Patent troll that wants $1,000 per worker gets sued by Vermont A-G

Late last year, a vigorous and secretive patent troll began sending out thousands of letters to small businesses all around the country, insisting that they owed between $900 and $1,200 per worker just for using scanners. The brazen patent-trolling scheme, carried out by a company called MPHJ technologies and dozens of shell companies with six-letter names, has caught the attention of politicians.

But Vermont investigators were able to get additional information not available to defense lawyers (or journalists). For instance, they discovered that there were forty different shell companies sending out the letters, all under the control of MPHJ.

Patent trolling is a well-established business that's been around in its modern form for more than a decade and has been accepted as legitimate by federal courts.