What we did when a patent troll asked for our help

You definitely showed all of us that your moral compass is tightly bound to the law. Instead of telling this despicable customer to leave, you gave him the grand tour.

Your blog post could have been an explanation of your reasoning and moral outrage, making you look better while providing transparency for your customers to trust.

The content of the post was not at all what I expected.

The funny thing about principles is they're easy to have when they're not being tested. For example:

"'I really don’t want this guy’s money,' Tyler said at one point. We’re glad not to have it."

That's a lot easier to say when the offer of money is no longer on the table. I'm not sure at what point that was actually said, but in the article it comes after giving this guy a demo of the system, making genuine recommendations about his entire process, and doing actual customization work for the guy.

Patent trolling aside, using the law of the land to justify going against your personal conscience is a horrible idea.

Reading the OP carefully, it is clear there are a lot of implications that can be derived from choosing to limit service outside of what the law requires.

As a thought experiment: Suppose Oracle and Google show up and want the service. Oracle is known to be an aggressive company with respect to business and so the company denies Oracle... but accepts Google since Google is friendlier. Does Oracle have grounds for suing ? I don't know. IANAL. But if I was in their position, I would be concerned until I consulted a lawyer.

What about other entities: political parties you disagree with? activist groups you disagree with? businesses who have unsavoury practices?

Put anther way, what can you legally say 'no' to, and what will get you sued for denying them?

If you can provide a straightfoward notice "no patent trolls" (enforceable in court), does that insulate you?

Again, I don't know. But it would give me pause to ponder if (when?) I am in the position of providing services.

--- more thoughts---

If you take the onus of determining who is moral onto your shoulders, you take responsibility for the inevitable screwup. And with that, you ensure that you will be arbitrary when you notice that one entity is an exception to your existing rules. You have to modify the rules, and that angers people (notice Blizzard's forums anytime changes come

Where the line? Where the exceptions? How to handle it? out!) This is a scaling problem.

Can you get away with not overthinking it and simply kicking the odiousness to the curb and hope that the scaling problem won't manifest?

We received an email from the user outlining their entire business. They weren't the most extreme example of a patent troll (where you can't even tell what company it is) but they didn't seem to have any real products, and their use of the CRM would be entirely for managing the victims of their lawsuits.

This is kind of the point of the post though. We hated the idea of letting this person use our software, but is it really our place to make those decisions? Things are rarely black and white.

Having said that, I'm really glad this guy didn't stick around.

To be clear, we tell customers all the time that they shouldn't use our software. Each customer is worth $10/month, so it's not worth having people on the system that don't belong. This wasn't about the money at all, it was about the precedent it would set. How do we convince our other users that they can trust us if we're arbitrarily booting users because we disagree with them.