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Comment by laveur | Hacker News Reader

I would like to note Bloombergs choice of words for the title. I find it interesting they went with that nickname instead of its formal name. To me they only want to strengthen the opinion of the general public that the new patent review process is bad.

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And what a title it is. Trying to parse it before reading the article, I thought someone had patented Death Squads, and I was trying to figure out if that was a technical system or a mercenary system.

Edit: Try Dr. Moriarty's Patent Death Squad System Today!

Yeah, I very much had to reread the headline to see if it was a death squad for patents or a patent on death squads.

I'm a bit surprised at Bloomberg, because they had as much space as they wanted. Normally this happens with things like the BBC app, where full headlines are truncated down to a few words. That's how we get winners like "New powers over death considered".

I was imagining a decision centering on whether criminal conduct can be patented. Imagine: suing drug cartels for infringing on your contraband distribution business process.

Your point is well taken, but for me Bloomberg's attempt to make the reader feel negative had the opposite of its intended effect. I had a moment of pleasant schadenfreude when I pictured shadowy figures coming in the middle of the night to kidnap patent trolls and take them to secret prisons.

Considering the choice of words of the article itself, Bloomberg appears to be on the side of patent trolls (in particular, deliberately pretending it's a David vs. Goliath situation in which megacorps crush the rights of independent inventors).

Maybe Bloomberg has a directive to support IP monopolies and IP protection, and the journalist failed to see that a sleazy NPE is something quite different from Disney.

I misread this as Patient Death Squad, like health insurance claims or something similar.

I doubt the "general public" knows anything at all about this issue. And I've been involved in patents in the past, and I'd never heard this review called a "death squad" before. Definitely inside baseball.

It's pretty weird. We've taken that bit out of the title above.

Edit: I am wrong, need more coffee

Well, the highest court in the land just said "this is bad"

No they didn't, they upheld it

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