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Comment by sprayk | Hacker News Reader

> What? You're saying companies file patents on tech they don't intend on using so they don't get sued by patent trolls for their non-use of some other preexisting patent? That doesn't make sense on any level.

Why does that not make sense? This has been the case at every job I've worked withe patent filing incentives. You get a few thousand dollars for coming up with an idea and going through the motions of writing the technical parts of the patent. The patent doesn't have to have anything to do with the business, they just want it for defense, and to increase value of a potential sale of the company.

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Okay, I get that it adds value to the company. But what do you mean by defense? How is filing patents that you don't intend to produce so you can win legal battles any different from patent trolling?

The "defense" part is that big company X with a large patent portfolio might sue you for infringing on a patent - unless you have a large patent portfolio because then if they sue you, your lawyers can review everything they're doing and compare it to your patent portfolio and find ways to sue them. This is something like mutually assured destruction.

It seems preposterous to me, but this is also the basic idea I've got from working at multiple big companies where they have training meetings to explain these things. You're very much encouraged to come up with ideas and submit them for the lawyers to look at and possibly patent even if it has no applicability to anything you're doing.

Ah I see, that makes more sense. So basically the court case looks at the pool of patents each company has, and one that has a lot of patents related to the industry it's involved in looks more legit than a potential patent troll holding a bunch of totally unrelated stuff. Is that more or less correct?

Sorry for contradicting you earlier. That still seems like a crazy way to manage IP, but after all I haven't got a better solution. Thanks for explaining. In my career I haven't been expected to produce patents very often. I'll try to remain a bit more humble.

The defensive aspect is for companies with real products.

Company A owns patents X, Y, Z. Company B owns patents M, N, O.

Company B sues company A that one of their products infringes on patent N. Company A countersues that 3 products of company B's infringes on X, Y, & Z.

That's the defensive aspect for company A. They won't instigate but they'll retaliate aggressively. This is known as the "nuclear option" as this strategy was employed during the Cold War - build up your offensive arsenal as a defensive measure to protect yourself against a first strike.

Plenty of examples during the smartphone patent wars[1] and perhaps this strategy isn't quite as successful as it once was.

For patent trolls having a large patent portfolio can increase the likelihood that you own a patent that the troll's patent is based on helping you with prior art claims. So having a large patent portfolio improves your defensiveness there. Additionally a large patent portfolio increases the value of your company because those patents are IP that have tangible value in the market; many tech companies choose not to monetize but frequently IP licenses can be bought/sold (or even the patents transferred) and mutual IP licensing is frequently part of lawsuit settlements so there's further value there. Since it's impossible to actually predict the value of almost any given patent in the future, having a large war chest improves your bargaining position/value of the patent portfolio.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_patent_wars

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