What does it have anything to do with taxes or any of that other stuff? If you have two corporate entities that merge, the merged entity can be considered the original assignee of all of the patents that each of the merging entities was. It's not a complicated rule. But it keeps trolls from setting up "mergers" to falsify their status as an "inventor or original assignee," because it's all or nothing. You couldn't transfer any subset of the selling entity's original patents to anyone else and still call them original patents.
Here, we can make it even more simple. Forget about mergers. You can transfer a patent for which you are the inventor or original assignee to another party and have that party be considered the original assignee if and only if you transfer every such patent you own to that party.
>There's nothing wrong with companies that buy IP and do nothing but licence it; that's how an efficient market in IP is likely to operate.
So say the patent trolls. It reminds me of what the high frequency traders say about liquidity: Even if it could theoretically be true under some set of artificial constraints, in practice the cost of allowing it pretty clearly exceeds the supposed efficiency benefits.
>The problem is with the frivolousness/obviousness of the original patents.
The problem is that software patents anyone is likely to infringe are inherently frivolous/obvious, because the lack of physical constraints causes there to be a million good ways to do any given thing in software, so (putting aside standards-essential patents that constitute their own special brand of unintended consequences), the only way you get a software patent that anyone else will ever infringe is to abstract the so-called invention out so far that it covers all plausible implementations rather than only the specific one that you're supposed to have invented.
The patent system wasn't designed for software. They're not compatible with one another. The proper solution is to eliminate software patents. But if we can't do that today then putting as many sensible limits on the amount of economic damage they can cause in the meantime will have to suffice.
