A new development in the intellectual property arena is the presence of “patent trolls.” These are small organizations, usually just a clever inventor and a patent attorney, who buy up patents or hold the inventor’s patents in a fast-moving area of technology, such as information technology. The trolls have no plans to make a product based on their patents. Instead they lie in wait, hoping to snare an unwitting manufacturer that in- fringes on one of their patents and to demand an outrageous royalty payment. Research in Motion, RIM, the producer of the hand-held wireless device called Blackberry, was sued in 2005 by a troll named NTF.

Find out more about what happened in the case of RIM versus NTF and identify the societal issues involved with patent trolls.