The limits of a patent pool

The limits of a patent pool

Posted Dec 8, 2005 19:18 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (guest, #3659)
In reply to: The limits of a patent pool by JoeBuck
Parent article: A look at the Patent Commons Project and OIN

Indeed, this was my first thought while reading the article.

The only defense against such litigants, if it can be called a defense, is what U.S. Senate Republicans might call the "nuclear option". If some surrogate troll (I like PJ's term) sues a Linux shop or company using Linux, we sue Microsoft to ban them from shipping infringing software, and sue a bunch of big companies to ban them from using it. The whole ecosystem goes down, software patents are shown to be a fraud, and unthinkably immense pressure builds to get rid of them -- just so we can all compute again!

It may never come to this, particularly before Europe commits to software patents, since any big patent attack now exposes the fraud, leading to an anti-swpat outcome in Europe. But this is a scenario which we need to prepare for ("we" not implying that I can do anything here :-).

Are there any suggestions for alternatives to the above "nuclear option"?

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