Patent trolls want $1,000 per employee for using scanners

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/patent-trolls-want-1000-for-using-scanners/

by blackhole • 14 years ago

235 180 14 years ago

jrockway• 14 years ago

$1,000 per employee is the most bogus request I've ever heard in my life. Even if the concept were patentable, I'd say a reasonable demand would be $1 per Internet-capable scanner sold.

The patent trolls should really read Joel Spolsky's guide on pricing enterprise software. Saving $200,000 is worth hiring some lawyers to fuck you up. Saving $75 isn't.

angdis3• 14 years ago

The people behind these scams have to use legal services as well. They do have to pay in some way for each letter that goes out. There's definitely a "sweet-spot" in the pricing which maximizes the ratio of intake to expenditures. I would bet that they and other patent trolls have found that sweet spot long ago.

scott_s3• 14 years ago

I was under the impression that some of these patent trolls are really just a collection of lawyers. If they're doing their own work, instead of getting an outside firm to do it, their costs should be much less.

crusso3• 14 years ago

IANAL, but I'd guess that the license pricing in their demand would play into the potential damages assessed by a suit later.

Once they admit that the patent is only worth $75 to a business, then how would they sue for $200,000 later?

Treble damages? $225?

fusiongyro2• 14 years ago

I think the point Jon's making is that a business is a lot more likely to swallow a $75 fee than a $200,000 fee. If you hit me with a $200,000 licensing fee I'm a lot more likely to hire lawyers to retaliate and really make you work for it.

wpietri4• 14 years ago

Sure, but now you're anchored [1] at $1000/per. Some fools might pay it, and many more will be relieved when the law firm offers to settle for something much lower. That lower amount being how much they were really intending to shake you down for all along.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring

lutorm2• 14 years ago

I find it extremely dubious that you could actually infringe on a patent merely by using a consumer product. Disregarding this particular patent, is that sort of claim actually grounded in fact?

rst• 14 years ago

Well, if the product's manufacturer has licensed the patent, then the "exhaustion doctrine" generally keeps the patent holder from taking a second whack from people who bought it. That's what ordinarily shields end-users of consumer products from this kind of nonsense.

If the manufacturer hasn't licensed the product, though, the users may well be fair game, in the eyes of the law.

ihsw2• 14 years ago

Whether it's grounded in fact has never been relevant because the in-court legal costs will far outweigh settlement -- that is the business model of patent trolling.

zalzane2• 14 years ago

I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for them to send one of these extortion notices to the wrong guy who will get enraged enough to shoot up their office.

I wonder if a chain of such shootings would set a precedent for change.

pavel_lishin3• 14 years ago

That would be way too expensive, I'm sure they hold a patent on a method on expressing customer dissatisfaction via chemical reactions to convert chemical energy into kinetic motion.

jetti5• 14 years ago

How would that one individual even find them? PO boxes and a "legal department call center" are all that seem to be given and it would seem difficult to track them down.

johnnymonster2• 14 years ago

Crazy people... they get crazy. Camp out at the PO box and wait for someone to pick up the mail. Get a job at that UPS store location. Pay off one of the kid employees that work there to give you the name and address on file. Follow the person that picks up the mail home. Look up his information based on his home address. Collect all his trash, find out where he works. follow him to work. then wreak havoc on all his coworkers!

you are really not all that creative are you... :)

johnnymonster2• 14 years ago

or just pay a private investigator to do all that for you.

angdis3• 14 years ago

It is amazing how much rage a story like this can produce in people who work in non-legal professions. The law-firms involved, of course, don't see it that way. This is just work for them-- although I can't fathom how they can sleep at night making a living by being what amounts to a parasite.

pavel_lishin3• 14 years ago

I've worked in a situation where I believed that what I was doing was fairly unethical. I wasn't sending out bogus legal threats, but I was doing development work for a company I consider flat-out evil.

I dealt with it by donating all the money I made during those hours to a relevant charity. It helped.

zalzane2• 14 years ago

Well, I guess that's why nobody likes lawyers.

driverdan• 14 years ago

Right, let's call for violence. Violence will solve the problem. There's nothing wrong with shooting people who's legal business practices you disagree with.

Torgo2• 14 years ago

Maybe it can be done in a Stand Your Ground state. I'm sure that the patent trolls won't mind, as long as it's "completely within the bounds of the law," just as their business is.

platz• 14 years ago

Your sentiment has been logged and cross-referenced in our classified database for the betterment of current and future society.

pavel_lishin3• 14 years ago

> the only variations are the six-letter name of the shell company and the royalty demands

This sounds a lot like the automated, python-scripted corporations in Stross's Accelerando.

unimpressive• 14 years ago

Would that make these literal shell companies?

jetti5• 14 years ago

The article mentions that it is hard to invalidate patents with prior art and that the patent holders will say that it is a narrower scope than previous patents. If that is the case, I can't see how this isn't extortion. There is no way that these "companies" could know the kind of network that the companies they are sending letters to use. They may be just guessing that they are even using a scanner. They are just mass mailing threats and hoping for money back.

Also, how is it even legal to target the users of technology in a patent infringement case like this? Wouldn't the manufactures (of hardware AND software) be the ones that would need to license the patent, not end users? I get why you would target the end user but is that legal/valid?

scott_s3• 14 years ago

I agree that it is extortion in spirit. But I wonder if patent trolls can be prosecuted on current extortion laws, as their defense would be "We're just trying to enforce our lawful patents." If prosecutors would not want to try, then I wonder how we could change extortion laws to include this practice.

jetti5• 14 years ago

I agree with you on what their defense would likely be. But with something like this, there is no real way of knowing for sure if companies are infringing on their patents without knowledge of their network and what devices they have. It is entirely possible that they sent this to companies who haven't used these features. The problem is that I can't see prosecutors taking these companies on. I would imagine that a Federal prosecutor would be the one taking them on, which to me, makes it even less likely that it will happen.

neurotech13• 14 years ago

IANAL but wouldn't it be easier to convict on mail fraud first. Corporate "accounts receivable" type scams have been convicted before of mail fraud. The scammers send an invoice to a corporation, and if it looks routine, it gets paid without a second thought.

Sooner or later, some patent troll is going to be dumb enough to send out "Unpaid License Fee" letters and set a precedence on the extortion charge.

larrys• 14 years ago

Most important to keep in mind is that this activity is targeted toward businesses (and for that matter not exactly "mom" and "pop" types either). It's more difficult getting someone to prosecute this type of borderline activity against business then the same thing against individuals. Especially if they have a leg to stand on and are being operated by attorneys who know how to word things to avoid potential problems.

ihsw2• 14 years ago

Strict legality and validity are irrelevant -- proving the legality and validity would be an expensive and time-consuming process for the targets of these claims and most lawyers would agree that settlement is always preferable.

9/10 someone may win the suit against a patent troll but the cost of proof ($$$$) is extremely bitter to taste.

jetti5• 14 years ago

Which is such a shame. Until that changes these patent trolls have no motivation to stop what they are doing.

DanBC• 14 years ago

Now we know the format of the letters I'm waiting for anonymous to send a bunch of letters to every member of US legislature.

olefoo• 14 years ago

Actually, it should be sent to their re-election campaign committees; legislators themselves are considered members of the government, and would not be considered businesses in their own right. Whereas their campaign comittees are heavily regulated businesses that get lots of financial scrutiny and are very short of cash usually.

Although that is a dangerous precedent to set; once you start using that sort of tactic, it will become yet another way for big business to lock out candidates they don't like and would have an overall chilling effect on participation in the political process.

astrodust2• 14 years ago

One simple reform to the patent system would be to force an automatic review of any patent involved in a lawsuit where the patent might be rendered invalid before the court needs to weigh in on the matter.

Right now the court needs to decide if the patent is enforceable, which seems like it's basically doing the job the patent issuing entity should've done in the first place.

krickle4• 14 years ago

Yes! I love this. If we can reduce the cost of defending these we would eliminate them without needing anything else.

jasimq• 14 years ago

I don't know about the different kinds of patents, but shouldn't the printer manufacturers be paying up licensing fees?

drstewart• 14 years ago

The letter from the patent trolls actually explains why they don't do that (the real reason is probably because it's easier to get a 30 person small business to pay up instead of a giant corporation with a retainer of lawyers).

arbuge• 14 years ago

It strikes me that one root cause of the patent troll problem, besides unscrupulous trolls and their evil lawyers, is idiot patent examiners who would allow patenting the process of drinking a cup of coffee of morning if there was no prior art on file on the subject.

It all comes down to incentives. Good patent lawyers know they can make big bucks working in private practice (possibly for trolls), whilst mediocre ones happy with a government salary go ... where else? ... the USPTO.

wpietri4• 14 years ago

Do you have any facts to back this up? The one patent examiner I know is very smart. But he's also part of a rigid system with very clear criteria.

If there's a problem, I suspect it's a systemic problem.

krschultz4• 14 years ago

Major root cause that could be fixed without hurting anyone other than patent trolls: the relatively anonymous registration of patents. If I'm being threatened with a lawsuit for patent infringement, how can I not find out the owners of the patents? That is crazy.

If you want to leverage a patent, you should have to be registered with the patent office so that you can be held accountable. Anyone using a patent for legit reasons wouldn't be hampered by this, but it would make hunting down patent trolls a whole lot easier.

crusso3• 14 years ago

Plus if these patents are so valuable, then it would be nice if their sale from one shell company to another had tax implications. Once a licensing campaign has been initiated for one shell company, that should put some idea of a value on the patent(s).

If you can be assessed taxes for options in a company that isn't public that you have no way to exercise, selling assets from one shell company to another should have tax implications as well.

Maybe that would limit the creation of mazes of ownership of these patent portfolios.

krschultz4• 14 years ago

I really like the idea of relating the value of a patent to the registration cost. If the patent is giving you $10 million a year in income, you should have to pay more for that right than if it brings you $10,000 a year in income. At least then we would have a list of patent holders and how much they are making from licensing.

d2vid• 14 years ago

Agreed, and then any accusations of infringement that the patent holder makes must also be registered with the patent office, so that defendants can see who else is being extorted.

wpietri4• 14 years ago

That'd be great. My proposed fix: substantial use. You can only file a patent lawsuit if you are actually using, in some non-trivial way, the technology described in the patent as part of a shipping product or service.

mtgx2• 14 years ago

You also should have at least 10 employees. That should help eliminate the shell companies that like to troll.

JackFr• 14 years ago

Couldn't someone end this by gettingt a business process patent on patent trolling?

mcherm5• 14 years ago

Doesn't help if you can't find the correct shell company to serve with the lawsuit.

lwat• 14 years ago

Prior art.

h4pless• 14 years ago

Could someone (or has someone already tried to) patent the process of patent trolling? I know that such a patent shouldn't be granted because the idea obviously isn't original but it seems as though there are so many bogus patents sneaking through the cracks that it could be possible. It would be nice if there was someone you could call to troll the trolls.

cschmidt• 14 years ago

Strangely Halliburton seems to have done this:

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/11/12/halliburton-patenting-pa...

hdj2• 14 years ago

What did happen to this application? Accepted or dismissed?

kaliblack• 14 years ago

Simple patent sending paper-based communication that is enveloped in a paper casing.

zem2• 14 years ago

ObUserfriendly: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030301

neurotech13• 14 years ago

Maybe I should do an AMA on my work for a patent attorney. It would get boring because his MO seems to be to only sue companies that negotiate license deals in "bad faith", and nowhere near the frivolous action seen in here. Most of his work is in filing patents.

The last conversation we had was actually about supporting the EFF, so I'm sure that is quite telling to what direction we're heading.

hdj2• 14 years ago

I'm not fully certain and I would love some verification/counter-argument, but wouldn't the new Public Use Anywhere in the World aspect invalidate atleast some of the garbage patents like the one discussed in the article? http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2012/11/15...

mcherm5• 14 years ago

Not really. The difficulty of invalidating the patent isn't the real barrier to standing up to these sorts of legal threats. The real barrier is that whether you win or not, it costs $100,000 or more to be sued in a patent lawsuit.

Here are your choices:

(A) Pay up. The extorting patentholder charges you $80,000.

(B) Hire a lawyer to defend you in court. The lawyer charges you $100,000. You also might lose and have to pay damages.

(C) Defend yourself in court without a specialist patent lawyer. Unless you ARE a specialist patent lawyer, you are guaranteed to lose. Pay triple damages plus lawyer fees -- actually, just pay everything you own and go live on the street.

Which would you choose?

krickle4• 14 years ago

And note that C is only an option if you are being sued as an individual, if you are being sued as a corporate entity you cannot defend your company pro se, you must retain a licensed attorney.

edouard12345672• 14 years ago

Yet another patent troll nonsense. Who needs scanners anyway... maybe people will come to their senses and stop printing signing & scanning... a waste of paper, energy and precision!

edouard12345672• 14 years ago

The clock is ticking for these patent trolls, scanners will soon become completely useless (posted on HN yesterday) http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/02/google-expensify-paperless-...

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

It would be interesting to see if you could pursue a case of legal malpractice against the firm which took this case to the patent office in the first place.

api2• 14 years ago

The present-day patent office is a joke. They basically just rubber stamp whatever you send them, and do so in priority order of who knows how to play their elaborate and bizarre game of approval queue gaming.

mcherm5• 14 years ago

On what grounds? That law firm successfully obtained a patent which (even if later invalidated) resulted in revenues for their client (the extortion money). That is not malpractice, it is SUCCESSFUL practice -- and more so if the patent is highly questionable, as it may have been the legal firm's skill that resulted in the patent being issued.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

On the same grounds that lawyers are sanctioned for bringing frivolous or extortionate lawsuits.

I think you bring a poor strawman to the debate, its not a question of whether or not the lawyer was successful, its a question of whether they were working toward the betterment of the system. For example. doctors may be sued for malpractice for performing surgeries that are unneeded even though the surgery is completely successful. They violate the terms of their licensing in the state where they practice by doing so.

My point is that there are many ways to mitigate the perils of the patent system without destroying it. One is to make abuse of it to have some cost.

So a proposal might be like this [1]:

To prosecute a patent (represent an inventor as their attorney in the application process) requires licensing by the patent licensing bar. That license states that willfully bringing a patent before the commission that is found later to be invalidated, and such invalidation shows negligence on the part of the prosecuting attorney, that attorney or their firm, is co-liable for any charges or court costs incurred by the folks who invalidated the patent.

It would also be interesting in public shaming of people who claim to have 'invented' such preposterous things. That is a much more social thing though.

[1] I'm not a lawyer, and I know it doesn't work like this today, its a proposal to make it 'painful' to try to game the system as a lawyer.

api2• 14 years ago

I personally hope the patent law abuse gets to the point that it destroys the entire patent system. So go for it. Sue schools, the elderly, whatever.

vertis• 14 years ago

And then what? We'll have nothing at all? I'm certainly not in favour of these patent trolls but you have to have a more nuanced approach to intellectual property than 'Burn down the House'

It's a balance between encouraging innovation by protecting intellectual property, and discouraging it because of patent abuse (etc).

Destroying the patent system completely would most certainly have a negative effect.

pyre• 14 years ago

I'm beginning to believe that reforms are not possible and "burn down the house" may be the only option to escape the current mess. There are too many vested interests, and the problems are too abstract/complex for normal people to care (and put pressure on representatives). Even if the general populous put pressure on Congress to do something, Congress would pass some law that at best did nothing, and at worst went in the opposite direction, all while politicians proclaimed 'victory' in reforming the system, and the general populous settles down because 'something' happened, and the technicalities of why it's bad are too hard to understand in a 10 second sound-bite.

drcube• 14 years ago

No, these trolls show that the entire basis for patents is absurd. The only difference between "patent trolling" and normal patent litigation is that they target individual users who are ignorant of the process. Big businesses have been doing this to each other for decades. Knowledge simply cannot and should not be owned.

mcherm5• 14 years ago

> And then what? We'll have nothing at all?

No... and then we'll have legislators who are willing to improve the system.

> It's a balance between encouraging innovation by protecting intellectual property, and discouraging it because of patent abuse

I think that depends on what part of the patent system you are considering. In the world of medical devices, for instance, it is a balance between encouraging innovation and discouraging it. In the world of software patents I honestly do not think that there is anyone who is innovating because of patents (there ARE some who are making money off innovations they would create anyway), so there I do not feel that there is a balance: software patents only discourage innovation.

dasil0032• 14 years ago

> Destroying the patent system completely would most certainly have a negative effect

Why are you so sure of this? Government granted monopoly is not the only incentive to create something, but there are definitely countless examples of how patents have been used to squash innovation and disruption.

I grant that patents have had some positive effects, but I would not assume they are net-positive. Also, they were primarily designed in a time when there were fewer ideas and getting things into production was much more expensive (this applies to physical things, let along software with zero marginal cost), and it was much easier for an incumbent to steal an idea and crush a startup simply by the barriers to entry to manufacturing and distribution. Since then lobbying efforts have only pushed intellectual property rights in one direction. Even medical research patents which are often held up as necessary create perverse incentives that tie up R&D dollars in unproven new drugs, and making arbitrary tweaks to existing newish medicines in order to secure patent protection, making research into natural or public domain compounds come to a standstill regardless of efficacy.

Obviously I'm biased since I work in software, but I think we'd be fine without patents. Trademark and copyright address much more important issues in my opinion.

wpietri4• 14 years ago

And then we'll figure out what comes next. It's not obvious to me that a 15th-century approach is still the very best option in the coming age of the Internet. There's certainly an awful lot of innovation happening for which patents are irrelevant when they aren't inimical.

Whether or not the whole thing gets burned down, I think api is right that only a major crisis will get us the major changes we need.

mtgx2• 14 years ago

And it's a shame EU just made it easier to get unitary EU patents in Europe now. Ugh.

CamperBob24• 14 years ago

you have to have a more nuanced approach to intellectual property than 'Burn down the House'

(Shrug) The house will either burn down, or it will fall apart due to shoddy construction. Better to get it over with sooner than later, so the land it stands on can be put to better use.

skreech2• 14 years ago

A more nuanced approach would be to stop software patents and lawsuits brought on by non-practicing entities.

That way you don't have to pull the carpet from under drug companies and suchlike, or 'burn down the entire house'. Just the rotten parts of it.

belorn5• 14 years ago

The patent system is one of the two laws still in existence that since its creation during the 17th century, it still have not been updated to even 19th century government procedural style.

Around the 17th and early 18th century, laws was made to be simple. Process required to be made simple. If you stole a horse, you got the same jail time as every other horse thieves. Taxes was the exact same as for everyone (at least for the poor), and there was no books after books with exceptions, rules, and additional judgement calls needed to be made. Everything everyone needed to know about the government could be read in a rather tiny book, written almost like a novel.

But by the late 18th century, governments changed in a radical way in how it worked. Laws got complex. procedures was created to have someone who made a judgement call on goverment actions on however something benefited society or if it did more harm than good. They started to do cost-benefit analysis. One by one, all but two areas (copyright and patent), was changed in how they was issues, and how to balance the public good vs desired benefits.

But giving people 20 years government enforced monopolies has so far evaded any form of cost-benefit evaluations. In contrast, it has just been expanded to cover more and more, for a longer time, and for less money.

Destroying the patent system completely would force a cost-benefit analysis on the whole system of patents and how to maximalistly create incentives for inventions, without costing society more than it gets. Given that its the government that pay's for and enforces said monopolies, one might consider a cost-benefit analysis on the whole system a something that it should do.

hetman• 14 years ago

The patent system is not for encouraging innovation, it is for encouraging people to share the secrets of their innovation. Without a patent system we would go back to the guild system of the middle ages, in other words, the protection of trade secrets.

You're right of course, we're much better off with a working patent system than with the system that came before it. However I'm personally not convinced that the patent system in its current form (at least in the US thought possibly in some other places too) is either working, or better for innovation than no system at all.

linuxhansl2• 14 years ago

I disagree. Only inventions that need a lot of money to be"invented" need any form of legal protection. You'd have to prove that without patents the incentive for R&D would be diminished to the point where it would no longer take place.

tobylane• 14 years ago

Can we find some term that does cover all of the things that don't need patents. It's somewhere between software patents, and all patents except medical/drug patents. Much of what is inbetween those two should (or could if the abuse is lesser there and we want to move it over) be covered by copyright, trademarks, etc. Reasons not to include new loopholes, probably deliberately written, new international treaties to at least make it sensibly easy to cover all markets, many more.

gte910h3• 14 years ago

I hope abuse of process requires bonds per lawsuit/legal communication. I want the prices of suing to go WAY up.

kunil• 14 years ago

Why punish poor people?

krichman3• 14 years ago

Not in all cases you wouldn't. Ideally we'd like the prices to go way up for these kinds of extortionists while remaining low for individuals who were actually wronged by a large corporation.

kalms2• 14 years ago

That would be a bad move. That way you're basically stopping average joe from enjoying the same privileges as large corporations.

guelo• 14 years ago

That didn't help in the RIAA situation, they could have continued suing grammas and kids if they had wanted to with no legislative remedy in sight.

lilsunnybee• 14 years ago

RIAA is involved in copyright protection, not patents.

jskonhovd• 14 years ago

Agreed. It does no one any good.

storf45• 14 years ago

This is just disgusting. Well, here's their contact, facebook, and twitter information if anyone wants to get in touch with them for services! Contact: http://www.hkw-law.com/contact Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/hkwlaw Twitter: https://twitter.com/atllawfirm

padseeker• 14 years ago

Why the heck aren't the hardware manufacturers stepping up on this one? Why should I pay HP/Xerox/Canon/Ricoh thousands for using their manufactured hardware when it does not cover the ability to use it?

I realize being a hacker news reader/tech person means I would know better, but wouldn't some of these people think to themselves "Why isn't this cost included into the hardware?". And why aren't the manufacturers that profit from this type of hardware stepping up as it has the chance to discourage people from buying their stuff.

mesozoic• 14 years ago

So who has the patent on patent trolling?

gefh• 14 years ago

IBM: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Se...

downandout• 14 years ago

In my experience, these places don't actually make any money, so fear not. I did some database consulting work for a company that was in a similar business a few years back. They wound up shutting down after about six weeks because no one bothered paying them. Out of more than $12 million in demands, they received less than $4,000 after sending their first batch. That was when they decided to shut down. I suspect something similar will happen with these guys and anyone that follows them.

pixl97• 14 years ago

Ob. SMBC

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2761#c...

zem2• 14 years ago

honest question - does the united states not have barratry laws? why do they not cover cases like this?

jonkelly• 14 years ago

We got hit with one of these letters. I read through it and it was clear that we weren't actually infringing -- it only applied to the use of distribution to employees via the scanner. Luckily that functionality is pretty much impossible to make work on the Brother MFC that we have. We had our lawyer send back a note saying that we weren't infringing and that was the end of it. My guess is that showing that you are actually paying attention and have a competent attorney is a good way to avoid getting victimized (at least some of the time).

hexagonc2• 14 years ago

Politicians aren't going to do anything about patent trolls until politicians start getting threatened and/or sued by patent trolls.

veidr3• 14 years ago

It would help in cases like this if:

a.) the litigant was not allowed to dismiss the suit without the consent of the defendant, and

b.) there was some mechanism whereby anybody who was subsequently sued on the basis of the same basic claims of infringement of the same patent could use the result of the first case as part of their defense. (E.g., unless the original verdict was overturned on appeal, the plaintiff would have to make some new novel claims that were not part of the original case when suing their next victim.)

This would require changes to the law, but not nearly such drastic change as abolishing the patent system entirely (which I think is scheduled to happen right around the time the USA switches to the metric system).

I was the victim of a very similar shakedown tactic at the hands of DirecTV in 2002. They had hired (sorry, "successfully lobbied to obtain the services of") the US Marshals to raid some small companies that sold smart card programming gear. DirecTV then got their marshal pals to copy the companies' customer databases, and then systematically went after the end users, threatening to sue unless the users paid up $5k to 'settle'.

In my case, our company had indeed bought some smart card programming gear, but I was incensed and inclined to fight (as it sounds like the protagonist of this Ars story was). But the only "fight" we were able to effect was to have our lawyers write a letter (basically, "fuck you, we program smart cards, bring it on") to make them go away for us. They abandoned their threat to sue us, but this didn't affect any of the thousands of other people they were going after with the same exact scam.

Our patent system would be better if the law forced the litigant to a conclusion once a patent suit was brought, and also made it much harder to repeat the same shakedown once one victim had successfully fought it and won.

That's not to say it would fix the problem of patent trolls, but since it would weaken the patent itself (once somebody had the balls and money to fight a bullshit patent shakedown and win) we wouldn't have to give a shit how many shell companies Myrvhold and similar parasites have. (We'd only have to give a shit that they have millions of unique B.S. patents.)

astrodust2• 14 years ago

Until the US courts have a loser pays (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorneys_fees)) system, this will never happen.

Patent trolls want $1,000 per employee for using scanners

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