Hacker News Reader

Comment by raquo | Hacker News Reader

Someone PLEASE make a patent trolling incident database that would include cases like that one. Two purposes:

1) you will gather an enormous amount of trolling evidence which will come in handy when this issue will get more attention from government and the public

2) when the troll issues such notes en masse (which I think they do), it will be easier for the victims to connect and pool resources to invalidate the patent.

View on HN

Thats actually a good idea. What would be the requirements? It might be an interesting weekend project for me!

You need stuff like patent numbers in question, the companies involved, industries, categories, links to relevant news stories and blog posts, etc. People should be able to submit what they know (you don't want to gather all this info yourself, apart from some initial pile so that the site does not look empty). The website should be easy to use for

1) bloggers/journalists finding out about stories about blatant trolling

2) victims to report their case and find other victims affected by it (automatic search by patent number, trolling company name, etc)

Note that victims will not look for your website in particular unless you're really popular. You have to create a lot of pages for each patent number, each company name, so that google picks them up and they come up on the first page when searching for patent number for example.

This is unfortunately too much for simply a weekend project. The technology is trivial but getting traction with such a website, bringing it to the attention of major blogs and news outlets is the main work to be done.

An area for estimated economic damage in the incident reports (broken out by legal costs, code changes, abandoned projects, etc.) would help reporters and politicians find some jaw-dropping stats to quote.

You'd also want to consider making a company ownership hierarchy. Most patent trolls work through a dizzying number of shell companies.

>>he technology is trivial but getting traction with such a website, bringing it to the attention of major blogs and news outlets is the main work to be done.

Like always! ;)

A more pressing question is: Is there any possible legal repercussions of building such a site. I live and host in the UK if that makes any difference.

The obvious way to implement this project would be a wiki. I googled a little and found a specialized wiki that already has the beginnings of such a project:

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Patent_trolls

So those of you who really want to help the world could go there and participate.

As someone else pointed out, this site exists: http://endsoftpatents.org/

Does that cover your idea?

It now also occurred to me that location of the victim and abuser is also important. City or state at least.

How about a vote-up mechanism to bring the most ridiculous patents to the top?

Don't use any rollover images in your project or you will certainly become a target of a patent infringement lawsuit.

Why not go the other way and make a point that the project violates every patent it lists?

Because the list itself would prove pre-existing knowledge of the patents being violated, which allows for damages awarded to be much greater than an unknown violation.

In Google:

site:news.ycombinator.com "patent troll"

Done. :)

Already done.

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/List_of_lawsuits

Thanks for the link, but key here is to track threats rather than lawsuits. A lot of threats are just settled and no one hears of them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com