A Consortium Against Patent Trolls?

well, not a consortium per se, but a start-up.

RPX Corp, has been launched for helping companies to deal with patent risks. More precisely, the start-up will acquire patents to avoid them from being used by the bad guys. In order to benefit from the pool of patents, a membership fee must be paid to the start-up.

The membership fee is between $35,000 to $4.9 millions and IBM and Cisco Systems are already members.

According to their website, the start-up has already over 150 patents and 60 patent applications.

Links of Interest:
Wall Street Journal
TechFlash