The rise of copyright trolls

I'm surprised that the most obvious solution has not been suggested. GPL compliance. In fact, the whole point of the GPL appears to have been forgotten in the article.

The analogy with patent trolls only goes so far and is potentially misleading. If you infringe on a patent, you have absolutely no way around it: you have to buy a licence etc. With the GPL you have a real possibility of coming into compliance. If you plan for it, there is no risk and no real cost. If that's not practical now, things have been left to rot for too long.

I think I'm in favour of more legal compliance action. I agree that it would be somewhat unfair to pick off small final customers in the supply chain, but that would still feed back up to the suppliers real quick, and their customers might have some legal recourse against them.