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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

We need to really make it painful to be a patent troll. Allow companies to band together and accuse a company for being a patent troll (list of patents as evidence and evidence of the ideas having existed prior to patent filings), if proven then their patents should be disbanded and the company fined. At the very least allow companies to band together to have invalid obscure patents from unknown companies that DO NOT EVEN INNOVATE taken down and voided.

Edit:

Once a patent has been proven invalid, it should be possible to sue for damages from being forced to pay the patent troll.

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The first thing that came to mind was a new brand of patent troll companies that seek to invalidate a smaller company's patent by "proving" it invalid.

What does the "new brand of patent troll companies" gain from this? Patent trolls exist today because of the monetary gain, why would those exist for no monetary gain?

You're telling me that you can't envision a situation where Big Company A holds patents worth billions, and Big Company B wouldn't pay money to see those patents invalidated?

You're telling me that you can't envision a situation where Big Company B could spend millions (instead of billions) in an attempt to bring down such patents and, even if it loses, consider it just a risky bet at best?

Why couldn't Big Company B just do that themselves already?

The bigger patent troll company would have to prove it has been patent trolled by the smaller company though? If the smaller company has never even contacted the bigger one, how is there any shred of a patent abuse violation?

We really need to fund USPTO better so some of these never get passed in the first place. I also think limiting the lifetime of "tech" patents removes most of this. Troll attacks must come very very quickly instead of just buying them up when start-ups go out of business for pennies so they can charge to "license" their pile of crap.

I wish patents had to argue how much work it would take a peer in the industry replicate their work.

A pharmaceutical company could argue that another company would have to spend millions on research just like they did. A tech company would argue that a talented 15 year old would need at least a day to duplicate their work. Give one a 20 year patent and the other a 1 year patent.

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