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Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

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Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

#151
post #90

There needs to be an anti-patent-troll membership organization. You pay a fee relative to some metric and the organization acts as insurance against parent trolls by fully defending any patent lawsuits that are obviously unjustified. And to keep costs low, membership in this organization would be public to deter patent trolls from even trying to sue a member in the first place.

I was sent this the other day. Haven’t had a chance to dig deeper. Free for companies under $10M in revenue? (If I remember).

https://lotnet.com/sem/

Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Run the numbers: Assuming you need a legal staff of 20 with avg cost 500k per. So that’s 10 million per year. Double it for rent, SGA, etc. we’re at 20 million per year. Offer a protection package at 10k per year, you need 2000 paying customers. Since all the lawyers are on staff, you can have them invalidating patents when not defending case. If you structure it like a mutual insurance company, you could return a po…

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?

I think $10k/yr is fairly reasonable even for startups. However, a lot of these trolls go after small businesses, don’t they?

Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

#154
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been Newegg's strategy forever... https://www.newegg.com/insider/newegg-vs-patent-trolls-when-...

Old Newegg. That lawyer has moved on along with the rest of the leadership after a change in ownership. Also George Hotz fought and cowed Sony’s legal team when he was a kid in a saga involving ‘marcan42 of Asahi Linux. These patent trolls must be very foolish to try to intimidate him. Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_...

What a wild story. Complete with diss track towards Sony[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUvuaChDEg

Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

#155
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, for someone his age that’s essentially a victory if it doesn’t involve any payments or criminal repercussions. In theory, marcan42 would have been subject to a very similar or same settlement but he went on to continue working on Sony stuff without repercussion: “In 2016, he ported Linux to the PlayStation 4 and demonstrated that at the 33rd Chaos Communication Congress by running Steam inside Linux.”…

There was no chance he would’ve ended up with any of the things you mention.

I don't know? Gary Bowser (canadian citizen) was deported to the US due to lawsuit and sentenced to 40 months in prison recently.

"Conspiracy to Circumvent Technological Measures and to Traffic in Circumvention Devices", and "Trafficking in Circumvention Devices" were two charges

Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

#157
post #90

There needs to be an anti-patent-troll membership organization. You pay a fee relative to some metric and the organization acts as insurance against parent trolls by fully defending any patent lawsuits that are obviously unjustified. And to keep costs low, membership in this organization would be public to deter patent trolls from even trying to sue a member in the first place.

I think that Intellectual Ventures started out as a defense against patent trolls, but after gathering enough of a patent portfolio, they started playing offense in a way that looks like patent trolling.

The important thing to know is that they did so because the economics of defensive aggregation were insufficient to return capital to the investors.

Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

#158
post #90

There needs to be an anti-patent-troll membership organization. You pay a fee relative to some metric and the organization acts as insurance against parent trolls by fully defending any patent lawsuits that are obviously unjustified. And to keep costs low, membership in this organization would be public to deter patent trolls from even trying to sue a member in the first place.

The Japanese video game industry does this in an ad-hoc way.

Smaller game studios ask bigger companies, like Nintendo, to register some patents in their stead so the bigger companies can keep them safe with their elite team of lawyers. The bigger companies like Nintendo in turn gatekeep the patents from trolls and abusers, letting the industry at-large use the patents for a greater good while suing anyone who doesn't play nice into oblivion.

It's not perfect, and it certainly only works because businesses in Japanese society generally view each other as friendly rivals rather than outright enemies, but it's an ingenius solution to a legitimate social problem.

Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

#159

The OP has a weirdly expansive/detailed Wikipedia page.

geohot is a known powerful hacker.

Yeah but Idk why a factoid about his SoundCloud profile is on there. Not relevant and reads like he wrote it himself.
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