In this case I don't think this is a patent troll. They are an NPE but they aren't trying to bully small companies to settle out of court. If they win maybe more people will want to join the dark side and make large corporations pay. Maybe then they will put pressure on Congress to finally pass the bipartisan bill that Leahy and Harry Reid forced to be shelved.
There is an argument to be made that going after a big fish means it's more likely you have a real claim, because it's not like Apple won't hire good lawyers, and if you lose you get nothing, so why bother if you have no chance?
The problem is that argument is complete bunk when you're talking about software patents. The plaintiffs also get nothing if they don't sue, and if they do they have a chance at a huge windfall. Imagine how many bad patents you could litigate with and lose if you could win one claim for $200 million dollars.
One of the (many) problems with software patents is that because the scope of what software does is so broad, what an individual patent would rightly be worth sounds extremely small, and so their worth tends to be vastly overestimated when not taken in the proper context.
You look at something like an iPhone, it's probably covered by thousands of patents. Cellular wireless, wifi, video codecs, audio codecs, encryption algorithms, web browsers, app stores, music stores, digital telephony, media library functions, printing, Airplay, etc. etc. Each of those will be claimed by dozens if not hundreds of patents. And "1% of revenue" sounds small when you're not taking that into consideration, even though in reality 1% is huge. Even calling it 1% of the value of all patents covering the device is ridiculous, and revenue has to cover at least a couple of non-patent sources of costs like manufacturing, distribution, marketing, etc.
There is an obvious absurdity if there exist 1000 patents that could each be considered to be worth 1% of revenue when you only look at them one at a time.
I think "patent troll" should be applied to be anyone who waits for accidental infringement. That's not quite everyone who's an NPE, and I view this behavior as tacit admission that you know you shouldn't have a patent.
That said, I doubt banning this behavior would solve much. It's easy to pretend to be well intentioned and there are truly well intentioned people with bad patents.
That's a pretty broad statement. The definition of "obvious" is different to a lot of people, and there are a lot of things that seem obvious in retrospect that weren't obvious at the time. So it's hard to use that as a way to define troll.
As for old, if the patent is still valid, does the age matter in isolation? Sure, you can argue that patents stay valid for too long, but I don't think I can call a company a troll for using an old patent if the age alone is how you're labelling them a troll.
