respectful naming of your opponent [LWN.net]

respectful naming of your opponent

Posted Oct 15, 2007 19:31 UTC (Mon) by moxfyre (subscriber, #13847)
In reply to: respectful naming of your opponent by zooko
Parent article: A visit from the trolls

> I know this is going to sound weird to some folks, but I would appreciate it if we didn't use disrespectful terms like "troll" to denote people whose actions or roles we dislike.

> We can argue that they are doing wrong while still referring to them with a word which indicates a normal human being just like the rest of us.

I understand your sentiment, but I think the history of the term "patent troll" actually shows that it's not meant to be offensive, but rather descriptive.

I believe it comes from the folk tale of a troll who hides under a bridge for a long time. People use the bridge to get about and do their business. One day the troll pops up and demands some fee to cross the bridge, causing problems for everyone who was using it.

In the same way, patent trolls wait until a particular technology becomes popular and widely used, and then "pop up" and start demanding money to use it. Many of them own dozens of patents and just selectively enforce the ones that pan out.

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respectful naming of your opponent

Posted Oct 15, 2007 22:18 UTC (Mon) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

So patent law needs a change, to ensure a company has to actively protect
its patent - if it's used for say a year already, and pretty widespread,
and they knew or should have known about it, it should be rendered
invalid. And I believe such is the case in the Netherlands, but I'm not
sure...

respectful naming of your opponent

Posted Oct 16, 2007 1:18 UTC (Tue) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link]

In the US, patent examination is supposed to eliminate applications that already in wide use or that should be obvious to a practitioner. Inventions that have been shipped (or otherwise disclosed) for more than a year are not eligible for patents.

If the law required that patents be actively used by the patent holder wouldn't work because the patent holder would be able to create products that were not competitive in the market (say, costing 10 times the cost of competitive products) and existed only to prove that the technology was being used.

Mandatory licensing for statutory fees could be an interesting approach. So could basing the duration of the patent on the cost/complexity of the invention process, the difficulty of the productization process, and how important the innovation is, but the difficulty of running such a process is unimaginable.