The Chicago Daily Law Bulletin quotes Professor Mark Lemley’s research on patent trolls in response to a recent ruling against Apple for patent infringement. 

This week, jurors in Madison, Wis. ruled that the world’s most valuable company, Apple Inc., infringed a patent from 1998 that makes microprocessors in its popular iPhones more efficient.

The verdict in the ongoing trial sets the stage for a damages award that could range from $400 million to $860 million, according to news reports and court documents.

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Mark Lemley, a Stanford Law School professor well-known for his research on the patent system, makes a similar argument about the effect of the term in the broader policy debate.

In a 2013 paper in the Columbia Law Review titled “Missing the Forest for the Trolls,” Lemley and Intel’s general counsel, A. Douglas Melamed, write that while trolls are a problem, they are also “taking the rap for problems with the patent system.”

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“Practicing entities, as well as trolls, can and do take advantage of these issues,” Lemley and Melamed write.

“Rather than focusing on the trolls — the symptoms — the law should turn its attention to the disease itself.”

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“They are clearly a ‘non-practicing entity,’” Lemley wrote in an e-mail. “But I don’t think we should care that much.”