Researchers Find That Patent Trolls Cost US Companies $500 Billion

The new patent system law was passed, but it came many years too late to stop the fund drains that patent trolls managed to cause during the past two decades.

Patent trolling is something that can be seen as particularly jarring to any company that makes and sells any sort of products.

Basically, patent trolls are companies that don't actually have any products, and no assets, but they do have a patent portfolio broad enough to include technologies used by larger corporations.

Their modus operandi consists of starting legal actions (or threatening with lawsuits) against companies that have the means to pay them for using their technology.

The main goal is for a financial settlement to be reached, and this all can happen, and has happened, more than once.

In fact, this practice has been in effect for many years, longer than many people, in the US and outside of it, have been alive.

The newest patent system law, at last, was recently passed by the congress and ratified by the US president.

Unfortunately, it will only hamper patent troll activities, not stop them (probably), and won't actually have much of a retroactive effect, save on certain patents that should never have been approved, and even then not immediately.

That said, researchers James Bessen, Mike Meurer, and Jennifer Ford from the University of Boston conducted a research project to see just how much patent trolls cost US companies since 1990.

The figure is a staggering 500 billion US dollars, and this is only counting tangible costs like legal fees and settlement payout, and only from publicly held companies.

In truth, the consequences were more far-reaching than that, branching into employee distraction, legal uncertainty, costs associated with having to redesign products, etc.

In other words, patent trolls cost US companies quite a bit more than $83 billion annually, which is already a huge sum.