On Wednesday, May 21, 2014, a U.S. bill aimed at combatting
patent trolling practices was pulled from consideration by the U.S.
Senate Judiciary Committee. As a result, it is unlikely that any
legislation addressing patent trolling practices will be passed in
the United States this year.
What is patent trolling?
One way of monetizing a patent is to collect royalties from
giving a license to another party to use the technology covered by
that patent. In this case, the patent owner does not need to
actually practice the technology covered by the patent. For
example, technology transfer offices of universities can be said to
operate on such a model.
"Patent Trolls", also known as "Patent Assertion
Entities" or "Non-Practicing Entities", adopt a
similar model, whereby they selectively acquire patents covering
commercially important technologies and attempt to monetize these
patents without practicing the covered technologies. The negative
term "trolling" is being
