According to Section 284 of the Patent Act, for infringement are supposed to be compensatory. The statute only allows for recovery of damages adequate to compensate for the Even though it qualifies that such must be no event less than a reasonable royalty, this language cannot be read to avoid the fundamental requirement that, as compensatory damages, any recovery must stem from actual harm suffered by the owner. Absent proof of actual harm, only nominal should be recoverable. Yet patentees who suffer no actual harm are regularly obtaining considerable amounts of money from alleged infringers as purported reasonable damages. This state of affairs reveals a need to correct the course that law has taken.The most prominent group of owners receiving windfalls instead of compensatory are assertion entities (PAEs), also known as patent trolls. While there are other situations where patentees are not actually harmed by instances of infringement, PAEs' business models and theories best highlight how existing law is being misread and exploited to support widespread overcompensation for infringement. PAEs are exclusively in the business of assertion, seeking to license their patents via actual or threatened litigation. They make and sell no products or services themselves, having no capacity or infrastructure to do so, nor do they partner with technology companies to develop and bring their patented products or services to market. Having no actual or prospective direct or indirect market participation relating to the technology, PAEs suffer no pecuniary loss from infringement — they are no worse off than they would be if the infringement had never occurred. PAEs are only legally harmed, not actually harmed, by infringement.The business model of PAEs is lucrative because of the erroneous assumption that substantial reasonable must be awarded for any infringement. The statutory language allowing for no event less than a reasonable royalty has been twisted and expanded, especially by PAEs in recent years, far beyond its strictly compensatory origin. PAEs emphasize improper restitutional facts instead of compensatory ones to unduly inflate their supposed — i.e., they focus on the benefits to the infringer instead of the harm to themselves. They also draw analogies to common law trespass principles to suggest that, just as a trespass interferes with a landowner’s use of real property, substantial are owed to patentees merely because they own the and the was infringed. When properly examined, however, these common law principles reveal that the analogy would support only nominal for such legally harmful but actually harmless trespasses. Nothing in the legislative history of the reasonable statute suggests that a reasonable was required to be a substantial sum. With no evidence that Congress intended a reasonable to be substantial or have a special meaning, under the plain meaning of the statutory text a should be deemed reasonable simply when it constitutes sensible and fair compensatory relief. This allows for case-by-case findings of actual without artificial legal constructs that distort the meaning of Section 284. Under this fresh reading of the statute, owners who suffer no actual harm from infringement would be entitled to recover nominal only. In some cases, such as those brought by PAEs, a nominal is reasonable.