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Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

let me play devils advocate for a moment here.

Why do these articles make it seem like the patent trolls don't spend any money bringing these suits? I'm assuming they have just as many legal fees to take care of as Carolla does.

The only good side to this is these companies finally understand the ROI on cases like these are prohibitive to the company bringing them.

Despite Coralla settling, I'm pretty sure Personal Audio lost money in this mess.

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Patent trolls usually have lawyers working on contingency fee basis. The lawyers take most of the risk ... the troll has very few costs. In comparison the defendants usually rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars in discovery costs (because, unlike shell company trolls, they have lots of records).

I am pretty sure part of the whole patent trolling business model is the asymmetric costs. The plantiff's costs are amortized over a number of suits; the the defendant's costs are not.

Could Carolla publish the findings of his attorneys’ discovery work, so that future defendants can use it? If so, that would serve as a pretty good deterrent to future litigation. Right?

The patent troll gets to pick and choose "soft targets" (or what they believe to be soft targets). They then get to pick and choose who they escalate against, and how. If they're good at what they do, they'll already have booked serious revenue before their first case even goes to trial.

A trial represents a huge risk for them - their patent could get invalidated, for example - so it will often make sense to settle even at a loss if an opponent will clearly put up a too risky, expensive fight compared to the potential return.

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