Slashdot Mirror
Startup Seeks To Preempt Patent Trolls
anaesthetica writes "The WSJ reports that a San Francisco startup is buying up patents with the promise never to assert them in order to help large corporations hedge against patent trolling firms. The company, RPX Corp, receives an annual fee in exchange for licensing the patents it has purchased. Cisco and IBM have already signed up for this service of 'defense patent aggregation.'"
By being one..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Company buys up all other patent trolls, seeks funds from major companies while saying "we don't use them against you (if you pay us), honest!"
News at 11.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Interesting business plan, I wonder if they patented it.
So they buy up patents that are most likely to cover the technologies already employed by firms, and then offer to the firms to pay a license fee for which in exchange they receive a guarantee that they will not be sued for infringement? That's a novel idea.
While the patent trolls state "I'm going to burn your store down!", these guys clearly say "It's a mighty fine store you have there, I can protect it from being burnt down for only a small fee".
1. Buy patents to prevent patent trolls
2. Charge a small fee to companies
3. Get more patents
4. Increase the fee cost once companies are hooked
5. ????
6. profit
What prevents this startup from suing someone that doesn't pay?
Legalized "patent-squatting"? Are we serious?
And IBM signing up? Didn't the rest of us concede they won the race for most patents about 74,273 applications ago?
Won't this just encourage patent trolls?
I better go RTFA, coz from the intro it sure sounds like a patent troll itself.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
seriously.
What's to stop them from turning around and blackmailing these huge companies once they've amassed all these patents?
They must be getting a really nice chunk of change.
-
Does anyone else see this as a harbinger for another legal quagmire in the future, or am I just trying to get karma by using big words?
Your brain is not a computer.
"New startup makes it easier and standard practice to legitimize the practice of patent trolling."
Just fix the damn system already!
As I see it, patent pools like this turn patent law against the patent trolls in much the same way that the GNU General Public License and other copyleft licenses turn copyright law against some publishers of proprietary software.
IBM and Cisco must be new here, or just online in general...
Do NOT Feed the Trolls.
If they "won't assert their claims" then why do you need to buy a license from them?
A contract, such as the purchase of a patent, requires some sort of consideration in order to be binding. This consideration could be a token amount such as one dollar, or (more likely in this case) it could be only as much money as is needed to maintain the patent pool.
If you've read Accelerando by Charles Stross the occupation of Manfred Macx the novel's protagonist does exactly what this company does. Stross terms this a Venture Alturist. He goes a step further with his character, whom not only sits on patents so the trolls can't get at 'em, but spends time alot of time furiously dreaming ideas and patenting them.
But really this is a bit "Honestly officer, I picked it up before someone stole it."
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Plot^H^H^H^H History:
1. Government develops the concept of patents to protect the little, lone creator from amoral, robber industries - because even in groups, the creators have no defense against amoral industries. Government protection against business.
2. Developments soar - we're beyond the end-of-day-almost-off-air programming of the 60s that warned one day technology would double every year - technology doubles faster than we can measure.
3. Characters arise to be lionized and demonized in the tech age. They are given primary credit - in the mass mind (including on /.) - for their companies' successes and failures. Creation still in the hands of individuals, despite mass mindset.
4. Charlatans seize upon the opportunity, start trolling patents like crazy. It gets out of hand.
5. A business develops the patent-license-protection-clearinghouse to protect the large, rich businesses from the amoral, robber trolls' abuse of the law - because even in groups, corporations have no protection against the amoral trolls. Business protection against government.
If I invoke the name of Calculon does it help illustrate the point? It's a multi-year-long plot, very boring, very circular, and I'm calling it: Days of Our Patents.
I don't know about you guys, but I signed up decades ago to be a part of this thing called tech - not to become a forced extra in some asinine soap opera - which I fear we are all going to become part of, like it or not, know it or not.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
The best and cheapest defense against patent trolls is defensive publication.
IBM patented this last year. Maybe you can patent ignoring prior art when filling for a patent.
The irony here is laughable.
Intellectual Ventures started this way and now are supertrolls, RPX is refugees from there and *must* inevitably go the same way. A license to patent A is not a license to patent B, so this concept just plain won't work and RPX knows it. It's just plain deception - it's like paying off the mafia when everyone knows the tongs and yakuza are waiting on the step for their cut.
*Any* business based solely on patents is pure overhead for the rest of us. Overhead of the patent system, I mean. The fact that you can have a growth business of just dealing with patents and nothing else means that the overhead of the patent system itself grows over time. At some point the overhead costs more than the benefit that we get from the system! Don't get me started on insurance companies, lawyers, bankers and brokers either. Each system has players that are pure overhead, and increasingly so.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
I think our patent system has truly gotten out of control when companies start doing stuff like this.
Assuming this company is on the hook for all legal costs/suites regarding said patents. It sounds a bit like outsourcing patent and associated legal costs, without all of the bad connotations that go with the word 'consulting' anyway ;)
This is not being done for free. Someone is making money off of it. It takes cash to buy patents. Ergo someone is also paying money for this. Anyone care to guess who?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I think I'll start doing that as soon as I buy a Macy's Bohemian Grove T-shirt and support Bush/Obama/Clinton/McCain by waving that pretend fallen-stripe anti-American flag that has the gold fringes not applicable in Title IV USCode.
In other words, never! I'll burn myself before I ever become a patent troll. However, a patent Troll is somthing different from a Patent troll that everyone wanted me to be.
...is that if patent trolls wanted money instead of patents, they would have just kept their money. I doubt they would sell patents at a loss or even at marginal gain, so the acquisition process would be quite expensive. We would effectively be giving patent trolls an additional revenue stream, i.e., they can profit by litigation AND resale, thus giving them even more money to spend on...
guess what? MORE bunk software patents!
Isn't this, like, the same thing... only cheaper?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
We're sorry to interrupt your usage of this fine product, but we really really need to reach our goal of $1,000,000 in revenue this quarter. You know you use the product, so why not give? And if you contribute now, we'll send you a nice shiny mug!
If this isn't a wakeup call to Congress that our patent system is entirely and completely broken, I don't know what is.
Probably the only voices left saying that patents are OK belong to certain ''well funded'' politicians.
...and how long will it last? Now and again even a troll can strike patent gold.
What you do is you have them sign a contract. The contract says thing like "You can never sue us." When you buy a company, you buy their obligations too. You don't get to say "Oh look, we are a new company so we can just ignore the contracts." Nope, you bought all that as well.
Remember: If you could get out of a contract with a sale, people could do this with houses. For example I buy a house, I sell it to you for a dollar. I then don't pay the mortgage. The bank comes to repossess the house and you say "It's my house, you can't take it, the contract is void because of the sale." No, not the case actually. Turns out if that mortgage isn't paid off, the bank gets to take the house (this is what title insurance is for, in case the sale is invalid). You can't just eliminate the contract like that.
So all companies have to do is make sure when they sell patents, it is done with a good contract. Then if a company buys it out, well then they'll be bound by the contracts too.
It seems like a good compromise between patent producers and the tech driven corporations. Patent producers are compensated for their research investment by a centralized fund while tech corporations are protected from unforeseen litigation or expensive patent searches. As long as there is some kind of fiduciary control on the centralized corporation and anti trust laws don't get in the way, then I believe that we have a market plugin to patch a problem in the patent system. The only ones who lose are the lawyers. . . so I doubt a certain legal-representative cartel will approve of it. Expect legislation against such market innovation in the name of economic stability.
From TFA:
The company, called RPX Corp., buys up patents to keep them from firms that might use them as the basis of lawsuits or to press for licensing payments. Companies that pay a fixed annual fee receive licenses to the patents purchased by RPX...
(emphasis mine)
So they'll buy patents and try to sell you licenses to them, in order to prevent other firms from buying patents to try to sell you licenses to them?
Sounds to me like the only difference between this company and the nasty patent trolls is that they've embraced the One-Bill business model, a la Verizon. I wonder if that's patented...
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Now you can increase you convenience by making all your patent licensing payments to one consolidated patent troll, RPX Corp. Convenient drive thru window coming soon...
In other words, RPX don't need to assert patents themselves, they are leaving it up to their members/licensees to do so if a nonmember company is suing.
Is this better than a patent troll? If nothing else, it's probably a cheaper patent troll. Now, this is the kind of stuff that companies have been doing internally for a long time; this is just outsourcing.
To defend against a patent being used to interfere with invention, you have to release the patent into the public domain. Doing that eliminates the artificial government monopoly, forever, for everyone.
If you don't do that, if you keep the patent, and license it to select licensees, you are using your patent to interfere with everyone else.
Therefore, there is absolutely no difference between these new patent holders and "patent trolls". Including big IT corps paying their extortion.
--
make install -not war
I don't get it. If you have a patent that you don't want anyone to ever assert, simply forget to pay the fees and let it go abandoned, or torpedo it in one of many countless ways. If you have an invention that you don't want anyone to assert patent rights against, publish it and every conceivable variation, working or not.
Maybe I'm missing something..
But at least it's an answer.
It's the wrong answer because even though on one end it relieves the pressure from bullshit patents, on the other end it encourages bullshit patents by buying them up.
We are better off letting legislation and court judgments takes their courses. Recently, a judge made a decision that effectively invalidates most "process" patents of recent years, and would make it much more difficult to get them in the future.
See Subject.
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
Intellectual ventures(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures) does the same thing? I am sure they would have patented (or at least applied for one) the business model!!
This is creepily similar to defense against the dark arts? Snape, are you there?
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs