Red Hat CEO On Patent Trolls: Just Pay Them Off

jbrodkin writes "Although Red Hat fights patent lawsuits when it deems it necessary, CEO Jim Whitehurst says it's often just better to pay the trolls to make them go away. 'When it's so little money, at some point, bluntly, it's better to settle than fight these things out,' Whitehurst said. Red Hat has been forced to pay out claims to the likes of FireStar Software and Acacia, and Whitehurst indicated Red Hat has paid off various other companies behind closed doors. 'Some of them are [public] but we often seal them in settlement,' he said."

Comments

The real harm's individuals and SMEs

[ciaran_o_riordan]

The discussion of software patents focusses way too much on court cases and big companies.

Companies have all sorts of expenses, and trolls is another. Some companies (particularly big ones) can afford that.

The real harm is when standards are ruined, or whole fiels (ex: video), or when SMEs and small developers are forced to stop distributing their software (or when they don't even start, since they know it would be doomed).

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/More_than_trolls

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Harm_to_standards_and_compatibility

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Audio-video_patents

Re:This is

[sqlrob]

He just told trolls "Come and get it!", how is that maximizing value?

How do you get this stupid?

[rudy_wayne]

Seriously. Does he really not understand that paying the troll only serves to perpetuate the troll and results in everyone having to continually pay out extortion settlements.

WTF?

Re:This is

[Twinbee]

Only to those cases where there's a a hint of honest IP defense. Standard troll crap gets fought (and presumably thrown out). I quote:

"When we feel like people are really abusing the patent regimen, and we have a good case that the patent is invalid, that it should never have been issued, it's not a patentable thing, or there's a lot of prior art, then we fight those out," Whitehurst said during an interview with Network World at this week's Red Hat Summit in Boston.