Why Rackspace Is Suing The Most Notorious Patent Troll In America

GO RACKSPACE!!!

No, I am not overlooking that fact. A "real" patent is simply a document that says you were granted one. It says nothing about the quality of the patent or the merit of it at all. I have read through hundreds and hundreds of patents over the years. I can say that the vast majority of them have been gut-wrenching bullshit patents. Yes, yes, an attorney will argue that there are subtleties to the claims that make them unique and patentable. I'm sorry, an engineer knows the real meaning of obvious. Lawyers and the patent examination process obviously don't. For example, the infamous patents on using PWM to modulate LED intensity in order to mix RGB LEDs and create various colors. Utter bullshit. None of them should have been granted. Not one of them. Read them all.

So yes, patent trolls have real patents. That does not mean they are real inventions that were deserving of a patent.

My point is that I would hit NPE's with bullshit patents as hard as possible if they stick their heads out of the sand. If they know you are backed by a multi-billion dollar legal fund with a mandate to invalidate bullshit patents they will only stick their heads out when they have real patents for real inventions. And, you know what, at that point I don't mind. Real invention can be laborious and risky at many levels. And, being that technology has advanced so far, real invention is harder and harder every day because engineering and other disciplines continue to advance.

Practicing or not, if you have a real patent covering a real, no-bullshit real, invention, then that's different. Trolls with bullshit inventions that should have never been granted deserve to have the sewers of Los Angeles dumped into their breakfast each and every morning for the rest of their lives. Since we can't do that, attack them with a multi-billion dollar legal organization that mercilessly goes after their IP assets and seeks nothing less than invalidation.

To me "not obvious to those skilled in the art" means something that has been lost from the process for a long, long time. We need to restore that. The problem is, government will likely take decades to do so, if ever. They can't even pass a damn budget or keep us out of bullshit wars. Now you want them to modify the entire patent system? Right.

The only solution I see is some form of massive legal threat that unifies companies against trolls. It can perhaps go beyond that (some kind of reasonable cross-licensing mechanism between members, etc.). I don't know. Regrettably we need lawyers to craft some of the finer points of something like this.

As an engineer this is incredibly frustrating. I see it as a bunch of lawyers and government bureaucrats fucking with our ability to innovate. I want to create and I want to create with absolute freedom. I want to be a fee man. We are not free at all these days.

I went fishing with my kids today. I had to pay a $50 license fee to be able to go fishing. I have to pay the government for permission to fish. If I needed to fish to feed my family the government could arrest me and fine me further for not having paid them a fee. Luckily I don't need to fish to feed my family. But it is almost surreal to think that the most fundamental act of man, to feed yourself in order to remain alive, requires a license fee paid to government or risk being incarcerated.

Yes, yes, I know about conservation and all of that. The point is that no government agency should be able to get in the way of a person feeding themselves and their family. If that is not a fundamental law of the universe I don't know what could be.

Not the same subject, I know, but it is one of those surreal things to help point out that government actions can have really bad unintended consequences. When it comes to the way patents are being grated what this means is that I am not free to use my brain to create and invent.

If I was completely isolated from society after graduating from college and independently "invented" the idea of sliding a graphical button on a screen I could be sued because I did not apply for a patent. The fact that, as a human being, I can put one idea together with another to create a third idea is being grotesquely violated by bullshit government-grated monopolies. That, is wrong.

That is as much wrong as having to pay the government a license to be able to feed myself or my family. Outside of being able to hunt and forage for food --something every species on this planet does without the need for government authorization and fees-- the one fundamental evolutionary trait that has gotten us here is that we can INVENT. And invent we have. Gloriously. For hundreds of thousands of years. Only now this thing we call government has actually come up with a way to take that from us, regulate it and even have others prevent us from using the fruits of our own mental abilities if they use theirs to come up with the same thing before us.

Have we really evolved?

It looks like they are taking a different approach to the problem (though the bill still hasn't passed yet):

> The next legislative effort will likely center around what is known as the SHIELD Act, which has been introduced by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) and Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). This bill would require plaintiffs to pay defendants’ legal costs if the suit is unsuccessful. -- http://www.rackspace.com/blog/patent-trolls-make-them-pay/

While this is a less drastic strategy, I think it's a more realistic one. It would have an immediate, deterrent effect on all trolls--big and small--because there would be direct, legal repercussion for their actions. This way, you don't need new infrastructure and new funding to support a watchdog group, and nobody can "slip through the cracks"--trolls paying for all the costs of a failed suit is just part of the system they are using to file the suits. This may not prevent the "big players" from throwing their weight around with patent litigation, but it would certainly help the current situation quite a bit, imo.

Here's the relevant text of the bill:

> [I]n an action disputing the validity or alleging the infringement of a computer hardware or software patent, upon making a determination that the party alleging the infringement of the patent did not have a reasonable likelihood of succeeding, the court may award the recovery of full costs to the prevailing party, including reasonable attorney's fees [...] -- http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr6245ih/pdf/BILLS-112...

[EDIT: Link to bill wasn't including the trailing colon ':', linked to PDF]

This will just cause the trolls to set up one shell corp per suit. If they lose, they just declare bankruptcy and vanish.

There needs to be a personal, professional cost to the attorney who represents the troll. Trolling doesn't work if you can't find a lawyer willing to take the risk on your bogus "on teh interwebs" patent.

"something like 90% of them were found to be bogus. But this was after dozens of OEMs were extorted into licensing these dodgy patents"

No, what happens is

Most of the company directors/managers doesn't know much about patents. They think it's a magical thing and that if MS is saying that we violate them it's better to pay them because MS invented computers or something.

I'm not making this up.

So then came B&N that apparently knows a bit more about patents and call their BS.