11
votes
Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls
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- Title
- A Wild Hearing: Chief Judge Connolly Flips Over Rock, Finds Mavexar LLC Crawling Around, Controlling Patent Litigation and Giving Hapless Patent Owners Just 5-10%
- Word count
- 1569 words
I'll take a very unlike myself opinion in this - I'll support patent trolls, but only if their exploits are increased by a thousand fold and punishes the entire patent system for being incredibly inept, antiquated, and against any and all forms of innovation. We need serious and far ranging complete patent reform (or revolution) and if deliberate brute-force use of the horrendous laws and regulations that have allowed those entities to proliferate over the last several decades finally forces changes, then bring on more of them.
Short term they are horrendous, long term we may need them to force positive changes that benefit and are on the side of small-time inventors and problem solvers, and not the mega-corporations (patent trolls with massive capital).
tl;dr: Patent trolls are bad, the patent system that enables them is bad, we need to force massive patent reform.
I think part of the problem is that the original 'intent' of a patent is to reward novel, new creations by smallish inventors.
I'd say a reasonable reform is that they are no longer transferable, only licensable. Can only have named people on patent, not a company.
Companies won't be able to build mass patent portfolios, individuals will retain protections against gross violations.
Except there's no way that a law could be worded (or stand up to challenge) to stop a patent from being put under an employee's name and irrevocably licensed to the company for the entire lifetime of the patent for $1.
Even if they could make a law and enforce it, individuals don't have the capital to defend their patents.
Short on time or I'd elaborate more:
The first item requires lawyers to work for free until all appeals have been exhausted and money is actually paid out.
The second takes away the patent holder's rights not to do business with someone they don't want to. You make something that is meant to improve bluetooth connectivity, Raytheon decides they want it in their new BabySeekerTM missiles as well and you don't have an recourse to say no.
Just like all those businesses that had "No Negros" on the door... they had the right to not do business with someone they didn't want to. Except that doesn't really work in a society that aims for justice and elegatarianism.
The only thing a patent grants is the exclusive right to a given implementation for 10ish years, in exchange how it works becomes public knowledge. What you've listed is an extra right which is of questionable value to society as a whole.
You want exclusive control over something? Don't file for a patent and rely on trade secrets. Or don't license out your patent at all and use it exclusively yourself as a competitive advantage (also one of the original intents of a patent, IIRC). Or destroy your creation if you fear it will be used more for evil than good.
Otherwise, accept that your invention has a price and anyone willing to pay can have it. Whether they are black charities or the military industrial complex.
That's on a long list of things that work in theory, but not reality. Once we've all managed to come together and build such a society we can circle back to the patent issue.
r/NonCredibleDefense is leaking…
I agree wholeheartedly. Sometimes you need to take a few small losses to gain a final overwhelming win.