The latest terror of corporate America is the "patent troll," a fearsome entity that can sue a company using its patents for millions, or threaten a shutdown.
There’s a new bogeyman haunting corporate America alongside the crusading white-collar prosecutor and the zealous class-action attorney.
The latest predator to terrorize boardrooms is a creature called the "patent troll." This is a patent-holding company that collects licensing fees from users of its technology and sues those who won’t pay.
BlackBerry maker Research in Motion learned the hard way how costly such a legal battle can be. RIM agreed earlier this month to pay $612.5 million to settle a patent-infringement lawsuit from NTP Inc., a holding company for the intellectual property of a deceased inventor.
Other tech giants, including Microsoft, Intel and eBay, are battling similar big-dollar patent-infringement cases. There also have been a few cases in Colorado.
Companies known as trolls usually produce nothing and sometimes are little more than a few lawyers who purchased patents out of bankruptcies. On the other extreme, inventors, university researchers and companies that represent them also are often dubbed trolls, fairly or not.
The issue of patent trolls – around for decades but coined by Intel in 2001 – has grown with the explosion in patent awards and related
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