The U.S. Supreme Court issued three decisions on the morning of April 29th. One of these, the one that got all the press, concerned certain air-pollution rules by the EPA. The rules survived a challenge from the affected utilities. The other two involved the fee-shifting provision of the Patent Act. It seems to me that these decisions address the trolling problem in patent law. In preparing to write this blog entry I discovered that I have never yet used the word "troll" in a patent-law context in the history of Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed . I'm happy to remedy that defect now. Troll, troll, troll. In the precursor to this blog, Pragmatism Refreshed , I used the word often, as here for example, or here. Anyway, in patent-law circles a "troll" is a person or entity that collects patents without operational intention. The only reason to hold these patents at all is to engage in or threaten litigation over them. That is, to some of us, a suffici...