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.'"

Comments

Could we call it the General Patent License?

[tepples]

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.

Re:Preempt them

[rudeboy1]

I see where this is going...
  Company buys up billions of dollars worth of IP (cheaply, due to the business concept), promising never to use it.
  Company gets bought out, at a reasonable price considering all they own, since they're "not really the IP owners".
  New company decides it's not bound by previous company's ethics, decides to call in the lawyers for the billions of dollars worth of IP.
  New company litigates the living shit out of everyone.
  New company buys out other companies using the money won from being sued for using their own IP.
  New company now owns 50.1% of the world.

Can someone verify the whereabouts of Pinky and The Brain please? I'm getting a little nervous.