Patent Trolls: Make Them Pay

> Well, for starters, imagine a legal organization with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank. How many trolls would dare risk going up against them?

Uniloc[1] have gone up against Microsoft in an 8 year case. That's pretty significant.

The Wikipedia entry for patent troll[3] mentions a few companies, and who they went up against. (Techsearch vs Intel; Forgent Networks against 60 companies using JPEG (collecting over $100million from 30 of those companies before prior art made the patents invalid); RIM paid $625million (Canadian or US?) to NTP inc; MercExchange vs Ebay with damages at $30million but some secret deal worked out later.

It feels like these people won't care about the legal fund.

[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniloc#Patent_lawsuits)

[2] (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-05/microsoft-settles-f...)

[3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_trolls)

It is not ridiculous. But it does not solve the problem. It plays right into the problem. What you are describing is already done, and has been done for many years, in one form or another, between corporations e.g. in the semiconductor industry with patent pools and cross-licensing; but it is not a matter of discussion in web forums. The reason why this stuff is now discussed in web forums is because this sort of protectionist racket is now reaching beyond a circumspect group of companies and is touching the free software world.

The solution as any informed but objective observer can tell you lies in taking away the power to sue - the junk patents which give people the right to sue for frivolous i.e. overly broad patent claims - and taking away the financial incentives - high fees by patent offices, high fees by patent lawyers and even the court fees - one could imagine E.D. Texas must thankful for all the patent troll business all stemming from the issuance of junk software patents. Stop issuing these junk patents. We deliberately opened the door for these in the not too distant past and we can also close it.

Needless to say, there is a fair bit of capital moving through the business method patent racket. That's why it's difficult to shut it down. We need to have junk software patent trolling declared as a class of white collar crime and then get some Giuliani-style prosecutors to come in and clean this mess up. I'm joking but you get the idea. It's not easy to stop this machine.

Creating another protectionist "insurance" scheme is not the answer. The perceived need for something like that is a symptom of the problem itself. The risk should not exist to begin with.

Think about it. What would happen if they were cheap?

Anyone could amass a large portfolio. We could all block each other's every move. No one would have any leverage.

But the second question you have to ask is what does it cost to sue? What if that were cheap?

Hollywood has precisely this model, setting up a corporation for each film made that somehow always ends up making a big loss, all the while paying massive fees to studios setting it up in the first place.

One thing we can be sure of is that patent trolls will adjust their business models and practise far quicker than Congress does anything.

The correct fix is to stop granting so many patents. Each one granted should answer yes to "would this have taken about 20 years or more to happen otherwise". They could also have special patent courts which could ensure consistency in the actual "justice" that is happening.

There is no need for elaborate laws to address the issue of patents for software and business methods. Nor a lawyer witch hunt. Nor some giant protection scheme like those mentioned in other comments.

The Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate patents. Everybody interested in solving this problem should ignore the half measures and demand the elimination of software and business method patents entirely. Other solutions will undoubtedly be gamed and the problem will persist.