Most discussion of patent trolls happens in the abstract — cost statistics, statutory citations, policy white papers. The Patent Scam doesn't do that. The documentary puts cameras in front of the people on the receiving end and lets them describe what's happening to them.
Watch The Patent Scam on YouTube →
What it is
The Patent Scam is a feature-length documentary directed by Austin Meyer, creator of the X-Plane flight simulator. Meyer made the film after his own company was sued by a non-practicing entity — an experience that turned him from a working developer into one of the more vocal critics of patent assertion in tech.
The documentary follows the patent-troll problem through real defendants — small businesses, individual inventors, and recognizable companies — getting targeted by shell-LLC plaintiffs operating out of P.O. boxes in places like Marshall, Texas.
Why it matters
The economic mechanics behind patent trolling are well-documented in academic and legal literature, including our own deep-dive on how patent trolls operate. But most defendants don't really believe the mechanics until they see other defendants describing them out loud.
The Patent Scam is the visceral version. Some of what the film covers:
- What a six-figure demand letter does to a small company that has never seen a lawyer.
- Engineers describing patents that read on basic features they shipped before the patent was filed.
- The math that pushes companies to settle for $50,000-$200,000 even when the patent is plainly invalid — because fighting costs more.
- The litigation tactics that turn an already-expensive defense into an existential one.
The film features interviews with technology executives, attorneys, patent-reform advocates, and academics. It's been credited as one of the catalysts for the wave of post-2017 attention on the patent-troll problem.
How to watch
The documentary was originally released in 2017 with limited theatrical distribution. It's now available free on YouTube:
Watch The Patent Scam on YouTube →
Run time is roughly an hour and a half. Worth the time even if you have no reason to think you'll be a defendant — patent assertions cross every industry, and the asymmetry the documentary depicts only operates when targets are caught flat-footed.
What to do after watching
If the documentary lands and you want to go deeper:
- What is a patent troll? — definition, NPE/PAE terminology, and the broader industry survey.
- How patent trolls operate — corporate structure, patent acquisition pipeline, assertion campaign mechanics, defensive aggregators, and what's changed since the film came out.
- What to do if you get a demand letter — the practical playbook for the first 48 hours after one of these lands on your desk.
- Browse the patent database for AI-generated invalidity dossiers, or add a patent we haven't covered yet.
A note on the title
"Patent scam" is the documentary's framing, not a legal characterization. As our footer disclaimer notes, not every patent litigant is a troll — many patent holders enforce legitimately to protect real products and research. The film's subject is the specific abuse the term "patent troll" describes: shell-LLC NPEs acquiring vague patents and using litigation cost asymmetry to extract settlements regardless of merit.
Bottom line
The Patent Scam is the most accessible piece of journalism on the patent-troll problem. If you've never been on the receiving end of an NPE assertion, the documentary makes the asymmetry visceral in a way that statistics never will. If you have been, it's confirmation you weren't imagining things.
This article is for general education and is not legal advice. Documentary content reflects the views of its filmmakers; we link to it because it accurately depicts the patent-assertion dynamics this site exists to address.