Whenever I see several different groups behaving in a manner I find obnoxious, I wonder incentives encourage this kind of behavior, and how those incentives might be reduced.
One such way is countersuit, which Rackspace is doing. If everyone (successfully) countersued, the incentive to be a patent troll would diminish.
There might be other ways. Is there some common property patent trolls depend on that might be penalized or forbidden? I've noticed that patent trolls rarely seem to produce anything. Perhaps some sort of "use it or lose it" clause, in which patent holders have a certain amount of time to effectively license their technology to some degree of effectiveness before they can't enforce infringements.
It works in other areas. For instance, in my home state, many people would love to live in the country extremely cheaply, so there's an incentive to set up dubious Christmas tree farms to get nice tax rates. To combat this, you have a certain number of years to turn a profit, and if you don't, you lose the farm credit.
I always wondered what would happen if a neutral party (EFF?) got a lot of money to essentially defend and countersue all patent troll claims, regardless of if they'd win or not. Hopefully this "scorched earth" plan would get the notice of judges and lawmakers to change the law.
>One such way is countersuit, which Rackspace is doing. If everyone (successfully) countersued, the incentive to be a patent troll would diminish.
I was under the impression that these patent troll shell companies are set up so that they have virtually no assets under them. Does countersuing even hurt these shell companies significantly? The only thing I can see countersuits costing patent trolls is time in court (maybe that costs the parent of the shell company money if they operate on a scale where they're hiring lawyers to go sue companies?)
Rackspace is more focussed on having the patents declared invalid than hurting the troll any other way. Eventually you'd run out of patents that are even remotely defensible, because they would have to have been filed long before HDFS became as ubiquitous as it is.
Ah thanks. Thank makes much more sense, esp in light of Newegg's recent victory along those exact lines: "How Newegg crushed the “shopping cart” patent and saved online retail" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125770
Right, but a patent X can only be used to attack technology Y if X predates Y. So once all the pre-Y patents have been struck down you're a lot safer. Even though X might be a totally unoriginal patent, if it predates the technology it's attacking, it might still be hard to defend against. Strike down the patent and it's done - and you cnan't assign another patent in the past.
Technologies continue changing. Your core technology may be older, but if you've integrated with some recent Z, you can still be attacked by patent X, even though your core technology is older.
Look at Apple for instance. It is older than all of the patents it is being sued with. Many of the lawsuits that it faces are for cases where the patent is younger than Apple's technology. Apple still gets sued for it though.
One such way is countersuit, which Rackspace is doing. If everyone (successfully) countersued, the incentive to be a patent troll would diminish.
There might be other ways. Is there some common property patent trolls depend on that might be penalized or forbidden? I've noticed that patent trolls rarely seem to produce anything. Perhaps some sort of "use it or lose it" clause, in which patent holders have a certain amount of time to effectively license their technology to some degree of effectiveness before they can't enforce infringements.
It works in other areas. For instance, in my home state, many people would love to live in the country extremely cheaply, so there's an incentive to set up dubious Christmas tree farms to get nice tax rates. To combat this, you have a certain number of years to turn a profit, and if you don't, you lose the farm credit.
(here's an example of why they do this: http://www.huntingnet.com/forum/wildlife-management-food-plo...)