Good practice: why the NPE model can help all businesses

Non-practising entities (NPEs) have acquired, alongside their patent portfolios, an unwanted reputation in the past few years. The assumption seems to be that there is something at best slightly uncouth, and at worst immoral in some way, about the notion of a company that owns patents but does not ‘use’ them to produce things. Of course, many companies that ‘practise’ patents also maintain lots of patents that they don’t use to develop products or technologies, but that fact can sometimes get lost amid talk of trolls and nuisance litigation.