I saw Bitcoin as another Second Life, great for smart young programmers to have a new sandbox to play in, but not actually useful for working adults. I was similarly "annoyed" by all the Second Life media hype happening after I had written it off.
They are waiting for bitcoin to become the number #1 currency. Just like people joke about 'the year of linux'. Guess what, linux is still around. It doesn't need to be #1. There may never be a 'year of linux', but it doesn't mean linux is a failure.
I see, I don't see it being successful at that, in trade. I see it's blockchain and consensus model being used as settlement on a broad and broader scale.
If this is the kind of impetus needed to set off patent reform, all the better. I would argue against the "Troll" label, it is a legal firm doing its job very well. The Troll bashers I assume would prefer the companies to just leave this $ to the infringes? Why? Is it somehow immoral to use the legal system for financial gain? No, it is not, not at all. I'd say good on them for finding the loop holes and driving their $600M lorrie straight through it to the bank. Don't say fuck the trolls, fuck the patent system in the US which Apple has used to the detriment of many young companies too, they are all playing the game.
Typically the 'troll' label is applied to companies like Virnetx because they produce nothing of value. They are strictly rent seekers - net negative economic value creators.
"It's a massive verdict for VirnetX, a company that has no products and makes its money solely through patent litigation."
Even that's selectively looking at the facts though. At some point they paid for those patents, and that theoretically put money in the pockets of creators, incentivizing them to create more.
That said, to my eyes it's clearly a subversion of the intended purpose of patents, and is societally damaging, so I see no problem with derogatory labeling of this behavior and those that take part in it. It's unfortunate, but it's an important part of getting consensus in a short time frame with a large populace.
That's not selectively looking at the facts at all. The facts are plain:
- company buys patents for the purpose of seeking rents
- company aggressively pursues others who are independently creating potentially valuable products to shake them down for rents
- company produces nothing of value with the patent except for increased wealth transfer by extracting value from others' work
That they [theoretically] put money in someone's pocket to get the patent in the first place does not change any of these facts. And calling attention to the behavior isn't selectively dealing with the facts. They exist purely for rent-seeking.
> That they [theoretically] put money in someone's pocket to get the patent in the first place does not change any of these facts.
Actually, depending on your definition of rent seeking, it either makes it rent-seeking or not, so it may affect those facts. Would inventors be incentivized to create as much if there wasn't a market for these types of patents? Even if you discounts the type of patents that trolls attempt to control as useless, can we say that those crappy patents didn't subsidize better inventions?
Now, I'm not defending patent trolls, just noting that it may be a mistake to assume there is no economic value to what they do, even though the net outcome is likely negative. The positive and negative consequences may not be entirely comparable, making this easy to overlook.
Best reply, but... How often is a typo made (1:1000?), how much time for support staff is needed and how many lost orders due to a ~24 hour delay in some orders being placed. Also, easy to flood the system with bad orders that need to be manually sorted, like a fake order DDoS.
If a typo is made 1:1000 times Candy Japan would have had.. 2? At this small scale it's probably worth it - the loss of a customer isn't as big a problem as loss of physical goods.
Not to mention that you can verify the Luhn checksum on CC numbers and immediately catch ~90% of all typos (and 100% of single-digit typos). Don't even need a server call.
