Making money the old-fashioned way: Suing the doers

In news that should come as no surprise, but somehow still does, here's an article from MSNBC detailing the activities of "patent trollers" like Forgent Technologies.

Rather than actually, you know, produce something, these characters file and buy patents on rather mundane things like the JPEG digital picture compression format and wireless email. Then, they turn around and sue the companies who utilize these things to produce valuable goods and services like digital cameras and Blackberries.

While legal in every sense of the word, this kind of activity is, to me, the worst kind of parasitic existence. It's scumbags like Forgent who slow technical advances and make goods and services more expensive than they should be. While there's no real recourse against these bottom-dwellers, all we can do is shine the light on them and, hopefully, make them squirm a bit.