You want to be careful with the "produce no products" bit - you'd stomp on entities like ARM that don't actually fabricate chips, but create and license designs.
Problem is, coming up with a definition of "patent troll" that's 100% objective and can reliably differentiate between a benevolent NPE like ARM and a group of snakes like VirnetX is tricky. Too strict and you'll have some awful false positives. Too vague and you're reduced to arguing it in court, something prohibitively expensive.
IMHO The patent laws should be amended to require entities to both "articulate a solution" and "add value" to make the patent valid.
For ARM (as a NPE) their patent licenses are bundled with a low-power processor core design that provides a solution to licensees requirements. The core design adds value to the basic technology covered by the patent.
The VirnetX patents shouldn't be valid as they merely describe an element of a design, and not a particular means of implementation. This may fall under Sec. 112(f) "Means-plus-function" [0], but getting the patents invalidated is not easy.
The EFF have tried to bust "stupid patents" [1] somewhat successfully. Please donate to support this worthy cause.
That's already governed under trade secret and copyright law. Their design itself would be protected the second it became a published work. Anyone could clean-slate the implementation themselves doing their own work on that. So, this is where patent law protects them as it prevents others from building something they described in detail. Aka, protects monopolistic business practices in chip industry. :)
> Problem is, coming up with a definition of "patent troll" that's 100% objective and can reliably differentiate between a benevolent NPE like ARM
From what I can tell, ARM started 30+ years ago and sold physical chips. I am missing when they morphed into mainly selling chip designs - and how were they able to make such a transition without the publicity of lawsuits.
Problem is, coming up with a definition of "patent troll" that's 100% objective and can reliably differentiate between a benevolent NPE like ARM and a group of snakes like VirnetX is tricky. Too strict and you'll have some awful false positives. Too vague and you're reduced to arguing it in court, something prohibitively expensive.