
Life for a startup on the receiving end of a patent law suit - changdizzle
http://pandodaily.com/2013/07/19/for-whom-the-bell-trolls-life-for-a-startup-on-the-receiving-end-of-a-patent-law-suit/
======
noonespecial
_“You’ll stay in business and license from us, or you’ll go out of business,”
he told him over the phone. “Either way is fine with me.”_

There are villains in this world. They used to hide beside the road and beat
then rob travellers. Later they rode around in rusty pickups with ak's killing
and robbing villagers. Their weapons change but their tactics don't. The
measure of civilization is how we choose to deal with them. I'm afraid they'll
always be with us. It all comes down to where our sense of justice meets our
apathy.

~~~
ereckers
"There are villains in this world. They used to hide beside the road and beat
then rob travellers."

Nah. They've always been lawyers.

------
slowdown
I have an LLC (US), but this is one of the blunders I've made and I plan on
dissolving it soon. There are many reasons to my answer, here are some:

The problem with a US based LLC is that you open up free access to thousands
of patent trolls waiting to eat your hard earned money. This isn't a problem
if you can afford a decent Lawyer for $5000-15000, but for businesses like
mine, which are bootstrapped, it's totally unaffordable.

Well funded startups usually have a separate legal department to resolve these
issues, but when you're running a startup totally from your own pocket, it
becomes extremely hard and annoying. I was wondering for a solution until a
very good friend of mine suggested me something nice.

If you set up a company somewhere in India (or some other popular, Start-up
friendly developing country), these patent trolls have little access to you in
terms of licensing, etc. Usually a patent troll will send you a legal letter
threatening you about violation of some kind of absurd technology patent, etc.
But, when you start up elsewhere, these become nulled[1]. Meaning, they can't
touch you. Worse-case scenario, even if someone DID sue you, the lawyers are
really cheap in such developing countries. We're talking about price ranges of
$50-1000. And for $500 bucks you can get some really nice lawyers to get the
job done.

There's also a LOT of start-up friendly exemptions for companies in such
developing countries simply because they don't have enough of them and they
want more people to start up.

So, even though these countries are often referred to as 'third worlds', they
are really good places to start up. If you know of anyone wanting to start up
from those countries, you should probably team up with them as their co-
founder and that should be good enough.

Of course, all this assuming that you aren't interested in seeking funding and
you want a bootstrapped start up. But then, if you are seeking funding, you'll
probably have enough cash to afford a $5000 lawyer anyway.

One potential issue you may find running a startup from a developing country
is the access to decent payment gateways. But then, if you don't mind sharing
an extra 1% with the gateway provider, you can probably use someone like
skrill.

~~~
rfctr
Samsung was in South Korea. Apple blocked Samsung's sales in US based on
patent issues.

It doesn't matter where you're located. What matters where you want to do
business.

~~~
studentrob
Blocking business seems like an unusual step, or at least we rarely hear about
it in the news. Is there any precedent for a patent case successfully blocking
a business whose service is all on a website? If so, what happened? Did they
simply take over the domain? What if a business used a foreign owned domain?

I feel like there are options here that may not have been tried. Presumably a
patent troll could try to tell your payment service and US based servers not
to do business with you, but I haven't heard of that either, aside from credit
card companies blocking Wikileaks and the US govt seizing servers suspected of
hosting illegal stuff. I forgot why the US govt seized servers in VA a few
years back but the point is that is pretty unusual too and I wonder how far a
patent troll would go or how difficult it would be for them to get through all
that.

The only way China blocks Facebook, for example, is through a massive
firewall, and their businesses generally don't accept any foreign credit
cards. The US seems unlikely to put in a huge firewall or modify DNSs to go
after small businesses for patent trolls..

~~~
rfctr
Wikileaks blockade is a good example of the power that can be used when
parties fail to come to an agreement.

Most companies though prefer to settle out of court because the court is quite
a gambling, that's why we do not hear it more often.

~~~
studentrob
Wikileaks is based in Sweden and was seen as threatening by the US govt.

Companies that settle out of court are, from what I have read, small to medium
sized US based companies that can face legal action if they do nothing.

What I am talking about is a small company that is foreign based in a place
that does not comply with US patents. Has there been one that has ignored US
patents and been shut down by having their domain blocked or their US payments
disallowed?

~~~
rfctr
In other words, is being small & poor a good defense against trolls? Yes, it
is.

Try to get bigger though or get a investment round, and troll will come after
you.

It is not a coincidence that the company in the article's got trolls about the
same time it's got an investment.

------
csense
Maybe we should set up a tradition of patent-busting bounties.

Some third-party trust or nonprofit or somesuch, so you no longer have control
of the money and the patent troll can't force you to give the money to them to
pay a judgment against you. 2% - 10% of your contribution can be used for
their general expenses, the other 90% - 98% can only be given to a party who
gets a specific patent invalidated, which you specify when you donate.

So when the troll tells you that Patent #1234567 is being infringed by your
company and you need to pay $100k a year or they'll sue you, you can roll over
if it's your own best decision from a risk/reward perspective -- but you can
also make a one-time donation of $100k, or whatever you can afford, to the
'567 bounty pool.

The troll extorts ten companies, suddenly there's a million-dollar reward for
somebody to take them out, and it changes the risk-reward equation for the
companies and lawyers involved (especially if companies are investor-backed
and aren't the sole source of income for the majority of their owners.)

I suggested this a while ago [1] and it got a lot of upvotes.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5126551](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5126551)

------
zalzane
Lately my group of friends have been discussing the most underhanded ways to
get PAE's to bugger off. Nothing serious, but it's interesting to think about
how one of these PAE lawyers would react if you told him his daughter's name
and the school she goes to.

It kinda surprises me that none of these extortion cases have escalated to
that sort of thing. When someone puts 5-10 years of sweat, blood and tears
into a company, it would surprise me if there wasn't a single example in the
country where one of those entrepreneurs reacted violently to this kind of
extortion racket.

~~~
rfctr
> how one of these PAE lawyers would react if you told him his daughter's name
> and the school she goes to

They would make sure you're behind bars in no time.

~~~
pkinsky
What if 'you' are an anonymous remailer service account and a bitcoin address?
It would be amusing if patent trolling got bad enough to force startups to
operate on the black market.

After all, what's the ROI on legitimacy if the state can't protect you from
banditry?

~~~
rfctr
What if his daughter really got killed or raped?

~~~
pkinsky
<sociopath>Other patent assertion entities would be inspired to think
carefully about targeting entities subscribing to our protection
service.</sociopath>

~~~
rfctr
I dunno how it is in US, but in other places all kinds of shady businesses are
protected by organized crime. Try to harass their businesses and jokes may end
pretty quick.

------
pjdorrell
I think the concept of "patent troll" is doing us more harm than good. The
implication of this expression is that the badness is in the "trollish"
aspect, and not in the "patent" aspect of it.

Patent trolls are what happens when the patent system is taken to its logical
conclusion. So if patent trolls are evil, then the patent system itself is
evil.

The fact that some or even many patent holders _aren't_ evil is beside the
point.

Imagine, for example, that there was a law which gave husbands permission to
rape their wives. Presumably only _some_ husbands would take advantage of this
law. So one might conclude that the law isn't bad, it's just that society has
to find some way to deal with those bad husbands, the so-called "marital sex
trolls", who take advantage of such a law.

And the bad husbands would say something like: "Morally, I think husbands
deserve some reward for the benefits that they bring to a marriage."

------
wheaties
Regardless of the kinds of reform we would like to see, the fact that America
still considers software nothing like "math" or prose will continue to allow
these types of litigators to press for a long, long time. Zombie debt
collectors are a seedy yet still thriving business model praying on the weak
and gullible. That is the route these trolls will take as well.

------
tsenkov
Algorithms shouldn't be patented; UI components/metaphors shouldn't be
patented; Anything potentially leading to monopolism shouldn't be patented;
Monopolists should get their patents revoked.

This is my opinion.

~~~
clavalle
The point of a patent is a state sanctioned monopoly.

------
Spearchucker
What's stopping anyone threatened like this from closing shop, and re-opening
in another country under different ownership or some backhanded deal where the
victim retains a chance of an income?

------
Mikeb85
Come to Canada.

Here mathematical algorithms cannot be patented, nor can anything 'obvious'.
While it is possible to patent software here, realistically you can't really
do it, and the legal system is kind to defendants if someone is brave enough
to sue you.

The patent system in the US looks ridiculous to anyone outside the US...

------
jborden13
They say "you haven't made it in business until somebody sues you." This is
the type of shit that keeps me up at night...

------
phillro
We need aggressive patent reform to stop this. A good start would be
contacting your representatives and signing this letter.

[http://devsbuild.it/patent-reform-letter](http://devsbuild.it/patent-reform-
letter)

------
chenster
Would it be safe to move the company outside of US where patent troll cannot
reach in legal jurisdiction?

~~~
rfctr
You can move the company. But as long as you make sales in US, you can be
blocked from doing business.

~~~
chenster
How would they exactly block you from doing business? Unless you have a
physical presence, if all your transcations take place online, how would it be
different from doing in the US and outside?

~~~
bcoates
Customs will seize your domain name without warning or following any
particular legal process. [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/08/members-
congress-deman...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/08/members-congress-
demand-answers-homeland-securitys-unjust-domain-name-seizures)

~~~
studentrob
I don't see anything in that article about the domain being seized as a result
of a patent lawsuit.

Let's assume that's happened before anyway..

What if you use a foreign domain name?

What are the non-US based methods of receiving payment online?

Are there any viable foreign servers that are fast enough to service the US
but whose country does not have patent agreements with the US?

------
thinkcomp
As much as patent trolls are an enormous problem, they are not the only
villains in this story. The others are of course the lawyers and the courts.

Let's say that you received a summons in the mail informing you that your
startup was being sued. First of all, why are you receiving it in the mail?
Why can't the Secretary of State ask for your e-mail address (as some do) and
actually use it for service of process? (Answer: because the courts aren't
even sure they want to allow a technology as sophisticated as Certified Mail
to be permitted for service of process, let alone fax. E-mail? You must be
joking.)

Once you get the summons, assuming you can even understand what it means, what
do you do? Look up the case on-line? Probably not. That would require you to
have a PACER account, which costs money beyond $15.00 per quarter in fake-page
access at $0.10 per fake-page. It would also require you to know how to
navigate the system, which isn't particularly easy. Assuming that you could,
and could understand the legal documents, you might be able to learn a lot
right there.

Instead, what most people would do is pay a lawyer to handle all of this for
them, at anywhere from $300 to $600 per hour. But what does lawyering really
involve? Copying and pasting from Microsoft Word templates, turning Word files
into PDFs, attesting to obvious things ("I have caused this envelope to be
placed in the mail as of this date") and occasionally reading a similar case
to cite. But mostly it's not that difficult. There are definitely aspects that
require skill and logical thinking. That's maybe 5% of the work.

So why are we paying $300 to $600 per hour for highly indebted people to do
things that computers could? Because the courts won't let computers into the
picture. They won't even let companies represent themselves through their
founders, even though Citizens United guarantees corporate freedom of speech
(everywhere except inside the courtroom, apparently). If they did allow
technology to enter the picture, handling a patent infringement assertion
might actually be fairly trivial--something you could do in a few minutes on a
web form--and at worst, as annoying as calling customer service.

The USPTO isn't blameless either. For more on that you can look at some slides
from a presentation I gave at the USPTO Software Patent Round Table in
February, 2013.

Slides
[http://www.aarongreenspan.com/technology/20130212.softwarepa...](http://www.aarongreenspan.com/technology/20130212.softwarepatents.pdf)

Video
[http://helix-1.uspto.gov/asxgen/20130212_SoftwarePartnership...](http://helix-1.uspto.gov/asxgen/20130212_SoftwarePartnershipStanford_Part2.wmv)

~~~
rayiner
> That would require you to have a PACER account, which costs money beyond
> $15.00 per quarter in fake-page access at $0.10 per fake-page

Patent law is federal law, and nearly all the relevant federal opinions are
available for free online. I do think it is problematic, in principle, that
very small corporations cannot represent themselves pro-se. That said, pro-se
litigants are an enormous burden on courts because they have no idea what
they're doing. A federal judge will have hundreds of cases on her plate at any
given time. They need litigants to get in, make their case, and get out.

> But what does lawyering really involve? Copying and pasting from Microsoft
> Word templates, turning Word files into PDFs, attesting to obvious things
> ("I have caused this envelope to be placed in the mail as of this date") and
> occasionally reading a similar case to cite.

My mom thinks that programming just involves "typing things into the
computer." What you're describing is paralegals' work if not secretarial work.
Most of lawyer's work involves researching case law, writing memos and briefs,
doing factual investigation, interviewing witnesses, taking depositions, etc.
Clients are sophisticated. They're not paying $500/hour lawyers to turn Word
documents into PDF's, not when you can get droves of bar-admitted lawyers to
work for $20/hour on Craigslist.

> Because the courts won't let computers into the picture.

Invent a computer program that can apply the law to the specific facts of a
case and generate a helpful brief and we'll talk. In reality, many college and
law-school educated people of well above average intelligence can't write a
helpful brief.

The legal industry has been adopting computer technology as it becomes
available. A good example is document review. Computers excel at searching
through large amounts of information looking for potentially-relevant
documents, so law firms increasingly use computers to flag such documents
(though many/most clients still prefer to have this outsourced to low-cost
contract attorneys). Most work that used to be done by secretaries is
automated. Document management systems produce blacklines, track changes is
used to enter revisions, etc. Again, clients are sophisticated. They're not
paying $500/hour for a lawyer to manually enter hand-markups.

~~~
thinkcomp
Clients are not all sophisticated, just like consumers are not all rational.
Much (most) of legal work is indeed paralegal work. That's my point.

The legal industry has been adopting some computer technology as it becomes
available. The courts have barely changed since the 1700s.

~~~
rayiner
The idea that Fortune 1000 companies or startups funded and guided by well-
connected VC firms are unsophisticated consumers that are unwittingly paying
$500+/hour for paralegal work is laughable.

~~~
thinkcomp
Isn't it? And that's why many law firms are laughing all the way to the bank,
as well as why there's a growing trend to bring legal work in-house among the
Fortune 1000, which has only recently realized that it's being fleeced.

I'm not just guessing here. I just spent a year as a fellow at Stanford Law
and heard all about it from people on both sides. I also have a friend who
just quit his job as an associate at one of the top valley firms. His job was
to do transactional work, i.e. prepare legal documents for top valley VCs. He
graduated from Harvard Law School, which meant that the firm could bill much
higher rates for his time, and told me that he spent most of his 16-hour day
copying and pasting Word documents--which is largely why he quit.

~~~
rayiner
There is always a surge of bringing legal work in-house after a recession,
because you've experienced lawyers on the market looking for a job and willing
to take a pay-cut to go in-house. It happened as well after the early 1990's
recession. I don't know how permanent that phenomenon is, I think other shifts
like the move to flat billing are going to be more sticky.

Your friend's characterization of his work seems phat. The first year
transactional associates I know are summarizing term sheets, conducting due
diligence, etc. It's fairly rote, but it's stuff that's just context-sensitive
enough not to be automatable. And as a practical matter, entry-level positions
in any field, maybe outside of valley startups, tend to be pretty rote. Some
of my friends might sum up their entry-level programming roles by saying that
their jobs just involved "changing colors of widgets in the UI in response to
support tickets." It's training, work that prepares the associate to do more
complex tasks down the road. Speaking broadly, training entry-level people, in
any field, is part of the cost of business. In law firms as in any other
business, those costs get passed onto consumers.

As a counter-example, I'll offer my own experience as a first year litigator.
I spent 75% of my time doing legal or factual research (including researching
several issues of first impression), drafting research memos, preparing
interview outlines, and summarizing expert testimony.[1] I spent 25% of my
time reviewing discovery documents, and that process was heavily
automated/outsourced. We were generally only looking at documents that had
been marked potentially significant by either a contract attorney ($35/hour in
NYC, less in India) or a predictive coding algorithm. The exception was when a
batch of documents was too small to be worth dealing with the set-up overhead
of putting a contract team together or training the predictive coding
software.[2]

[1] Electronic access to case research is of course a big boon to making that
sort of work more efficient. However, I should note that at the end of the
day, using Lexis/Westlaw saves the client a lot of money. Google Scholar is so
spectacularly bad for legal research that it takes much longer to get an
answer, and you feel less confident in the answer you get. The limitations of
Google Scholar when it comes to legal and scientific research are very telling
insight into the limits of automation with existing technology. Google is
amazing, but fundamentally its not actually intelligent. It suggests to you
what you might want to look at based on what other people looked at. When that
popularity heuristic is inapplicable, it becomes really unhelpful.

[2] This is a flip-side to automation technology that gets glossed-over. In a
mega-litigation, predictive coding is a huge boon because you might have
hundreds of thousands of documents. But in a more run-of-the-mill litigation,
the time it takes to train the predictive coding engine might negate any
advantage over just having a first year associate look at the documents.

~~~
wglb
_might have hundreds of thousands of documents_

Actually the extreme is likely to be in the millions.

------
jakejake
In addition to patent reform, why legals bills are so astronomical? The whole
thing stinks.

~~~
rayiner
Legal bill = billing rate * hours billed.

The number of hours billed is very dependent on the structure of the law. One
of the goals of courts is to streamline the law so that cases that don't have
merit can be dismissed quickly and easily. If you follow litigations in the
popular press, you'll see that a lot of lawsuits get dismissed on
"technicalities" (i.e. procedural rules). E.g. the EFF's NSA litigation is in
danger of getting dismissed for a lack of standing (i.e. dismissal because the
plaintiff can't show actual injury). Courts create these procedural barriers
because getting to the merits (i.e. looking at the facts) of litigation is
time-consuming and expensive. Courts also create other barriers. For example,
in a shareholder suit, there is something called the business judgment rule:
i.e. in the absence of a conflict of interest or something like that, a court
will defer to management's superior business judgment. Rules like that allow
shareholder suits to be evaluated and dismissed based on facts that are easy
to prove without having to reach facts that are expensive to investigate and
prove.

In patent litigation, there is precious little of that. Patent litigations
very quickly become a very fact-intensive process of interpreting a complex
and voluminous patent, getting expert witness testimony about exactly how the
defendants product works, etc. Once a lawyer is sitting down with an engineer
looking over code, the clock really gets going.

The Supreme Court has been very reluctant to create categorical rules in terms
of patentability, and that's largely because the Patent Act is written in a
way that makes such categorical rules inconsistent with the intent of the law.
But the fact is that categorical rules (e.g. no software patents, deference to
business judgment) make litigation cheaper, and that's an important
consideration too.

~~~
csense
> One of the goals of courts is to streamline the law

And one of the goals of (relatively) rich plaintiffs who sue (relatively) poor
defendants is to drag out the case as much as possible to impose costs and
inconveniences on the defendant.

~~~
rayiner
As a practical matter, that's not a situation the federal courts encounter
very often. It's usually poor plaintiffs suing rich defendants, or rich
plaintiffs suing other rich plaintiffs.

------
ChuckMcM
Still waiting for the "Prenda Law" moment in patent court.

~~~
changdizzle
So far I would say Newegg takes the cake - [http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2013/05/newegg-nukes-corp...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2013/05/newegg-nukes-corporate-troll-alcatel-in-third-patent-appeal-
win-this-year/)

~~~
Zikes
I've always admired Newegg's efforts on that. I should patronize their
business more often.

~~~
samspenc
Exactly! Proud Newegg patronizer here, especially because of their standing up
to the trolls.

------
rasur
Excuse my ignorance, but have any companies succeeded by just replying "Go Get
Fucked" to patent trolls?

~~~
clavalle
If they file suit you have to show up or you lose the case. If you don't get
lawyers involved you are hosed.

~~~
csense
AFAIK if you're a corporation, you must be represented by a lawyer in the US.

If you're not a corporation, AFAIK you can go pro se (be your own defense
attorney), but in that route you're not just risking the business -- if you
lose and the damages are more than the business can pay, they'll be able to
seize your house, your car, and your kids' college fund. And your credit
rating will be ruined if you have to declare bankruptcy personally, so you
might not be able to get credit cards for a decade or two afterwards.

------
technoir
I once considered taking a serious crack at a subset of this problem. Didn't
get any takers though.

[http://libpatent.com/](http://libpatent.com/)

~~~
csense
What's your marketing like? Have you tried approaching relevant blogs like
Popehat for a mention? Or trying to get in contact with places where startups
congregate, like YC? Or asking if EFF or others who oppose patents for
ideological reasons would be willing to give you publicity, advice, or
referrals? Heck, a Show HN post might get you some publicity and feedback.

Also, the website is a little unclear about what exactly customers are buying.
"Search for prior art" \-- it sounds like you're charging people $10k to copy-
paste the sentences from their product's specs one-by-one into Google. What
exactly are your customers paying for? It's not clear on your website.

Remember, _you_ probably have a decent understanding of patent law if you have
a JD, but your customers don't. Your target audience is (I'm guessing) similar
to much of HN -- intelligent hackers who have a good business sense but little
formal training in law or business. Hackers'll want to know the "how" and
"why" of what they're buying, but your explanations don't explain legal jargon
like "examining applications," "prior art search," or "ex parte".

Also, I would suggest offering services on contingency-fee basis -- you only
get paid if you actually bust one or more patents at least dimly related to
your customer's business, or produce some other sort of tangible result for
the customer. To make this financially viable for you, you may need to
substantially increase your fee for contingency clients, and have cash
reserves in case you lose multiple re-examinations in a row.

Also it'd be nice to show patents you've busted. If you don't have any yet,
you might consider looking for easy patents to target, and self-funding a re-
examination of them, or (if you don't have the money or it's against the rules
for a lawyer to bring such a case on their own initiative) approaching the EFF
or somebody to ask if they'll fund you.

~~~
technoir
Thanks for the thoughtful response.

I originally created this page as an exercise in "marketing driven
development" aka just testing the waters to see if there is a market for this
sort of thing.

I did consider your last point of busting a bogus patent and self-funding the
ex parte filing fee. I was considering going for a particular linked list
implementation which was patented in the 2000s. My approach was more or less
to grep / lucene a wide range of open source projects with extensive
timestamps of publication dates (e.g. linux kernel).

It turns out that is a lot of work, and since I got no response to the site, I
figured this kind of legal service is not really appealing -- for reasons I
don't understand. At least, not enough demand to spend a bunch of time on it,
since I have other projects I enjoy working on more.

Thanks again for the thoughtful response.

~~~
csense
> since I got no response to the site

Just putting a website on the internet is no guarantee people will find you.
There might be a lot of people interested in your service, and it could be
that your site is too hard for them to find.

------
slowdown
[http://foaas.com/off/patent%20trolls/Startups](http://foaas.com/off/patent%20trolls/Startups)

------
6d0debc071
I wonder whether areas with strong patent law will just become...
uncompetitive... by comparison to areas where such laws are not enforced.

------
ninjapirate
The real problem and challenge of the issue (especially in terms of
litigation) is taking the power away from PAEs but also not taking the power
out of our patent system.

The fact that our system allows folks to invent but not manufacture led to
substantial growth in our country and also to the entrepreneurial culture we
all enjoy.

PAEs are abusing this and absolutely need to be stopped.

------
wavesounds
Does anyone sell patent-troll insurance?

~~~
Guvante
Too easy to game. With the minimum legal cost of a successful defense being
$200,000, what kind of monthly rate would cover that?

~~~
dscb
With car insurance claims easily being >100k due to injuries/death/multiple
vehicle collisions, what kind of monthly rate could possible cover that?

Other examples with high claim amounts, flood insurance, health care, etc.

It doesn't matter how high the minimum cost is, and you cant judge any kind of
insurance based solely on that. The chance of it happening is just as
important. Let's say 1% of all companies get sued for patent disputes every
year (I don't know the stats on this, just an example), with an average
defense costing $500 000. The insurance company also wants to make money, so
let's have them charge 150% over cost.

$500k x 1.5 = $750k (amount of revenue per 100 customers)

$750k x 0.01= $7500 (cost per customer per year)

$7500 / 12 = $625 (cost per customer per month)

Now even that number isn't that high, and I assume 1% of companies getting hit
with patent lawsuit per year is bigger than the real figures.

~~~
Guvante
Average cost of a claim and average claims per year are incredibly important.

Average cost of a car claim (ignoring glass) is probably in the $5,000 range.
The average person gets in <0.5 accidents a year, so coverage is <$2,500 for
the average person.

Average cost of a patent claim is, say $200,000 (that is a minimum, but we
will treat it as an average). Average company gets 0.05 patent claims per year
(1 in 20). Coverage would be $1,000 a month. Not too bad.

Now lets add what happens after the first time you pay out an insurance claim
within 6 months. Someone in your company gets $200,000 for a client list, your
patent claims per year just became 10 per client. Good luck.

------
ioncereadknuth
look kids, the system is rigged. you dont organize, you dont form voting
groups based on your issues, you dont get involved in politics, and when the
rules bend the odds vehemently against you, you go to a social media website
and bitch about it.

when are you losers going to wake the hell up?

and oh yeah, Aaron Shwartz, never forget.

edit: you know theres a business opportunity right there. you know crowd
funding? how about crowd voting? that'll teach em.

~~~
ioncereadknuth
super edit: i'll seed fund it. i'm old, bitter, and have money.

~~~
ioncereadknuth
for real. 2k USD/month for 5 months for anyone who puts this together. think
of it as pre-ycombinator funding.

promissory note.

~~~
thinkcomp
[http://www.plainsite.org/issues](http://www.plainsite.org/issues)

------
ioncereadknuth
suggestion: every company that receives one of these things should incorporate
in nigeria or something, till US lawmakers wake the fuck up.

~~~
keithpeter
Isle of Mann?

UK patent law, 'relaxed' personal taxation, zero corporation tax, good motor
bike racing, English widely spoken, good transport links with mainland,
temperate climate, funky passport. I imagine remote ownership is possible.

On a more serious note, patent protection was designed to _promote_ innovation
by providing a monopoly in _exchange_ for full disclosure so others could
understand and further improve. In the US this purpose is (apparently) not
being achieved so as others have said, time for some politics.

