Anyone interested in getting a better understanding of the economic reality of trolls is encouraged to go to ssrn.com and do a quick search for "patent trolls". These are not all peer reviewed papers, but many of them have data and methodologies and, most importantly, numbers. Read only the abstracts, if you're short on time.<p>As always, the topic is so much more nuanced than "good" or "bad". The first result, "Patent Troll Myths" by Michael Risch is a good start.<p>Sure, you will find the papers by Bessen et al where the "trolls cost the economy 29 Billion" meme comes from. But you'll also find a paper (by Schwartz and Kesan) that debunks Bessen's paper, which got nearly 0 coverage in the press. You'll even find a paper showing trolls have better patents than average! But these tend to get settled quickly, so typically the poorer ones go to trial, and so you get papers (like from Lemley) showing that trolls lose more cases than average.<p>You'll also find papers arguing the benefits of trolls, debunking some of the common arguments against trolls, and introducing new previously unconsidered harms of patent trolls.<p>And of course, just like there's no clear definition of "software patents", there is no clear definition of "patent trolls" either, and you'll find papers discussing this. <p>And because they use different data sets, different papers look at the same problem at the same time and reach completely opposite conclusions.<p>And further, because the authors are almost never practitioners in the field, you get some really obvious findings being reported... and then misconstrued! For instance there's a paper showing litigation has shot up since 2007, and presenting various theories, completely missing the
Medimmune v Genntech decision that effectively upended the rules of patent licensing. And there's the paper that argues patent quality is dropping because more patents were being issued, without being aware of the ending of the misguided "reject, reject, reject" unofficial policy instituted by former USPTO head Jon Dudas (<a href="http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2009/03/16/prespective-of-an-anonymous-patent-examiner/id=2190" rel="nofollow">http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2009/03/16/prespective-of-an-anony...</a>)<p>And as always, it's helpful to keep in mind where the authors' funding comes from. Bessen of the "29 billion" fame, for instance, is funded by the "Coalition for Patent Fairness". Check out the list of supporters. It's almost ad hom, but hey, if we can point out that studies showing the harms of piracy are often funded by the MPAA, we can point this out too.<p>Yes, there are clear bad actors like Lodsys, but there are so many more variables out there, and many are arguably helping more than harming. <p>Yet, somehow, it's only one small side of the story that gets told. <p>As this is a hot-button topic, we should take an objective look at the data. Because, quoting from one of the papers above, "Without a better understanding of the many complicated effects of patents in high technology markets, we run the very real risk of misguided policy decisions."