Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

A public good is a good which, if it is provisioned, is available to all regardless of how much they contributed to its provisioning. There are many, many examples of public goods, but I'll use clean air as an example.

The problem with public goods is that it is only in your personal interest to contribute to the extent that you personally reap the reward from your contribution. So, for example, catalytic converters cost about $1500. If you live in a city, you personally benefit more than $1500 in life quality from the fact that everyone around you has a catalytic converter. But if your catalytic converter goes, you don't benefit $1500 from YOUR catalytic converter. And so almost nobody would, without some other motivation, bother spending $1500 on a catalytic converter.

And yet, public goods do get provisioned. Here are the basic ways.

1. A single large entity benefits enough from the good to provision it for everyone else, who gets to free ride. The book calls this, the exploitation of the large by the small. If ever you see someone arguing that some big country or company should do something nice for everyone, they're hoping for this.

2. A small group combined can provision it. This usually results in complex negotiations, cheating, and so on as each tries to do the minimum necessary. The history of negotiations within OPEC on controlling the supply of oil is a good example.

3. A fundamentally coercive organization which exists for some other reason can ensure the provisioning of it. For my catalytic converter example, that is the government. If you fail to have a $1500 catalytic converter, the government will take steps up to and including putting you in jail.

4. People seem willing to put a small amount of energy out for a good cause. For example a lot of people are willing to put the energy out to vote, even though your personal vote is unlikely to swing any election in your lifetime. Some people are willing to put a lot of energy out.

5. The good may wind up provisioned for some other reason. For example open source software is a public good, which programmers voluntarily create and maintain for a wide variety of reasons. But very few programmers are creating it out of some notion of acting to maximize the common good.

But that is a very short take with very few examples. The book is quite readable and offers a lot more on all of this.

Really good idea to bring it to yc - they know how much legal fights like these have cost across all of the cohorts.

And obviously they would pitch it internally to all existing + future startups.

Maybe this is what ends this garbage once and for all?

> don’t want to give up the possibility of using strategic patent suits themselves

This is a highly under-appreciated aspect of the patent world. Companies that buy and own lots of patents do so defensively. Big companies even enter into patent cross-licensing agreements with each other, where they basically say "I know you probably infringe on my patents and I probably infringe on yours, but we'll make a deal and indemnify each other". But they want to maintain those patents to harass upstart companies that would threaten their core business, so when the trolls come along, they just pay to license and move on.

One of the few examples of a big company fighting patent trolls is Intuit vs encryption patent trolls, of all things. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/intuit-beats-web...

Yep happened to me. The parent company was an e-cigarette business and they use the profits to buy random patents that have nothing to do with their core business. It was like getting a shakedown call from a mobster.

To George and the comma.ai team, thank you.