Fighting trolls sounds like something straight out of “Lord of the Rings”, but it’s become an unfortunately side effect of all the technological advances that have been made.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the tech giants Cisco, Google, Verizon and HP are working together and with other firms to form the Allied Security Trust.

The purpose of this group will be to purchase intellectual property assets before they can be purchased by patent-holding firms. The cost for each company to join the trust will be roughly $250,000 to join the trust and will each deposit $5 million into a joint pool to purchase future patents for the trust.

Both the tech and telecom industries have both been plagued in recent years by several patent suits filed by patent-holding companies that do not actually produce any of the technology whose rights they own - also referred to as “Trolls” because they “troll” for developments and get patents on technologies years before the technology is even remotely ready to come to market. Then they can file suits against the actual developers of the technology for “infringing” on their patent.

The most prominent such case involved a patent-holding company named NTP that successfully sued BlackBerry maker Research in Motion for infringing upon its patents for e-mail-to-mobile device technology, something everyone with a Blackberry uses.

After getting a $612-million-dollar settlement from Research in Motiion, NTP sued Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA for infringing upon five of the same patents.

You can see how this trust will stop a lot of this activity and protect the larger corporations from troll-based lawsuits. The winners in the end will be us - the consumers because we won’t have to pay the added costs to cover the litigation in our product purchases!