@gnufreex A patent troll is a company that harvests other people's patents, typically ones that were misfiled or patents the owners can't afford to defend, and then uses this portfolio to hoover money from companies who don't do due diligence. The patent troll company doesn't actually *create* anything - they just litigate.
Allen's company actually does research and files patents on its own inventions. That's entirely normal practice and almost any tech company does it.
So, no, Interval Research is *not* a patent trolling company.
That being said, there is a serious question as to whether this is a reasonable use of patents. Personally, I don't think it is. Patents weren't intented to be a means to profit on their own - they were meant to protect an actual product, which is why originally patents had to be associated with a physical implementation.
This is why software patents as they exist (or much worse, business process patents) are a terrible idea and why most of the world hasn't bought into them.
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