
Abolish The Patent, Vanquish The Troll - grimey27
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/abolish-the-patent-vanquish-the-troll/
======
lukifer
I've been thinking about the connection between biological signaling and
advertising; like colored plumage or a large chest cavity, a multi-million ad
campaign is a hard-to-fake signal, and in a way, such campaigns are as much
about overt displays of power than the contents of the ad.

In that sense, this move is the pinnacle of the best form of advertising.
Whether they are acting out of pure altruism or pure strategy (it's probably
both), they are demonstrating their values with non-trivial risks and
resources, thereby earning genuine trust with current and prospective
customers. Awesome.

~~~
larrys
"thereby earning genuine trust with current and prospective customers"

I don't disagree with that in general but I will raise the issue that you
would need to know the percentage of current and future customers that really
care about things like this to know the effect that it will have on their
business in dollars.

Consumers and business are fickle. Good will has a value but people will drop
you in a dime if the next shiny ball comes along with a better product and/or
lower pricing. My guess is that the community that cares about this relative
to their sales volume is not as significant as your statement suggests.

As an similar example, people on HN regularly hate on godaddy but they are
still a giant in the domain business and end users that use them (I deal with
those end users since gd is a competitor of ours) don't care about any of the
shenanigans. And the "tech guys" that feed business to gd in general seem to
be pretty happy with the relationship judging by transfer rates.

~~~
zabramow
Funny that you mention domains, because, while there might be some public good
in patents, it's much harder to say about domain name squatters. Why have we
not put adequate regs in place to eliminate squatters? I liked a particular
domain name for a new startup. I approached the domain name owner -- a FB
engineer no less -- who had bought the domain, and I offered him a price that
would have yielded him 7500 in profit. He turned us down and continues to
squat on the domain and do nothing with it. We ended up going with a dotme
domain, which isn't ideal.

Now, as a lean startup we probably shouldn't have been looking for an
expensive domain name in the first place. But ineffective squatter rules (10K
for an arbitration!) are preventing the marketplace from making the most of
attractive, catchy domain names, and instead we're settling on domains that do
not adequately describe the business.

~~~
larrys
So let me see if I understand your point. You are saying "they aren't using it
so therefore we should be able to use it" and are somehow comparing that to
what patent trolls do?

Further you are saying that someone who holds a domain name (or any property)
should have to satisfy a requirement of "use" of that property or domain name?
And if not they should sell it to you for a price that you find acceptable or
maybe just give it to you?

If that is the case then please tell me who will be in charge of determining
what "use" of a domain name is?

What do you define as a squatter? Because it's not someone who registers a
domain name and just holds it although that is the popular culture
interpretation of the word.

By the way there is no such thing as "arbitration" with domain names. There is
the filing of a UDRP (which costs much much less and you can file on your own)
but to do that you would have to have some basis. I can assure you that if you
have just formed a startup you don't meet the requirements for filing a UDRP.
It isn't meant to protect people who "just want a particular domain and the
seller isn't being reasonable" it's meant to protect those with true
intellectual property interests (from what I'm reading in your comment you
don't meet this in any way).

~~~
AnthonyMouse
The mistake is in thinking that domain names should be property. They're not
property, they're address space. Imagine if trademarks worked this way --
right now to get a trademark you have to actually use it (or certify that you
intend to use it), you can't just squat on a thousand different names and hope
somebody is eventually willing to pay you for one of them.

And the solution should be the same. You can't sell a trademark. What you can
do is sell the goodwill it has accrued and transfer the mark along with it.
That sounds like the same thing, right? But if you haven't used it there is no
goodwill -- in fact, if you stop using a trademark then you eventually lose
the rights to it. It shuts down the squatters but not anyone else, which is
why we don't have trademark squatters the same as we do domain name squatters.

~~~
samuellevy
Define "using" a domain name. I have a couple of domain names where my primary
reason for holding them is for email addresses, or an inside joke with
friends.

Admittedly, no-one is clamoring for these domain names, let alone offering me
$7500 for them for their business, but just because you can't see the use
_doesn't mean that they're not being used._

Yes, domain name squatters suck, but they're making money, so they'll keep
doing it, and there's no way to fairly stop them that doesn't take away my
right to hold stupid domain names.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Nobody has to stop you from holding stupid domain names. Hold them all you
like. You _are_ using them for something. Nobody said "something" has to be
hosting a website. But don't try to sell them without having built any value
into them -- you should only be able to profit from the transfer if you're
transferring it incident to something of value you've created, like an email
service or website with actual users. And yes, that means some of the
squatters are going to try to create sham transactions and commit fraud, but
at least then you can prosecute it where you can prove it, rather than
allowing their useless, irritating, wasteful arbitrage-based businesses to
continue lawfully.

------
arbuge
"IPRs can be risky and costly. We know this IPR will cost us more than the
$75,000 that Rotatable wanted to extort from us. But we are not just fighting
for us; we are fighting for all the app developers who are also in the line of
fire."

Clearly the patent system is defective and needs to be fixed radically (or
patents entirely eliminated in the software space, which I personally believe
is preferable).

Nevertheless the above suggests a possibility for a shorter-term fix. If
companies could proactively band together in some kind of association to fund
IPRs for every single troll attack, spreading out the costs of the IPR amongst
the member companies, it would seem that this would make life for the trolls
much harder. Indeed, simply listing your company membership in such an
association on your website might be sufficient to ward them off, same as
sticking alarm decals on car windows wards off many would-be car thieves.

~~~
acdha
Check out John Walker's PATO proposal from 1993, following Autodesk getting
hit with a bogus patent:
<http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_105.html>

~~~
DaniFong
God damn; PATO is exactly my proposal. I shall sue him, having come up with it
15 years _after_ his publication... ;-)

~~~
ubernostrum
Except it doesn't work.

Here's what really happens:

PatentHoldingShellCompany60852, Inc. files a lawsuit. They have no products
and no services and so cannot be countersued for any conceivable infringement.
Even if you do manage to sue them successfully, the company's only asset is
the patent. It declares bankruptcy, nobody involved in setting it up gets
hurt, and tomorrow PatentHoldingShellCompany60853, Inc. is filing in East
Texas to try to shakedown somebody else.

~~~
acdha
I think the modern wrinkle would need to be establishing a common defense fund
with the goal of funding all the way through invalidating bad patents, not
just settling a suit. Right now most of these players simply risk losing their
time investment, not the grounds for future extortion or possibly even
invalidating other settlements.

A well-funded, well-known legal team could have an easier time doing filing to
consolidate cases, making the strategy of repeatedly going after small
companies less one-sided.

------
davidroberts
I totally applaud Rackspace's dedication to the public good. But I think their
response is their best move economically too, despite the initial cost. They
are basically saying "Troll me, and you risk losing the whole patent." It's
like dealing with a playground bully. Once you display a willingness to fight,
they go pick on someone less assertive.

~~~
hkmurakami
ditto Newegg

"Newegg Crushes Patent Troll in Online 'Shopping Cart' Suit"

<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414778,00.asp>

edit: better article link:

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/how-newegg-
crushe...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/how-newegg-crushed-the-
shopping-cart-patent-and-saved-online-retail/)

------
jonathanwallace
Nothing makes me want to become a rackspace customer more than posts like
this. I adore integrity.

~~~
larrys
I'm also a RS customer but how do you see this as "integrity" as opposed to a
regular business decision done with the intent to prevent future problems?

(Noting also that there is the PR value of spending money this way as your
comment proves!)

~~~
dublinben
Countless other companies in their position would pay the settlement and sign
an NDA. We can never know the extent of this problem unless companies like
RackSpace speak up.

~~~
rayval
Yes, it is also an indicator to me that if I am a RackSpace customer, and
other issues come up (could be patents, could be government surveillance, or
something else) that will affect me as a developer, Rackspace is more likely
to be on my side than against me.

Obviously, I expect Rackspace to pursue its own business self-interest, but
often there are multiple ways to do that, and not all of them are win-win for
both the hosting company and for its customers.

------
mandlar
I wish the best of luck to Rackspace.

As an independent Android developer, I live with the slight fear that one day
I'm going to eventually be hit with one of these absurd patent lawsuits. I
only program for Android as a hobby aside from my day job as a web programmer.
What can an independent/hobbyist developer like myself do when we are
eventually challenged with something we can by no means defend ourselves
against without loads of money? Reform is needed, soon.

~~~
GotAnyMegadeth
If you are independent, then can't you defend yourself in court?

~~~
mandlar
It's not that, it's that I wouldn't have sufficient money to do it. Or
bankrupt myself in the process.

------
Arjuna
On the topic, this is quite an interesting TED talk given by Drew Curtis.

 _"You need to know that the average patent troll defense costs $2M and takes
18 months... when you win."_

Drew Curtis: How I Beat a Patent Troll

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_lb3D7Ay-M>

~~~
drakaal
Drew is exaggeration. I took on Acacia, it cost me nothing more than the
travel, and time away from my primary business.

Lawyers cost a lot of money, but for something like "the ability to rotate a
mobile screen" that rackspace is fighting you don't need a lawyer.

Prior art exists for rotating screens on desktops and tablet PCs. Feature
parity on Mobile is not innovative. Obviousness is the challenge to a patent
and the defense against its infringement.

This is not a "risky" case. It is not a case that requires 4 lawyers for a
year. It is a case for 1 guy part time for a year. Which if he is $400k a year
could be $75k but it doesn't need to be that.

~~~
umsm
I believe the keyword here is "average". There are probably examples of cases
on both ends of the spectrum: cases that dragged on to be very expensive and
others that were resolved with a phone call or letter.

~~~
drakaal
Yes a billion dollar fight would skew the average a lot. Several fights
between porn companies and streaming media changed the numbers as they were in
the hundreds of millions range at that seriously messed with the average. The
typical need not be so high.

------
amikula
To me, this is a strong sign that the patent holder should at least run a
substantial risk of getting charged for legal costs if they lose. It might
require a bit more due diligence on the part of the patent holder in genuinely
enforceable patents, but it would all but eliminate the motivation of patent
trolls when they know their patent is dubious.

I applaud Rackspace for this act of charity to the community, but it should
not be necessary. Let's root for Rackspace, but it's more important to fix the
system.

~~~
zmmmmm
At some point it should be more than legal costs. Threatening someone with a
patent that is manifestly not applicable should be considered a form of fraud
in extreme cases, just like it is if I send you a false invoice in the mail
demanding payment. We need to raise the risk factor enough that patent trolls
can't simply write off their losses against all their successes. They'll keep
going as long as the benefits outweigh the risk.

------
a_p
If you cannot understand how people could possible think that software patents
are acceptable, I recommend reading this article. [1] Not because it will
convince you that software patents are good — it won't. But it will help you
understand the thought process of lawyers who do think that there should be
some software patents. For example, Goetz writes that he supports "patents
where the preferred implementation of an inventive machine process is in
software (via a computer program), hardware (via circuitry), or a combination
of both software and hardware."

[1] [http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/09/in-defense-of-
softwa...](http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/09/in-defense-of-software-
patents-part-2.html)

~~~
tomp
Personally, I support software patents. I'm just against _idea_ patents, as
opposed to _invention_ patents.

Screen rotation is no invention. It's an idea; once you have it, it's trivial
to implement. That, IMO, does not afford patent protection. However, certain
things can, and should be patents. RSA, for example. It's a non-trivial
procedure that was non-trivial to invent and there are not very many
alternatives.

~~~
takluyver
There's an interesting question about just what an invention is, though. At
least in software, actual implementations are covered by copyright, and I
can't see any hard and fast distinction between ideas and inventions.

For instance, determining the optimum layout of a mail application for a four
inch screen probably takes a lot of tweaking and user testing. But there's no
way that you can call it an invention, and your competitors are free to copy
the layout, so long as they change the style enough that customers can clearly
distinguish the products.

On the other hand, using a magnet to hold a power connector to a laptop seems
like a really obvious idea once you've seen it. You don't have to study
detailed documents to see how you could make it. But calling it an 'invention'
seems reasonable - and it is patented. And it's perhaps the only thing that
attracts me about Apple laptops, but that's not important right now.

~~~
wildgift
I've seen these magnetic power cords on water boilers for a long time. We got
one from Asia in the 90s. <http://www.zojirushi.com/products/cvdyc>

That may have merited a patent (if it wasn't already invented, and I suspect
it was), but Apple's implementation does not.

------
charlesjshort
I've worked as a patent prosecutor for a top ranked patent prosecution firm;
and I know first hand that most patents are 'pencil patents' worthless subtle
distinctions that are allowed because 'obvious' arguments do not stand up.

However, some innovations, maybe 1 in 1000, are really worthy. And if the
inventor did not have some way to protect their research - google or microsoft
or anyone else could usurp the idea from the average joe who spent a lot of
research and effort to resolve the invention. just my 2 cents.

~~~
Kliment
It's much more likely that google or microsoft would absolutely annihilate the
average joe with a countersuit rather than license anything from them. They
hold a much bigger patent portfolio and can afford to pump money into a case
for several years. There is absolutely nothing that makes patents attractive
to the "lone inventor" type. The innovations may be worthy, but patents do
nothing to help there.

------
greghinch
I really hope this is successful. I will begrudgingly admit that some patents
probably are useful (that's a separate argument), but in the specific case of
software, so many were granted at a time when general knowledge was very naive
and so were unintentionally made to broad sweeping. Eliminating them is the
best course of action.

The fact that it will take an independent committee up to 1 year to do so for
each one is rather less encouraging.

------
Proleps
> _Patent litigation typically costs defendants between $1 million and $5
> million just to stay in the fight._

A battleground where only the rich can win a fight. There doesn't seem to be
any justice left in the American courts :(.

The only way to win is to not play their game. It's probably cheaper to buy a
shotgun and show up at the doorstep of the person suing you with the message:
"I know where you live" :S

~~~
inovator
You got it wrong. "It's probably cheaper to HIRE someone" _

------
CopyrightX
Patent and copyright laws are both in serious need of radical reform in the US
and globally. Thank you Rackspace for not caving in to the patent trolls, but
as you wrote, it has become a never-ending game of "whack-a-troll".

That's because with existing legislation, the patent troll business model is
financially very sound if also inherently corrosive to society as a whole.
"The dynamics of local vs. global optimization" is jargon from the team-
building and process-design communities that applies here: a successful
business strategy for the patent trolls is a huge failure for the community as
a whole. This could also be considered a perverse incentive
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive>

There are perverse incentives in both copyright and patent law that undermine
the original Constitutional goals of "promot[ing] the Progress of Science and
useful Arts..." that are especially powerful in our age of ever-increasing
innovation where digital computers and The Internet have created a radically
different "landscape" than that which existed when the first such laws were
drafted.

Ideally, thoughtful legislative reforms would prevent such perverse incentives
in the future so that both copyright and patent law would once again be
aligned to serve the common good rather than the good of a few.

Large and democratic communities (such as those Joel Spolsky helped create)
full of good questions and answers could go a long way towards helping to
craft such thoughtful legislative reforms. See Ask Patents
<http://patents.stackexchange.com> for such a community on patents, and
<http://goo.gl/5YDHa> for such a proposed community on copyright.

Anyone who feels strongly about these issues, please go get involved by
"Follow"ing the proposed CopyrightX community and submitting 5 Example
Questions. With enough voting and other participation, the CopyrightX
community proposal can graduate to an actual community like Ask Patents.

And with two vibrant communities full of good questions and answers related to
IP law, perhaps future legislation will be free of perverse incentives, and we
can once again rely on our laws to serve ALL of our best interests.

In the interim, thanks again Rackspace for being willing to continue the
costly game of "whack-a-troll" on behalf of all of us.

------
hkmurakami
_> Patent trolls then follow each filing with a settlement demand “at a price
far lower than the cost to defend the litigation.” (Id. at 1326.) This allows
trolls to use the high cost of litigation as a club against operating
companies. _

This smells like another ugly practice by "rightsholders". Namely, the
RIAA/MPAA litigation against individuals.

~~~
anigbrowl
It's a common pattern in almost any litigation, not specific to IP
rightsholders.

~~~
hkmurakami
I guess you're right. Even when "people" sue companies, they typically just
settle out of court.

------
drakaal
Patent trolls suck. But with out patents there is no incentive for innovation.
The issue is not that Patents are bad, it is that you can patent a "unique way
to swing on the playground" and be awarded a patent. Patent officer often
don't know what they are awarding a patent for.

This is supposed to be kept in check by the fact that you can fight a patent.

I think that if you file a patent, sue someone over it, and lose you should be
forced to pay 8X the amount you were suing for. That would severely limit who
would try.

I also think that patents should only be allowed to be resold twice. This
would limit the number of patents which could be used to extort money.

Lastly I think you should only be able to sue for patent infringement if you
have a product using the patent currently in the market.

Those 2 simple rules would remove a lot of trolling.

~~~
angersock
"But with out patents there is no incentive for innovation."

What a merry little idea. Has it occurred to you that there are a large number
of people who invent, innovate, and develop because it's simply not an option
not to? That it is a sort of compulsion, a reason for being?

In a market without patents, I'm sure capitalists will find a way to keep
making money, just as I'm sure that inventors and makers will continue to keep
inventing and making.

~~~
spartango
It totally depends on the field. In software, perhaps this would work nicely,
because rapid iteration and expansion prevails.

That said, in the pharmaceutical or material science worlds, the cost and pace
of research require that protection be afforded to those who choose to invest
and disclose the fruits of their labor to the world.

It's not so black and white that there are _no_ incentives for disclosed
innovation, but patents are a big booster in some areas, for good reasons.

~~~
toasterlovin
There was plenty of invention before patents existed as a legal concept.

Patents exist because some people who came up with clever ideas thought
(properly) that it was in their best interest to be granted a legal monopoly
on the implementation of their ideas and lobbied lawmakers to grant them these
monopolies.

Patents did not come into being because we, as a society (speaking as an
American), determined that our pace of innovation was too slow and decided
that we needed to do something about it.

This idea, that patents encourage innovation, is the justification, not the
motivation, for the legal construct that is the patent. There were no
experiments done to test this hypothesis. In fact, I think the history of
invention before patents suggests quite strongly that they are not needed;
that, in fact, people will invent simply because we are tool builders and
tinkerers.

EDIT: To testify to the fact that people invented before patents:
<http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2011/12/machine-power.html>

A book from 1606 showing illustrations of gear and hydraulic powered devices.
Some are fanciful, others less so, but they all clearly show humankind
figuring out every last way to apply a technology to the tasks of every day
life.

~~~
ScottBurson
Have you researched the history of patents? I'm no expert, but my
understanding is that they were established in response to the guild system,
in which a lot of technical knowledge was kept secret. Invention may have been
occurring, but it didn't benefit the larger society the way it could have.

~~~
belorn
One legal theory behind patents is that they were a tool to incentivize
immigration. It benefited the United States even before it was the United
States, as people was encouraging to stay in the country during the duration
of exclusivity, and gave the country a working model of the invention so
people could learn. Before patents, many invention was treated as city or
state secret.

I can recommend a very interesting talk by Professor Eben Moglen, who teach
law history and actually read discussions that happened between the people who
wrote and worked with the first implementation of the US patent law
(<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPzpBn-XGxw>).

------
larrys
"IPRs can be risky and costly. We know this IPR will cost us more than the
$75,000 that Rotatable wanted to extort from us. "

Would love to have the breakdown of where the legal fees are going to file the
inter parties review. To me seems like several hundred hours of legal work
involved. (75000/400 approx.)

<http://www.uspto.gov/aia_implementation/bpai.jsp#heading-1>

(Wondering also whether the IPR stays any legal proceedings that have started
or prevents any legal proceedings.)

------
rayiner
Why should reexaminations be so expensive?

I think this is an area where Google could really be useful. With their
database and search algorithms, it'd be doable for them to put together a
service to do prior art searches. Maybe use text analysis to summarize prior
patents into English (since they're written in a fairly structured way to
begin with).

It doesn't need to be advanced AI. Anything they came up with would certainly
be better than whatever process the USPTO uses now.

------
breck
I like this approach. I would be mathematically surprised if there exists any
patent that cannot be invalidated via prior art. It seems there is a strong
correlation between the amount of information online and the probability of
there existing easily accessible prior art for any arbitrary patent.

In other words, if the amount of information on the web doubles every year,
the probability of finding prior art that can invalidate any patent doubles as
well. By this point in time, with the amount of information that has been
moved online, the probability of having a patent not subject to prior art
claims seems astronomically low.

As an anecdote, I just saw "The Mother of All Demos" (1968 -
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs>), for the first time the other
day. That video alone contains dozens of inventions that I thought were
relatively recent.

~~~
jacques_chester
The "information" on the web is not doubling. The number of accessible bytes
are.

Ten million cat videos don't constitute prior art against RSA, for example.

~~~
noonespecial
No, but it certainly increases the possibility you might see a cat chasing a
laser pointer:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_exercising_a_cat>

~~~
jacques_chester
Touché.

------
5hredder
There's an unsettling trend in startups today on IP protection. A lot of
incubators/accelerators seem to think that having a protectable IP =
innovation.

By placing more focus on patents rather than on real innovation, we are far
from acting as a catalyst to promote innovation in developing countries like
India. Intellectual monopolies in the developed world prohibit SMEs in
developing countries from growing to the point where they are able to compete
in global markets with the western IP heavyweights. It is imperative that
developing countries like India and China place careful thought before
committing to restrictive FTAs that are specifically designed to keep them at
a lower level of technological development.

------
chime
If IPR for screen-rotation ends up with nullifying the patent, can
organizations like EFF start doing that pro-actively for other ridiculous
patents like One-Click-Buy and Swipe-to-Unlock? Or does the patent-holder have
to be proven as a troll?

~~~
Ilmesnkie_Jones
The patent holder would have to sue someone first or there would be no
standing to bring a case.

~~~
neurotech1
Anyone can file a re-examination request ex parte. The EFF have done this
occasion, without an actual filed lawsuit from the Patent Assertion
Entity(PAE="troll") but it still costs thousands of dollars in fees and the
EFF lawyers time.

------
kunai
Without a doubt, one of the most honourable deeds that a company can do for
the rest of the world. The courage and altruism displayed by Rackspace should
serve as a reminder to any company:

We _cannot_ afford to let patent trolls win.

------
hexagonc
I'm not a lawyer but this patent troll litigation would seem to be a textbook
case for estoppel by acquiescence. [1] These patent trolls are deliberately
waiting until the patents are firmly established norms in the industry so that
finding alternatives are that much harder. Furthermore, the trolls wrongly
allow time to go by so that they can claim a higher damage reward than they
otherwise would have.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel_by_acquiescence>

------
forgottenpaswrd
Question to the Rackspace guys:

Why don't you make a kickstarter project to pay for the IPR?

As you said, other companies are interested in sharing the cost, as trolls go
after them too. Why not sharing the cost too?.

Companies that are affected by trolls are acting like independent entities,
witch makes them extremely vulnerable to big companies and capitalized trolls.

You need to unite!

Small and medium business are most of America's or European business, but if
you act alone and divided you will be easily defeated(divide and conquer)

------
timedoctor
When I read the title I thought they were talking about abolishing patents
altogether, which I think is not such a bad idea. At least for software
patents I definitely think they should be eliminated.

Eliminating this one patent is pretty useless. Admirable in a certain sense,
but there are thousands of other ridiculous patents. You can't fix the entire
system one patent at a time.

------
joshaidan
This sounds like it could be a good PR move for Rackspace. I've heard from
quite a few developers who, for whatever reason, have a negative opinion of
Rackspace. Does this action change your opinion of them?

But perhaps it ultimate comes down to their service, the products they offer,
and price.

~~~
jakejake
Just curious why you've found that people don't like rackspace?

We've used them for a while without any major complaints.

------
wojonstech
These sort of things are scary to me, I am planning on starting a business,
using money from my own pocket and the fact that random companies are going to
sue me just cuz they they can makes me not want to start one which just lowers
then innovation that takes place.

------
Avitas
This type of behavior is commendable. Cheers Rackspace.

------
xutopia
Rackspace is really smart here. By making it a public policy they're showing
patent trolls that they're out of luck trying their antics with them.

------
clayFrance76
If you abolish the patent, you would then become like China and Russia and a
few of the other countries where lots of STEALING takes place...Hence, a dive
in creativity would happen, just like you see in China and Russia for the last
100 or so years since socialism and communism.

Also, China, only very very few are rich, definitely less than the USA's 1
percent. And only those in power make the decisions, those little guys ideas
are easily walked on by a number of "market competition" methods.

~~~
shmerl
_If you abolish the patent, you would then become like China and Russia and a
few of the other countries where lots of STEALING takes place...Hence, a dive
in creativity would happen,_

You have no way of proving this connection. Practice even shows completely the
opposite - absence of software patents increases creativity. "Stealing" is
using the patents to extort money. Or should I rather call it robbing to sound
more appropriate? So abolishing software patents will reduce robbing.

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white_devil
I wonder if there are any active patent trolls outside of the US, or is it
just not viable.

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escaped_hn
Coming from the company that put a "TM" after every mention of the generic
word "Cloud Server" on their website.

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coolj
A trademark is different from a software patent. A trademark addresses
specific product branding in a specific market; a software patent -- at least
the ones in question -- address a generic process that's not limited to a
specific market. Consider the trademark on the Wikipedia name versus a
(hypothetical) software patent on "a method for storing and displaying user-
generated content."

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escaped_hn
Ok. If i want to start a cloud server company, can i use the generic word
Cloud Server? if i do, will Rackspace sue me? Even if they are different
things, seems like they reach the same outcome.

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coolj
INAL, but my understanding is that you can use a generic phrase like "cloud
servers", where both "cloud" and "servers" have pre-established meanings in
the space, as long as you don't use the name for a product competing in the
same space. E.g., you could call a service providing base images for clouds
"Image Marketplace," but not "AWS Marketplace".

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laureny
You don't need to kill patents to kill the troll: modify the law so that the
only way patents can be transferred is when the company gets acquired.

This makes patents a valuable asset for start ups while completely killing the
patent troll business.

Patents can be useful, don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

