Something similar happens in mobile telephony, where the big mobile firms have to fight their way through patent thickets to bring any innovation to market. At any one moment these firms are involved in scores of lawsuits as plaintiffs, defendants or interested third parties. The result, says one observer, is that ‘lobbying and litigating may be a more profitable way to win market share than innovating or investing’. Today, the biggest generators of new patents in the US system are ‘patent trolls’ – firms that buy up weak patent applications with no intention of making the products in
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