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Trolling for patents
Microsoft calling for limit on patent rights? Who would have thought...? And it's not just Microsoft: several multinational technology companies have been lobbying to limit "patent trolls" - small companies that buy up patents and then use them to extort money from the big guys. These outfits don't actually produce anything; they collect patents strictly to file lawsuits. When a company starts making something similar to a patent they own, they file suit and demand payment.
The trolls described in this case are rather unsympathetic characters. Before getting into the patent business, one guy helped steal cars. The verdict sucked -- the trolls won (at least temporarily) -- but I confess to finding a certain poetry in the fact that the plaintiff is a thief.
Posted by Carrie McLaren on 09/22/2005 | Permalink
Comments
I work for a high tech software company, which I won't mention, but we recently had a discussion on getting patents on our products, which is a company goal. It is an expensive process with each patent costing on the order of $1 million. Our use of these patents is similar to Microsoft's, not to go after possible infringers, but to protect ourselves.
There is a cogent body of thought which suggests that software patents should not be allowed. There are significant differences between hardware and software, and better writers than I have made the case clearly and with great force.
I had a personal experience with this working for a small software company in the mid 90s. We applied for a patent in the network gaming area. It was neither original nor particularly non-trivial but applying for a patent made good business sense as it made the company appear more valuable. At the time a patent search brought up about a dozen network related software patents. These fell clearly into 2 groups. One group used extremely obfuscated language to describe utterly trivial ideas, while the other used clear language to describe small improvements to certain nitch areas. An example of the first, when boiled down to understandable language, was when adding computers to a network game, you would assign unique numbers to each computer, perhaps assigning 1 to the first, and 2 to the second, using a counter, for instance which you incremented so they were unique. In my opinion, none of the patents were for ideas that an intelligent programmer could not have come up with on their own when needing to create this kind of feature. This is by definition, trivial. I'm not saying there are not clever ideas in software which are
non-trivial, but they are few and far between.
This really all happened because of Reagan gutting the US Patent office so there weren't enough software savvy examiners. The EFF (Electronic Freedom Foundation) and others have been putting together documents of prior art just to keep trivial and well known ideas from being patented. This is a clear case where a few pennies on the dollar spent by government in the appropriate place at the appropriate time would save billions of dollars in the market place and huge quantities of everyone's time. I'm sure Reagan did it to give larger corporations an advantage, and it some ways it probably does, but in the long run, these kinds of things just backfire and are now costing us all.
Posted by: David Barbour | Oct 18, 2005 1:14:26 PM
