Don't call them trolls anymore!

The use of the term "patent troll" has become familiar, at least to those who follow intellectual property issues.

Of course, it is a contentious term. Nobody calls his own line of work "patent trolling." It's always the other guy. But the idea behind the term is that there are (natural and legal persons) who collect lots of patents they have no intention of using in any productive way, in the hoope that they'll find somebody doing something similar. Then they can threaten a lawsuit for infringement, collect their check, and think of some more patents to file.

It sounds like an excessively easy way to make a living -- and like a matter of throwing sand in the gears of somebody else's productivity. It sounds like, well ... trolling.

I'm told that there is a new, more neutral term for the trolls. Non-practicing entities, or NPEs.

Anyway, on Tuesday of this week the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on potential patent law reform. I recommend the thoughtful testimony of Mark Lemley, professor at Stanford Law.

Here's a single paragraph from near the start of Lemley's disussion:

"There is nothing inherently wrong with either the growth in patent lawsuits or in patent enforcement by non-practicing entities. But a number of patent rules have given these plaintiffs unfair advantages in litigation, allowing them to enforce dubious patents in favorable jurisdictions, and to use the rules of patent remedies to obtain more money than their inventions are actually worth. Many of those problems resulted from troublesome judicial interpretations of the Patent Act, rather than from the Act itself."