经济学人下载:创智财富,专利之争更猛烈更烧钱

Making things even more troublesome is that as lawsuits became particularly lucrative some companies entered the fray to feed off them. Non-practicing entities (NPEs), which have intellectual property but no actual products, include such august bodies as the Harvard Medical School. But some NPEs are derided as “trolls” because their sole purpose seems to be to exploit the legal system by demanding licensing fees from companies, sometimes for questionable patents. Over the past 15 years, the median award to NPEs of damages for patent infringement has doubled while that for other firms has declined

制造东西甚至变得更棘手的原因在于随着法律诉讼变得相对的有利可图，企业进入了专利争夺战场去喂饱讼棍。不实施专利的实体（NPEs）——只有知识产权但无实际生产——包含了这些德高望重的实体比如哈佛医学院。由于他们的核心理念是利用从企业之处收取高昂的许可费法律，很多NPEs被嘲笑为“姜太公钓鱼”。某些专利甚至还有问题。在过去的15年，同意支付给NPEs的侵犯专利权的损害赔偿金的中间值翻了一倍，与此同时给其它企业的赔偿却在降低。

注：Troll v. fish by drawing bait along in the water 用带有鱼饵的曳绳钓鱼[perhaps related to French troller to quest]

Court rulings in America have begun to clip the trolls’ beards by making it harder to win injunctions and by strengthening the criteria for whether an invention is truly “non-obvious”. Microsoft has seen the number of suits filed in the famously plaintiff-friendly district court of Eastern Texas fall from 17 in 2007 to just two so far this year, says Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel. However, as big companies have improved their defences, the trolls have changed their tactics and are now going after start-ups.

通过让其很难赢得禁止令和加强是否发明确实“非显而易见”的标准，美国法庭的裁决开始剪掉“姜太公胡须”。微软的总顾问巴瑞德斯密斯说微软最近的几例诉讼在对原告极其友好的东德克萨斯州地方法庭失败了。不管怎样，随着大企业逐渐改变他们的“防御工事”，姜太公们也在改变他们的策略手段，并且现在热衷于欺负新出道的公司。