A victory for the trolls

Posted Apr 26, 2011 4:59 UTC (Tue) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048)
In reply to: A victory for the trolls by ajb
Parent article: A victory for the trolls

Sorry to say so, but this approach won't impress political decision-makers in the slightest. First of all, it's just a hypothetical thing in terms of the licensing cost. In practice, not every patent is asserted against every potential infringer (not even in the smartphone space, though there's a lot of enforcement going on there). Politicians don't care about what might theoretically happen if it doesn't happen in practice. If the likelihood of this kind of total patent enforcement scenario is so low that maybe one software company will go out of business every 150 years, they won't care. Moreover, the problem you point to could also be solved through other means than abolition, such as ensuring that the total amount of damage awards to all patent holders is only a certain percentage of a product's overall economic value.

I explained a while ago right here on LWN that politicians won't abolish software patents until they see that software companies really suffer and approach them with calls for abolition, and that those calls aren't just based on filling out a web form in five minutes but that there's a serious effort bein made. In terms of the constituency that politicians would care about, I mentioned what a staffer of the conservative group in the European Parliament told an anti-software patent activist years ago. He said: bring on those middle-aged closed-source entrepreneurs with beards, bellies and glasses.

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A victory for the trolls

Posted Apr 26, 2011 7:12 UTC (Tue) by ajb (subscriber, #9694) [Link]

Indeed, but I think such an experiment would play a useful part in persuading closed-source entrepreneurs of the dangers of software patents. In the long term, it is the growth of trolls which will do this, but we need them to understand before the trolls actually win. (If patent markets such as http://www.ipxi.com/ become entrenched, it will be impossible to reform the system).

I don't think closed source people quite understand their potential exposure right now. That is what this kind of experiment can change. We need to show them that the software world is effectively living in a 'black economy' - like the third world entrepreneurs who can't register their property.

One of the things about a black economy, is that businesses can't appeal to the law to protect themselves. We are not quite to that point in the software world, but you can imagine analogous problems. For example, businesses are often concerned about the 'disgruntled employee' problem. If a disgruntled employee offers a rival company his employers trade secrets, they will usually report him to the police, because they would get into legal trouble otherwise. But suppose instead a disgruntled employee offers evidence of patent infringement. This kind of thing already happens in the copyright world, with 'shop your employer' lines for software licenses. It's not much of a stretch to imagine it happening over patents.