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Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

The entire patent system needs to be redesigned. Lawyers always seem terrified at the prospect of throwing away decades of case law but in this case, considering the nature of what patents represent and how they are used has changed so much from their original purpose, it’s probably necessary.

Of course, big business incumbents don’t mind the system because they have corporate lawyer teams that understand how it works and how to play it, so I don’t have any hope that it will ever become a political issue

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It may balance out over time, but big businesses spend an enormous amount of money defending themselves against patent suits and defensively filing patents. Patent trolls are the only types of businesses that purely see upside from patents.

They also benefit from the stability of operating within a pretty known system and the fact that they are able to afford legal expertise. Big businesses may get hurt by patent trolls, but I’d imagine that this is less strategically important to their business than using their patents to prevent competitors from starting up or from taking away their business.

Small businesses get hurt the most by the patent system. A patent troll can bankrupt them or make them unfundable, big business can squash them (perhaps offensively, eg a big business takes a small business to court even though they can’t win, so the small business can’t raise funding and has to pay tons in legal costs), and they still have to pay lawyers for advice on how to protect themselves even if nobody goes after them.

No doubt it hurts small business the worst, but I'd not agree with the notion that all big businesses net gain from this. Lawyer time isn't cheap, and the bigger you are, the more attention you gather. And of course, patent trolls optimize to use the most lawyer time possible, to make it less efficient to defend (sometimes, it legitimately isn't worth it.)

Basically abolishing patents would definitely receive pushback from bigger and even smaller companies, but improving case law to be more reasonable really wouldn't.

If you're big enough you have teams of lawyers on staff. It costs you literally nothing extra. If you're not big enough to have staff lawyers you're not big. Small businesses are pretty much everyone else. You can't polish a turd, and this system as well as the copyright system are a giant turd that's antithetical to the original intent of the law.

The lawyers they have on staff wouldn't otherwise be shooting pool and drinking beer, they'd be doing useful things for the company. There's a big (opportunity) cost.

Plus lawyers are not all interchangeable, just because you have people who know employment law or how to M&A didn't mean they are good at fighting patents on court. AFAIK they're usually externally firms, not in-house lawyers

You might instead want to make a looser pays rule standard for patent suits, due to their special notions for who has standing.

That only balances it for those big businesses. For new firms the balance is quite a lot against them.

You're right, but several important business models stop working out when patents disappear, most notably drug researchers.

> The entire patent system needs to be redesigned.

That doesn't necessarily mean removing it altogether. Making more thing unpatentable (ex algorithms, discoveries, etc.) and shortening the lifetimes of patents could go a long way.

forcing upstart competitors to spend potentially billions fending off patent trolls is a good barrier to entry

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