presumably if the company goes bankrupt and it ows money to someone (i.e. the sued company) the assets of the troll (the patents) should go to the debtor, so hyow would this work?
Or does US law permit you to close a company keeping all it has while not paying debts?
They don't hold all of their patents under one company, they split them up. If you prevail against them in the lawsuit, the only patents you'd collect from them are the ones you just overturned.
IANAL, but I would think it would be possible to license the patent out to the shell company for relicensing. Something similar to how Microsoft Ireland is able to sell, license and sue companies using MS products without actually holding the copyrights to those products.
So then what happens to lone inventors or universities or anyone -- business or individual -- who develops an idea, patents it but cannot afford to bring it to market? Should they just forfeit their efforts to a large company without any compensation?
I don't know how someone develops a patentable idea without practicing the related art. I don't think NPE means actual original inventor by any stretch -- but I could be wrong and would be curious if you can point me in the direction of examples where a court or even a reliable pundit has made that stretch.
Here's a scenario for you. Imagine you are an aerospace engineer working for a company such as Boeing. After a nice career, you decide to retire. One day, while in the shower, you imagine a brand new design for an airplane wing and you decide to model it on your PC using the software you'd always used at work. To your shock, you discover that this new design promises a substantial reduction in fuel costs. You obtain a patent for your design. Now what? Are you going to start your own company to manufacture aircraft wings? No, you decide to remain a NPE and license your patent to companies such as Boeing and earn a nice living from it.
Just to put a stake in the ground, I mean patent trolls specifically, when I call out bad NPE behavior. Not all NPE behavior is bad, and I only hope to limit the bad behavior.
Wikipedia says: Non-practicing entities are generally not considered 'patent trolls' when they offer their patented technologies to licensees in advance, such as individual inventors, university research laboratories, development firms, and licensing agents that offer enforcement and negotiation services on behalf of patent owners.
Just to put a stake in the ground, I mean patent trolls specifically, when I call out bad NPE behavior. Not all NPE behavior is bad, and I only hope to limit the bad behavior.
How do you do that, legally speaking? What is the fundamental technical difference between our hypothetical aerospace engineer suing Boeing and some troll suing Vizio? It's not enough to say that the patents of a troll might be invalid; invalidating patents is extremely expensive in court.
At that point you're just saying "trolls are bad", because you're not offering any way for the law to differentiate between a "good" NPE (our lone inventor) and a "bad" NPE (the trolls). How do you limit the bad without also limiting the good?
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