I can see two rules that would help immensely with trolls:
1. There should be an absolute maximum on the litigation that can be brought against any organization for any reason in a given time period (say, a year), and that total cost should not be able to exceed some tiny fraction of its total operating costs for that period (parent companies included, to avoid hiding actual illegal activities in subsidiaries). In other words, it should be impossible for someone to kill a startup “in the crib” simply by creating overwhelming lawsuits that are too expensive in time and money to deal with.
2. There should be a very substantial penalty for failing to convict after accusing a someone of a patent violation; something like 10x the legal costs of the party that was accused, and a moratorium on any similar accusations against any party for some period (like 6 months). In other words, slow these trolls down and hit them hard when they fail, and they might not try to make a shady business out of it.
The first rule is too easily exploitable. Defensively engage in litigation between a pair of complicit entities that consumes the entire litigation budget, and then go around screwing everyone you can over while going "nah nah nah, you can't sue me"
Of course with absolute legislation like this you're going to end up with someone abusing the rules. Already been sued too many times this year (as any large company is)? Congratulations, you're now immune to lawsuits.
The intended purpose of patents is to _support_ innovation. People spending time and money on inventing should be able to reap financial benefits of such research rather than seeing their hard research work just being copied over by someone else.
Thereby there should be an absolute maximum on the litigation brought by someone using patents based on the R&D spend they had for the said patent(s). Let's say that the litigation can at most be 10x of the said investment.
Since determining how much of the R&D expenses were directed towards the said patents could be tough, the maximum litigation for all patents could be set to 10x the money a company has spent on R&D in say the two years preceding the filing of concerned patents. This means that if a company sues X for $120 million after having spend $20 million for the given period, they can now sue someone else for at most $80 million for any other patent(s) over the same period. Further details can be worked out.
1. There should be an absolute maximum on the litigation that can be brought against any organization for any reason in a given time period (say, a year), and that total cost should not be able to exceed some tiny fraction of its total operating costs for that period (parent companies included, to avoid hiding actual illegal activities in subsidiaries). In other words, it should be impossible for someone to kill a startup “in the crib” simply by creating overwhelming lawsuits that are too expensive in time and money to deal with.
2. There should be a very substantial penalty for failing to convict after accusing a someone of a patent violation; something like 10x the legal costs of the party that was accused, and a moratorium on any similar accusations against any party for some period (like 6 months). In other words, slow these trolls down and hit them hard when they fail, and they might not try to make a shady business out of it.