"who's only commercialization of their technology is to sue other people"
There's a very good reason for this behavior:
If you are a small company that sells a product, enforcing a patent related to this product is nearly impossible. If you try to enforce your patent your opponent will present ten other patents related to your own product and destroy your company.
For big players this is typically not an issue, because they often exchange patents with each other - and thereby also prevent new players from entering the market.
But for small companies the only viable approach in regard to patents is to sell your granted patents to other companies (instead of enforcing them yourself). And it's very obvious why the companies buying the patents are so unpopular amongst the big players: As these companies don't have any products on their own, they can't be extorted when trying to enforce a patent.
Disclaimer: Personally I'm against any patent laws because I think that patents just hinder innovation. But I don't see any reason to blame companies that play by the market's rules (especially when your own company supports those rules).
The problem here is that the reason they are suing nearly 400 companies is as a tactic against Google and Microsoft. Essentially the patent covers looking up in a database items that have geographic information associated with them, and displaying the results on a map.
They think Google maps and Bing maps violate this. They also know that if they sued either of those two, neither would not be interested in settling and buying a license. Either of them would go ahead and mount a vigorous defense, and very likely destroy the patent.
So, instead of suing Google and Microsoft, who they know would destroy their bogus patent, they are going after companies that use Google maps or Bing maps, such as companies that have a "store locator" on their web site that will show you where nearby stores are located.
Their hope is that those nearly 400 companies will all put pressure on Google and Microsoft to make the suits quickly go away, and that Google and Microsoft will respond by just going ahead and licensing the patent since that is quicker than getting it invalidated.
I don't get you. So you're ok with the companies doing that, but not ok with the laws which allow them to? Normally, I'd say that some both things are a problem. How can you say X is bad, but doing X is ok, since the law allows it? That just sounds like hypocrisy to me...
I think the post is saying that patent trolls provide something like a way for small companies to outsource their patent enforcement, which arguably levels the playing field a bit, but not as much as patent reform would. (sounds reasonable to me)
It's a common industry term, describing a patent holder who's only commercialization of their technology is to sue other people.
If you don't like how the industry describes this behaviour I suggest you find a new industry as we're always coming up with names like that.