Battling the Patent Trolls

opus writes "There's an interesting series of articles at law.com on the current situation in patent law, which has become "a money-minting machine for a few patent holders". Includes an article on Peter Detkin, counsel at Intel, who spends much of his time battling patent infringement claims against Intel, and who coined the term "patent troll". Apparently it's not just the geeks who are unhappy with the current state of affairs in patent law."

Comments

Good to see big companies complaining

[Paul Johnson]

Its good to see that the big companies are being hurt by this. In the past they could use cross-licensing agreements to tie up whole areas of technology for themselves and shut out new companies. (Cross licensing, BTW, is where A says to B "I'll let you use all my patents if you let me use all yours, and since your pile of patents is smaller than mine you can pay me $$$ to make up the difference". Never mind the quality, feel the width!)

But the threat of an injunction which stops production for a year or so whilst the lawyers fight it out in court is a gun to the head of these companies. So we have what amounts to a protection racket: pay up or be put out of business. At the moment the fees are tolerable, but this kind of thing has a way of growing exponentially as more people catch on to the idea of easy money. Once patent trolls start making a measurable dent in the bottom line you can bet that these companies are going to start complaining to their tame congresscritters.

(Not that I've got anything against large companies in themselves: some things just really do need a large organisation to make happen. But I've noticed that getting something done is just so much easier when you have the president of a large company backing you)

Paul.