James Bessen, Jennifer Ford, and Michael Meurer of BU School of Law have written a phenomenal paper titled The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls. Rather than be politically correct and refer to NPE’s simply as “non-practicing entities”, they cut through all the noise, define what a patent troll is, and go through a detailed and rigorous analysis of the private and social costs of patent trolls. Some highlights from the paper follow:
Regarding money:
- From 1990 – 2010 NPE lawsuits are associated with $500 billion dollars of lost wealth to defendants.
- In the past four years, NPE lawsuits are associated with an average of $80 billion per year of lost wealth to defendants.
- Very little of this loss wealth represents a transfer to inventors.
To read the full, original article click on this link: The Real Cost of Patent Trolls
