That's certainly possible in principle, but it would be pretty stupid. One big advantage an NPE has in litigation is that it can't effectively be counter-sued: it has no business against which an injunction can be issued, and (if set up as a shell company, as trolls generally are) it has no assets that can be levied against. Furthermore, since it's not operating a business, it is exceedingly unlikely to be (even arguably) infringing any patents owned by its victims.

For a company producing a product to expose itself to the risk of countersuit by trolling would be idiotic, particularly as it's completely unnecessary -- all it has to do is spin off a shell company.

Universities are a major source of the basic innovations that companies profit from commercializing. So who is leeching off who?

Also, all modern patent systems are intrinsically based on this reality, to the extent that we have a problem with maintaining a high bar on obviousness. Today, patentability is based on how much an invention differs from the prior art, which is based on the premise that all new innovations are built on top of previous ones but we still want to reward "worthy" inventions. Unfortunately, obviousness is so hard to quantify without subjectiveness and hindsight bias that the commonly adopted objective measure of "worth", is the delta from the prior art. You find a delta the examiner cannot refute with prior art, you get a patent.

Those are two very different things. And most of those R&D shops are attached to companies capable of doing something with the research.

> while most of the money flows to companies that take those ideas and build consumer products with them

If you're looking to come up with ideas and make money from them, as opposed to publishing them for general benefit, academia is the wrong place to do that. Universities aren't necessarily patent trolls, but university IP licensing departments are. (In any case, universities that make claims over the innovations of their students and faculty are broken to begin with, and I wouldn't blame a university for researchers who go off and create entities to license their own inventions that the university doesn't own.)

They're often similarly positioned vis-à-vis the patent system. E.g. even with patent protection, SRI got a pretty short end of the stick relative to Apple despite doing much of the real innovation behind Siri.

> If you're looking to come up with ideas and make money from them, as opposed to publishing them for general benefit, academia is the wrong place to do that.

Maybe there would be more innovation if that weren't the case. In any case, I find it hard to fault universities for deciding they don't want to do free R&D for industry.

You probably disagree with this, but the platonic ideal of the patent system, for many contemporary proponents, is enabling a world where everyone who participates in the incremental process of innovation can get compensated for their contribution, instead of a windfall going to whoever takes the last step, or more typically, takes a proven idea and throws UX engineers and a big sales team at it.

I agree that that's the platonic ideal of the patent system. (Though I'd note that its documented motivation is not to reward innovation per se, but to encourage the production and most importantly publication of it; reward is a means, not an end, and I think that's a critical distinction.) I also believe, and I hope you'd agree, that the reality of the patent system does not come anywhere close to that "ideal". Furthermore, I believe the harm and limitation to innovation far outstrips the encouragement, especially in tech.

I'm not going to comment on the more challenging issue of how to fund innovation in fields like medicine. However, at least in the tech industry, if the patent system evaporated tomorrow, the world wouldn't end, no company or product we actually cared about would go away, on balance we'd be better off.

I disagree that good products don't go away. What does the world look like where there is no SRI to do the hard part of Siri, just companies like Apple sitting around waiting for something they can package up and sell? What does the world look like without ARM? What does the world look like when Qualcomm spends a lot less money on R&D because competitors can easily use the results by reverse-engineering their firmware? What does the world look like when the ITC never happened, and Chinese firms contained to engage in flooding the international market with copies of American router designs?

I mean, I don't have to mention all these things. Just look at the lobbying materials of tech companies in the 1990's. The tech industry had a huge hand in creating the patent regime that exists today, just as Microsoft and Adobe did in creating the copyright regime we have.

This is false to a surprising degree. Consider that the vast majority of the semiconductor industry cannot "do something with their research". ARM is the oft-repeated example, but what is missed is that they are the norm, not the exception. Consider that the semiconductor industry has thousands of firms and only a handful of fab companies. Without the fabs, these semiconductor companies can do literally nothing, and worse, some fabs like Intel are direct competitors.