On the most recent episode of This American Life, NPR's Laura Sydell and Planet Money co-host and This American Life producer Alex Blumberg spent the entire hour exploring the lucrative practice of "patent trolling." While On the Media has discussed "copyright trolling," a much less successful analogue of patent trolling, we were fascinated by this story, and how this practice could potentially be stifling the creation of new technologies. We asked Alex a couple questions about what patent trolling is, and the difficulties of reporting a story that had the potential to be...well, incredibly boring.

This May, we weighed the merits of Apple's curated app store against the Android's big tent model, and what each meant for the future of free speech, but David-Michel Davies, Executive Director of the Webby Awards, suspects that this dichotomy might be a moot point.  Instead, he offers a third option that has been hiding in plain sight.