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The Patent Mafia and What You Can Do To Break It Up
colinneagle sends this quote from an article about the ever-growing patent racket in the tech industry:
"The lawsuits are raging all across the tech world. Oracle sues Google, Yahoo sues Facebook, they counter-sue. Others threaten, others buy more patents and the circle goes round and round. Don't be fooled by the lawsuits between these tech titans though. The real cost that the patent mafia extracts from the tech world is on the smaller companies who can't afford to battle the Apples and Microsofts of the world. Their choices are far simpler. They can abandon their innovations or they can choose to pay and allow the Mafiosos to wet their beaks. Also, don't be fooled about who the real losers are here. The the real losers are you and me. ... So what do do? Here is my opinion. I would make it just as expensive for the offensive patent prosecutors. Just as the government put in the RICO act to combat organized crime, I would put a similar law in place on patents. RICO calls for treble damages. I would have treble awards of costs and legal fees. If a patent holder sues another entity for patent violation and that suit fails, the plaintiff who brought the suit should pay treble damages to the defendant. Three times what the defendant paid to defend."
Very good idea. Another problem that nobody seem to notice is that the patent system is the wrong way arround. In normal criminal cases it is up to the prosecution to prove that the defendant perpetrated a crime. Inocent until proven guilty.
The patent system works the other way around it is up to the defendant to prove that they have not violated a patent. Guilty until proven innocent.
Do not really make sense to me. How about you ?
No, it's not. If I'm a small business with 25k in debt to start up and another 50k in debt to finance my new patent on my new product and then Microsoft sues me for violating their patent I can either capitulate and be out a minimum of 75k as my business disappears or fight with nearly no money to finance my operation.
Microsoft, on the other hand, can pay 5M to its lawyers to crush me.
If, somehow, I win my legal fees back I get to wait through round after round of appeals, have lost months if not years of product sales due to the injunction in place on me and have, in the meantime, defaulted on all my debts, losing my business. Yeah, not quite fair.
Scenario: a "little guy" gets a patent. A "big guy" violates it. The little guy takes the big guy to court, and the big guy throws an entire legal department at the little guy, and essentially buys the result. The little guy then has to pay treble damages of the expenses of that great big huge legal department, and goes out of business because of the punitive award. As part of the punitive award as the little guy goes under, the ownership of the little guy's patent then goes to the big guy.
Want a patent held by a little guy? Willfully violate it, then bleed the little guy dry with protracted court proceedings. You'll get the patent through bankruptcy. And if the little guy doesn't defend his patent... free IP!
Think it through. "Automatic" damages means you create a system that can easily be gamed by armies of lawyers far better at manipulating the system they crafted than you, and ties the hands of the judge to prevent it.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Many patent trolls are in fact nimble upstarts.
The answer is much simpler. Get rid of business process and software patents. They are proving to be a detriment to the software industry.
- Limit all patents to 5 years
- Abolish UI/Gesture and all software patents
- Abolish lifeform and seed patents.
Its worse. Microsoft steals your work, you sue them, they spend 1M to crush you, and under Submitter's plan you would pay treble damages.
No, the only plan I can come up with is to sell your patent to a troll with cash reserves in exchange for something like 10% of their winnings if they successfully sue MS. Lunacy like that is where we are headed, the blood sucking lawyers will make sure of it.
I guess he didn't pitch it in a way that you'd get the joke.
Sounds like you're settling an old score