What is Florian's strategy?

Exactly, it's important to communicate the problems. Communicate with others in your industry (eg, software related or nonsoftware related), with customers, and with government representatives. Eg, add an easy to use form to your website allowing customers to write to their reps and/or sign a petition.

I see a lot of companies not getting active and being shaken down, perhaps repeatedly over the coming decade. People that haven't yet would probably gain from uniting and supporting each other. Software patents allow a small group to tax the industry and consumers. It's a game won by the big money and the "trolls" that don't produce products but simply shake people down. If you produce, you will have to face a constant risk from trolls and a larger group that wants you to pay significant fees to cover their many many patents.

Heck, independent invention and fair use are not built into the law.

[Well, patents weren't used against so many people traditionally, because a motivation for the law was to facilitate capitalization into the real dollar millions of dollars to manufacture the item.]

Original software (with many many unpatented ideas and perhaps almost entirely original expressive content (a la copyright law) is being created by many people in very large quantities and used in very sophisticated systems. Much of this software I refer to is also openly revealed to the world and available for $0 (Linux is an example). This is only possible because software is expression, afterward simply automatically loaded into the device that will use it. Anyone can do this. You don't need a million dollars, and a monopoly is ridiculous (that is why the SCOTUS ruled algorithms to be abstract and believes the machine-or-transformation test is a very very good test). A monopoly (enforced) would tie up so many people and add so much overall cost that free speech at a large scale would be violated in practice and innovation smacked hard down. Progress would not be promoted, and many people's original existing works would be deemed illegal if we are to believe the threats of the people holding the software patent paper on such software.

Look at how funny is the patent law in general though obviously the real harm becomes clear once it affects a large number of creators and users directly: it says that to get a patent, you have to "invent" something.. get this.. non-obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art!!

Now, this means that if you are starting off "in the art" today, and you take a year to figure something out (ie, you didn't think it was obvious), that this could very well have been allowed to be patented by the USPTO by someone ahead of you and be in effect today. It also means that if you are experienced (eg, your employees or those contributing open source software like Linux that you might use), then a monopoly is being granted on things these experienced people very possibly consider to be obvious and already anticipated or could deduce very quickly .. or perhaps have even developed already.

Unless you ask for help from the people sharing their prior art (the open source world), you may not realize that prior art existed. [Open source collaboration took off with the creation and rise of the Internet, btw. It's a superior model -- collaboration is -- that some of these patent attackers want to hold back to preserve their old ways and very high profits on information bits we call software.. eg, like the bits on a software CD -- a CD is a machine!! how funny. What's next, to claim that putting that information into your computer is a patenable act!! Anyway, open source allows people to charge for their time to integrate and expand such software in custom ways (as well as other possibilities), but do not in practice allow anyone to become billionaire by.. um.. "printing money". Again, don't forget that if software patents were legal, they would pre-empt original works many could perform in an afternoon or 10 in their homes and then share with the world by dinner time (on the 10th day).]

And no matter how talented someone is (or not), they can't be the first to do everything (and most creators, can't afford to patent a tiny fraction of all their ideas). Everyone can't be first by definition. So we give a monopoly to a single -- that's right, a single -- person to stop everyone else coming to the same conclusions is say a year's time (or perhaps a little more time or in many cases much less time).

The bar is ridiculously low and virtually guarantees progress will not be promoted, at least not when you step on many toes for every single such monopoly granted (and software has many creators/inventors because of it's very low cost.. it's like writing math/fiction -- you create algorithms and you create virtual reality descriptions) and not whenever the costs to manufacture don't warrant monopoly granting (as is obviously the case for software, as demonstrated quick convincingly over and over by the Linux (open source) world because manufacturing software is so cheap these days).

Could you imagine if we rewarded the winner of a track and field race one time and then that person was the only one allowed to run future races or to set the terms and give themselves nice handicaps? Would that promote the quality of the sport? No, it would instead discourage many from competing. Perhaps the software patent proponents want that -- to discourage innovation and development so that in enough time it appears like only they do things. Yeah, consumers will really gain there.

These giants supporting patents have very low costs to manufacture software (unpatenable algorithms.. mental steps for information processing with the obvious post-solution step of displaying results and accepting more information from the user on a continual basis -- this was "novel" many decades ago, not today), yet want to get the 20 year monopolies enforced. Listen, volunteers (!!) are creating very good quality software. This is software that likely would infringe on some patents, while at the same time having many original pieces of innovation. That is the essence of software.

The very large companies that will come to get money from you (perhaps using a proxy litigation firm) have a pipeline of lawyers and average engineers cranking out "nonobvious" patents. They threaten to sue you out of business. That is unacceptable. Monopolies should never have been granted. And if software is not patentable, the USPTO should stop granting such patents.

OK, so software algorithms are abstract. The SCOTUS has already ruled on that. And most uses of software are obvious: you stick it into the computer and enjoy the results of all those calculations and information processing for which the computer/device was designed to accomplish. Can people patent calculations done by a calculator or its display? The way the machine calculates has been and is being patented, but the calculations you want it to perform is a total abstraction, and frankly, others should not deprive you of that liberty or try to "tax" you for such use, especially if the calculations to be performed (to effect the virtual realities dreamed up by some people) were largely original content. [And who can afford to read and understand the thousands of patents being granted continuously, allegedly, many of which can be called software patents or will be used to try and tax your use of a computer that way.]

What may happen to some groups is that those with the unfair and stifling monopoly patent papers will come to your door and demand ransom. I guess each will react their own way.

And one reason I use open source is because these are people that recognize the value to industry and to society of collaboration. I don't support software patent supporters or patron them if I can at all avoid it. If I get sued, I want to have the moral high ground and know I am part of a wide collaboration going on, not be helping a few of the greediest who want to mint money and stifle progress for their own greedy ends.

>> No company involved in the creation of original or proprietary software can afford to unilaterally refuse to get involved in the patent landscape, I'm afraid.

Well, no one is alone. The number of people writing (and using) open source software (and no patents.. but using licenses like the GPL) is of very significant size and likely growing at a healthy pace. You progress faster when you collaborate in creating virtual worlds and algorithms.

I am not a lawyer.

I don't support software patents because they would stifle and abridge a whole lot of people's Constitutional rights. They also bias greatly against most folks in favor of the highly ambitious (in the litigation sense) and likely already quite wealthy.

And note that it can be very costly and time consuming to prove prior art in court. This is why many people allow themselves (wrongfully) to be shaken down. We have to shed light on this and shame the people doing the shaking down. Share your experiences with a wide group and seek the collective wisdom, voting, boycotting, and shaming power in numbers. Sometimes those small firms are intimately connected with giants of industry that stand to lose a lot of business if we work as a group.

This comment includes the sorts of things I periodically share with my elected representatives. It's important to share this with them.