Black hats and white hats in the patent law system
SUMMARY: Within patent law and the patent litigation system, there are good ways and bad ways to make use of the rules and laws that have been set forth for us to follow. Many patent practitioners and patent litigation attorneys follow these rules to further technology and to protect the rights of inventors via their patented inventions. In the analogy of white hats and black hats (terms used in the information security / hacker communities), people who do good by the law would be considered white hats.
However, within the patent litigation system, there are also black hats, namely venture capital companies, inventors, and attorneys who seek to harm others by writing, enforcing, and suing on patents where the protection does not cover the technologies these often non-practicing entities (NPE's) hope to target through the patents they assert. This causes havoc by overburdening the court systems with frivolous lawsuits, by devaluing patents already in existence, and by causing inventors to sell their patents to those who wish to profit and do harm with them. Often this results in the inventor making only a fraction of what she is entitled to, and the NPE's taking the majority of profits by suing or licensing on a technology they did not invent.
