
History Will Remember Obama as the Great Slayer of Patent Trolls - tim333
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/03/obama-legacy-patent-trolls/
======
anatoly
History will remember Obama as the weak President who did nothing to stop
Russia from destroying the one principle that held the world back from
territorial wars ever since WWII.

As we enter the new era of land grabs and might-makes-right, history shall
record that what the American President did to stop it was order travel bans
on a few minor flunkeys.

~~~
waqf
Sorry, what was the one principle? The US certainly didn't stop randomly
invading countries after WWII.

~~~
anatoly
The principle of territorial integrity, enshrined among other things in
Chapter 1 of the UN Charter.

The US didn't stop invading, and neither did the USSR. But the one principle
was that waging war for territorial gain is no longer acceptable.

After WWII, the major countries understood that while it's impossible to
completely outlaw war - states will find real or imagined reasons to attack
each other - if we agree to freeze borders, most of the motivation for waging
war will go away.

And it worked. After 1945, no developed country started a war against a
peaceful neighbour to perform a land grab. The very few exceptions where
annexations did happen were in the context of pre-existing state of war, and
even so were not recognized by the international community (e.g. the Golan
Heights).

But actually invading a country which doesn't threaten you and annexing part
of its territory? Didn't happen after 1945.

Until 2014. Welcome to the new era.

~~~
jusben1369
Russia "gave" Crimea to Ukraine well after WWII. The majority of Crimeans are
Russian. Putin is defintely taking a leaf out of Hitler's play book but it's
more like "Khrushchev gave it and Putin took it back"

~~~
anatoly
Russia and Ukraine weren't sovereign states when it happened. It's not
relevant to the international principle I'm talking about.

It's true that the majority of Crimeans are Russian, but the majority of
people in Sudetenland were Germans, too.

The whole point of territorial integrity is that state boundaries are frozen
to prevent territorial wars, _even if_ they don't happen to coincide exactly
with ethnic boundaries (they never do).

If there's no threat of territorial land-grabs, there's no motivation for the
sovereign power to do ethnic cleansing. In Crimea, for example, Russians were
and remained the majority since Ukraine declared independence in 1991. Ukraine
never tried to settle a huge mass of Ukrainians in Crimea, or induce Crimean
Russians to move out. In the bright new world we've now arrived at, states
will be very motivated to "smooth out" their populations by ethnicity, so that
neighboring powers don't invade and annex lands with "their people".

The 19th and 20th centuries were rife with such ethnic cleansings and mass
resettlements; ever since the fallout of WWII we had very few. Not anymore.

~~~
dllthomas
_" If there's no threat of territorial land-grabs, there's no motivation for
the sovereign power to do ethnic cleansing."_

There's _less_ motivation. If power is (or might be) democratically
controlled, and issues are divided along ethnic lines, then there remains
motivation.

Still an important point, though.

------
rayiner
> “If you are asserting a patent against people who have never heard of your
> technology and they never embodied it in commercial product, or otherwise
> you have no real reason to think they copied you,” he says. “And if you’re
> doing that, and your patent isn’t something that is very specific, and is in
> general vague, that is a pretty clear sign that you are a patent troll.”

This is really the gist of it.

~~~
talmand
To be honest, I don't fully understand this quote.

In the first sentence, he seems to be saying a patent troll might be suing
someone who has never heard of the troll's technology and they haven't
produced a commercial product. The "they" in that sentence seems to imply he
is speaking of the one being sued. If they, meaning the party being sued, has
not created a commercial product that infringes on the troll's technology, it
begs the question of why are they being sued?

Plus, a patent doesn't have to vague for it to be considered part of a patent
troll. It can be a very clear and precise patent on something so glaringly
obvious that no one else bothered to patent it because a normal thinking
person wouldn't think it should be granted in the first place.

~~~
rayiner
The first sentence doesn't say the company being sued hasn't produced a
commercial product, but rather hasn't embodied the invention described in the
plaintiff's patents in a commercial product. I.e. they have a commercial
product, but have no reason to believe it incorporates anyone else's
invention.

> It can be a very clear and precise patent on something so glaringly obvious
> that no one else bothered to patent it because a normal thinking person
> wouldn't think it should be granted in the first place.

In practice this is a lesser problem, because a very clear and precise patent
on something really obvious will be quite easy to invalidate using prior art.
It's not free to defend such suits, but cheap enough where a nuisance
settlement isn't particularly attractive. It's the vague patents that aren't
clearly applicable to your particular problem domain that are the greatest
concern, because litigating the meaning of those patents can be very
expensive.

~~~
talmand
Well, I'm still confused.

Company A has a patent, Company B has a product that doesn't use said patent,
Company A sues Company B anyway?

Or are you saying that Company B has a product that they think is original by
having never seen the patent beforehand?

I'm just getting stuck on the idea of being in a patent lawsuit over a
product, or no product I guess, that doesn't involve the company being sued
for the patent in question.

As for the second point, a clear and precise patent on something obvious would
be easy to use. You simply offer to settle and/or license cheaper than it
would be to fight it in court, pushing the idea that invalidation is not easy
and not common. It would pay off if you think of the long tail.

The vague patents are for going after the big targets.

------
stuaxo
He will be remembered for being the first black president, remarkable in his
unremarkableness and continuation of the status quo.

------
pge
Only if he is successful.

While personally, I am of the mind that software patents should be eliminated
entirely, the concept of patents appears in the constitution[1], which makes
it very hard to make substantive changes, and there are a lot of people
aligned to keep current laws in place. If you fundamentally believe that an
idea on its own that has not been instantiated in a product has value (which
is a basic concept of patents), then trolls are very hard to eliminate. What
if an inventor sells his patent to a lawyer in order to monetize it (his
protected right) because he lacks the resources to litigate himself? Then is
that lawyer a troll, or just an enforcer of the inventor's right?

It's easy to say we are trying to eliminate trolls, but it's hard to draw a
black and white distinction between trolls and legitimate plaintiffs if you
fundamentally believe that an idea without a product has value, and that
concept is in the constitution (or at least,the constitution has been
interpreted that way to date).

[1] Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8

------
dm2
There is a long way to go to fix patents.

[http://stks.freshpatents.com/AAPL-sym.php](http://stks.freshpatents.com/AAPL-
sym.php)

No matter what happens with Obama it couldn't be worse than what Romney would
have done.

~~~
wernercd
At least Romney knows how to run a business - which is more than can be said
of a Community Activist.

Obama is going to go down as the worst President in history. Staggering debt,
destruction of the Health Care industry, "Common Core", Benghazi, lies,
corruption, etc.

I doubt Romney would have put the country in the mess it is now.

Hope & Change my ass...

------
not_paul_graham
If we really are making statements predicting how future generations will
remember a current figure:

"History will remember Obama for being the First African American President of
the United States", will supersede any other statement in the long run
(50-100+ years).

~~~
jerf
Even that assumes the perpetuation of certain modern attitudes that I don't
feel comfortable confidently asserting into the future. Perhaps race won't
matter in 100 years, and people will hardly think to notice. Perhaps after the
first AI President of the United States, the mere question of _race_ won't be
seen as worth mentioning, next to the more pressing question of _species_...
the future is a foreign country, more foreign than anything currently in the
world.

~~~
Pxtl
Even if race doesn't matter in 100 years, historians will still mark its
importance in the development of the United States (and every other country in
the world). Even _with_ a post-racial future, Obama's most significant feature
will be that he represented a tremendous milestone in America's racial issues.

~~~
ronaldx
I find this doubtful.

Up to now, Margaret Thatcher is not primarily remembered for being female, a
comparable and unmatched milestone. She is remembered more for what she
achieved in office (for good or for bad).

The changes that allowed America to have its first black president did not
happen on the day of the election in 2008, nor during Obama's time in office.
To suggest that he will be remembered for this is to suggest that he has done
nothing of historical note.

~~~
gambiting
We are used to seeing females as leaders though - as with your example, UK has
a QUEEN, so having a female PM while unprecedented, is not that surprising.
And we've had queens leading entire countries centuries before. However, a
black person chosen as president in a country which just 40 years earlier had
racial segregation? That's really surprising and a massive development.

~~~
ronaldx
Two words: Nelson Mandela.

------
josteink
While he himself is using Apple-products? I say not.

~~~
happyscrappy
A patent troll is a person or company who enforces patent rights against
accused infringers in an attempt to collect licensing fees, but does not
manufacture products or supply services based upon the patents in question.

~~~
talmand
What if they produce products on some of their patents and sue based on the
others?

~~~
rsynnott
That'd be a grey area, but doesn't really apply to Apple anyway.

~~~
talmand
I think it applies to both Apple and Microsoft.

Likely applies to a number of large international corporations.

------
midas007
If we're gonna be fair and balanced, let's not forget targeted assassinations.
See also: works by Jeremy Scahill

------
exratione
History is long.

Long after the time in which anyone can easily recall who was US president in
2014, or what party was in power, or which wars of declining empire were
fought, and then long after anyone even cares about that ancient history, and
later, long after the whole downward slope of the history of the US is but a
footnote of interest to scholars of the transition from second to third
millennium, and later still, long after anyone can even find out with any
great reliability who was US president in 2014 ... long after all these things
are forgotten, the first half of the 21st century will still be clearly
recalled as the dawn of the biotech and data era, the coming of age of
medicine and computing.

Progress in science and technology is really the only thing that matters in
the long term. Everything else is just fiddling cultural details. How much do
you know or care about the legal disputes of Ur?

