The Federal Trade Commission has voted to use its subpoena power to investigate patent trolls, or as they are more felicitously know, patent-assertion entities, or PAEs. These are organizations – usually for-profit businesses — composed not of inventors but of investors who buy up patents and use them to sue other companies for infringement.
About this investigation, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it would be a great public service for some institution to gather the facts about PAEs and dispassionately distribute and discuss them. The recent report by the GAO shed far too little light on the subject and led some to conclude that there’s not much of a troll problem at all.
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