>Finally, I think we can learn something about the raging debate over who's a patent troll and what to do about trolls by looking at university patents. Universities are non-practicing entities. They share some characteristics with trolls, at least if the term is broadly defined, but they are not trolls. Asking what distinguishes universities from trolls can actually help us figure out what concerns us about trolls. What we ought to do is abandon the search for a group of individual companies to define as trolls. In my view, troll is as troll does. Universities will sometimes be bad actors. Nonmanufacturing patent owners will sometimes be bad actors. Manufacturing patent owners will sometimes be bad actors. Instead of singling out bad actors, we should focus on the bad acts and the laws that make them possible.
"Are Universities Patent Trolls?", Mark Lemley, 2007
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=980776
From the abstract:
>Finally, I think we can learn something about the raging debate over who's a patent troll and what to do about trolls by looking at university patents. Universities are non-practicing entities. They share some characteristics with trolls, at least if the term is broadly defined, but they are not trolls. Asking what distinguishes universities from trolls can actually help us figure out what concerns us about trolls. What we ought to do is abandon the search for a group of individual companies to define as trolls. In my view, troll is as troll does. Universities will sometimes be bad actors. Nonmanufacturing patent owners will sometimes be bad actors. Manufacturing patent owners will sometimes be bad actors. Instead of singling out bad actors, we should focus on the bad acts and the laws that make them possible.