessful. They do not use the threat of litigation to seek nuisance settlements, nor do they threaten litigation against startup companies, product retailers, or retail consumers unless they directly compete with the licensor.
Patent trolls, on the other hand, often use low-quality or over broad patent claims to threaten litigation against hundreds of small businesses each year, even retail establishments such as coffee shops and hotels. They claim these businesses are infringing their patents simply by doing something as innocuous as scanning a document to email or offering WiFi access to customers. They then demand settlements of a few thousand dollars or threaten the business with an infringement suit that can cost literally millions of dollars to defend against.
These suits are known as strike suits—i.e., suits filed to extort nuisance settlements that are less than the cost of litigation—and are unfortunately nothing new in American courts. Similar suits are also filed every year in the personal injury, product liability, and shareholder rights arenas. In fact, personal injury and product liability suits outnumber patent suits by 10 to 1 every year. And given all the stories of ambulance-chasing lawyers and faked whiplash injuries, not to mention of people carrying cockroaches into fast-food joints and crying foul, it’s likely there are many times more abusive personal injury and product liability suits than abusive patent suits each year.
AI
