Patent trolls seem to have caught big companies by surprise. In the last couple years they’ve extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from them. Patent trolls are hard to fight precisely because they create nothing. Big companies are safe from being sued by other big companies because they can threaten a counter-suit. But because patent trolls don’t make anything, there’s nothing they can be sued for. I predict this loophole will get closed fairly quickly, at least by legal standards. It’s clearly an abuse of the system, and the victims are powerful.
I’m not aware of anything effective having been done that prevented the patent troll loophole. What actually happened with it in the last 14 years if the problem grew over that timeframe?
(not an expert, but thanks for the prompt to actually google a bit.) Turns out there have been a number of changes in the recent decade. Primarily https://www.eff.org/alice and a few other recent US Supreme Court cases that made it easier to defend against bogus patents, and reduced barriers to recoup legal expenses if the claim fails. From what I can tell, trolling isn’t gone, but it’s less egregious than it was in 2006.
Paul graham did one 2006
http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html
In the article Graham says:
I’m not aware of anything effective having been done that prevented the patent troll loophole. What actually happened with it in the last 14 years if the problem grew over that timeframe?
(not an expert, but thanks for the prompt to actually google a bit.) Turns out there have been a number of changes in the recent decade. Primarily https://www.eff.org/alice and a few other recent US Supreme Court cases that made it easier to defend against bogus patents, and reduced barriers to recoup legal expenses if the claim fails. From what I can tell, trolling isn’t gone, but it’s less egregious than it was in 2006.