Champerty and Other Common Law We Could Use Today

pevans writes "Over on Red Hat's Opensource.com I found this neat summary of a few old laws that could really help us today with the patent trolls. The article 'What's wrong with champerty?' is brief, but full of legal goodness that seems to have fallen by the wayside: 'Let's bring back barratry, maintenance, and champerty for patent lawsuits. Combine that with a limitation on the assignment of patents and a lot of patent trolls would be out of business. ...do patents have to be freely assignable? And why can't we prohibit a cause of action for patent infringement where there is no net gain to society?"

Comments

Did I hear "net gain to society"?

[Ihlosi]

And why can't we prohibit a cause of action for patent infringement where there is no net gain to society?

What are you, some kind of communist?

Re:Lets not pussyfoot around

[BitZtream]

I agree, copyright and patents are immoral, thats why I have no problem including GPL code in my closed source projects ...

Okay okay, back to reality ...

I think you need to go figure out what immoral means.