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A comment above addresses this well: shell companies, which is really the problem we should be fixing. Granted, the definition is probably still difficult to legally define despite how obvious it is when you're looking at one.

I've seen a number of people call CSIRO ( http://csiro.au ) a patent troll based on the wifi case.

Perhaps any company that doesn't actually have any other product or service? I agree it gets into tricky territory though.

Companies who have sued more than a certain number of companies (5?) in the past would be a good start, I think.

I'm sure Google and Apple and the other large companies fall into this category. I'm not sure I qualify them as trolls. Neither would the number of patents held by those companies qualify them either.

Well then, just open a few more shells so that each only sues four!

We can keep playing definitions all day, but it's not going to help anything.