IV was explicitly founded as a patent troll. I find their processes so nefarious that I avoid talking to their employees when I run into them at conferences.
I don’t know anything about IV or their business practices, but it sounds like in this case they are funding research in order to patent useful inventions that they could then presumably license to manufacturers. Doesn’t sound like patent trolling.
IV always had a few things like this, google mosquito laser. It always seemed like they wanted enough that a few people wouldn't think they're trolls, but they're trolls.
Huh?! Your description basically accuses many universities and VCs for being patent trolls, as they develop / fund and then licence technology, but don’t productivise it...
Patent trolling is a red herring - just a form of economic specialization. Selling your patents to a troll or hiring an attorney to enforce them for you are just different labels for the same transaction.
It's just that, in software anyway, many more things are patentable than ought to be. And arguably the whole concept behind patent law has proved unnecessary necessary in our field - "good" actors deduplicate efforts and share mutually beneficial IP via the open source community.
Someone in software using the patent system at all is probably acting in bad faith, or else building a moat to defend themselves from bad-faith actors.
