Comment by kauffj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kauffj | Hacker News Reader

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This seems like as good a thread as any to mention one of my favorite unrealized enterprises: Patent Trolling for Good (PTG)

The idea is simple: take the traditional model of a patent troll, but alter the settlement terms to create a cascade that ultimately ends or significantly reduces the exclusive ownership of facts (aka IP).

Patent Trolling for Good acts like a traditional Patent Troll in that it takes any IP it has and aggressively uses it to make claims against other firms/entities.

However, instead of just seeking cash, PTG offers two options:

- Pay us a lot of cash

- Join PTG. By joining: 1) all of your IP can be used by PTG to sue others and 2) everyone in PTG has automatic rights to any IP held by others in PTG

And of course, anyone is welcome to join PTG at any time. You don't have to wait to be sued to join :)

I've brought this idea up with VCs and lawyers a few times across the years but I've never gotten any bites. If anyone was ever seriously and credibly interested in pursuing it, I would give such an entity any and all IP owned/claimable by LBRY (https://lbry.io) and potentially a small amount of initial funding as well.

> exclusive ownership of facts (aka IP)

This is one of the weirdest definitions of IP I have ever seen.

You think a story is a fact? Stories are usually copyrighted and usually part of what people mean by "IP".

Facts are generally not copyrightable. You want to go and make a phone book or a map, you can. Other existing phone books or maps do not mean you can't make your own.

What about a distinctive trademark? Surely you agree that my company logo is not a fact. You want to use my company logo to sell your stuff? That would be deceiving customers if you started to sell your stuff under my name. Is the logo and distinctive mark a fact?

Rather than have an argument about categorization I'll instead respond to the core moral question.

I do not think it is moral to claim that you own a story or a logo in the same way that one owns a shirt or a cell phone.

(But yes, I think a story or a logo is much more like a fact than property. Though they're certainly less fact-like than other types of facts.)

_Claiming_ to be another company that you are not is something different entirely (fraud) and does not require IP.

The categorisation is important. Copyright is very different from trademarks is very different from patents. It is important to understand these different laws rather than saying that they're all about owning facts or owning whatever it is you consider "owning" to be.

The very term "intellectual property" is troublesome because it indicates the very ownership that you're objecting to. There is no ownership. And there is no property.

A patent is about disclosing inventions. Copyright is about giving the author economic and moral rights. A trademark is about making sure consumers are not deceived. It is a separate law than fraud. You can deceive by abusing trademarks without outright lying.

Patents can be infringed accidentally. You can infringe a patent without ever being aware of it. You cannot accidentally infringe copyright. The plaintiff of a copyright infringement complaint has to prove that you deliberately copied. Independent retelling of a story is fine. Independent rediscovery of a patented invention is not.

It is important to understand these laws, their origin, their purpose, and their nuance, whether you agree with them or not, in terms of the rights they grant and what constitutes infringement. Making the analogy to property and ownership is misleading and leads to the wrong conclusions about how these laws work.

Know thy enemy.

Trademarks: Who Copyrights: What Patents: How

Many do not realize that utility patents generally protect how something is done, not what was done. Inventors will often say, we can't patent that because someone else does that thing already. But it is the "how" that matters not the "what."

For example, even though the paper mention Amazon's one-click patent, there are probably 100's of other shopping cart patents that claim different methods of making an ecommerce shopping cart work.

US Trademarks protect against consumer confusion. The policy is based on protecting the public not the trademark holder.

Trademarks are also defend-it-or-lose-it. That is why companies aggressively sue to protect their trademarks. If they do not actively defend their marks from infringement they will lose their rights in the undefended marks.

It seems to me that a potential flaw with this plan is that mounting patent litigation costs money, so if everyone just joins the PTG to avoid expensive patent litigation defense, then the PTG would not have any income to sustain itself. Its continued survival would require that a significant percentage of cases end up with cash winnings instead of the target joining the PTG.

To be sustainable it can't be TOO effective.

It would have to only allowing joining before a suit is launched or after all payments for misuse of its patents have been met.

Problem is, once it begins generating revenue, there is a chance it will want to continue doing so. The lawyers on staff don't want to get fired for lack of work, so there is a possibility it becomes a bad (or at least Chaotic Neutral) patent troll.

Or perhaps: let the PTG sue any company that sued any other company/indifidual for patent violations (rightfully or not; enforcing patents is always evil).

https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPX_Corporation

There are several (lots?) of defense patent networks.

This is an offensive patent network with the intent of proactively obviating or severely reducing patent enforcement.

Patent: The Gathering

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