I imagine a lot of patent trolls (e.g. Intellectual Ventures) just read this headline and interpreted it as:

  Patent sector profits rise to half a trillion.

The This American Life piece on patent trolls[1] (Which I am sure a lot of you listened to) was certainly eye opening, but one take-away was the huge investments that companies like IV have coming in from 3rd parties that expect serious returns.

From what I would tell, IV operates a lot like an insurance company.

They hoard 10s of thousands of patents which they enforce through 1 of 1300 subsidiary companies and larger companies like Microsoft, Samsung, HTC, etc. can pay a monthly or yearly membership fee to IV in order to "lessen the chance of being sued by IV or one of the child companies".

Of course it is cheaper for all of them to pay their membership fees and IV enforces this behavior by violently attacking anyone that decides they don't want to pay up.

There is an implied threat[2] to not playing along.

(this isn't me postulating, the "When Patents Attack" piece covers this).

In turn, investors step in and invest billions into IV to get a cut of the growing patent market, like I might invest in a fund.

I understand financial and legal systems are complex, but what IV has created seems to me to be this dystopian-esque octopus of circular self-leveraging that is designed to be impossible to untangle.

[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/w...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extortion