The fuzziness of software patents’ boundaries has already turned the ICT industry into one colossal turf war. The expanding reach of IP has introduced more and more possibilities for opportunistic litigation (suing to make a buck). In the US, two-thirds of all patent law suits are currently over software, with 2015 seeing more patent lawsuits filed than any other year before. Of the high-tech cases, more than 88% involved non-practicing entities (NPEs). These include two charmlessly evolving species who’s entire business model is lawsuits—patent trolls and sample trolls. These are corporations that don’t actually create anything, they simply acquire a library of intellectual property rights and then litigate to earn profits (and because legal expenses are millions of dollars, their targets usually highly motivated to settle out of court). And the patent trolls are most common back in the troubled realm of software. The estimated wealth loss in the US alone is $500,000,000,000 (that’s a lot of zeros).