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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it's possible to make some sort of patent troll insurance company.

Basically a company that attempts to collect as many patents as possible to weaponize against trolls and then provides legal protection to clients from trolls. The clients can share their patents with the insurance company too to help them become more powerful.

Then when sued by a troll the insurance company goes scorched earth to destroy them as a matter of policy. So their clients get the benefit of also deterring suits just because they're represented by this insurance company.

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Unfortunately the economics of insurance & low settlement demands from patent trolls would simply come into sync at some point.

This is because patent trolling is a low effort attack, while fighting them is a high effort activity. With an insurance company it would be no different: The pool of money from premiums still wouldn't be enough to fight all of the trolls because they would also all be pooled.

It's cheaper to just collect premiums, payout claims as little as possible, and if claims get too high you re-assess your actuarial tables and raise premiums where appropriate.

Insurance companies simply aren't in the business of solving the root-cause of any given problem. They're in the business of risk analysis & pooled risk & selling financial risk mitigation on that basis.

> Insurance companies simply aren't in the business of solving the root-cause of any given problem.

There is precedent for insurance underwriters to attempt to modify/reduce the risks of their underwriting.

Aviation insurance often comes with training or other restrictions more severe than what the FAA requires. “Coverage shall not be in effect until pilot completes FlightSafety initial. Coverage will then be only for supervised operations by a pilot meeting the open pilot requirements listed in ___ until a further 25 hours of supervised operating experience is completed.” or similar.

UL (Underwriters’ Laboratories) origin story is from building insurance underwriters seeking to understand their risk.

This surely is true for things where insurance company behavior doesn't increase risk. But here the incentives are different because every dollar they pay out to a patent troll is a dollar that can be used against them.

I could believe that they wouldn't be "scorched earth" about it. But I could see them being incredibly difficult to get a dime out of. Insurance companies tend to be like that normally, but here the incentives are even stronger.

> Insurance companies simply aren't in the business of solving the root-cause of any given problem. They're in the business of risk analysis & pooled risk & selling financial risk mitigation on that basis.

Insurance companies generally hold vast amounts of assets - and some already shift their investment strategy based on policy, e.g. climate change and other sustainability goals (see https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-i...), work with large customers to reduce their risk exposure or indirectly go after the root causes, e.g. by exiting risk-prone markets (basically, no insurance any more for flood or fire prone areas).

Risk reduction is a little different than attempting to solve the root cause. It's also notable that risk reduction generally doesn't include launching massive litigation initiatives. An important distinction is that insurance companies try to reduce risk so that they reduce claims, not solve the root problem. In fact solving the problem could put them out of business. Any effort towards risk reduction is to maximize profit, not solve the problem.

I also don't see any market that insurance companies could exit to reduced patent trolling.

There's a ton of asymmetry that makes this not work. One, patent trolls are "non-practicing entities". They don't build anything, or do anything other than sue people, so you can t sue them for infringement of patents. Two they shard their portfolio into very small chunks, often one patent per company. If you knock down one patent, you just take out that one patent. Three, they are usually run by lawyers, so their cost to attack is just their time, whereas you'll have to hire an attorney at market rate to respond. Four, if things get hairy, they can almost always just dismiss the case, and then you lose any claim you have against them, because they're not suing you any more. It's tricky to get counterclaims set up so you can continue grinding them down after they try to dismiss - and it will cost you money. And, at the end of the day, you'll at best invalidate their one patent.

>Basically a company that attempts to collect as many patents as possible to weaponize

You've more or less explained IBM. You cant come at IBM because their patent portfolio is so vast, they you're bound to be doing something that infringes on some patent they have.

When I working there you wouldn't get promoted from being an IC to a manager unless you had at least 10 patents to your name during your tenure there.

1. This is called a patent pool. It's very common.

2. You can't sue a parent troll for patent infringement, since they don't have any technology business. They are only "companies" on paper.

You can preemptively sue them, albeit not for infringing on your IP. It’s called declaratory relief.

Unfortunately it would basically be an ongoing DDoS on the court system to try to get declaratory relief for existing garbage patents and the never ending stream if them created every day.

Maybe. I’m not sure anyone has tried it. It wouldn’t work against a party like Intellectual Ventures but in theory you might be able to take out a nascent troll with a smaller war chest, and if you win they might have a tough time selling off their portfolio.

You can only try that if you know they exist.

Sure, but they have to come up for air sooner or later.

See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/06/defensive-patent-licen...

I did some work on this years before the article, while in law school. Seems to be defunct now.

https://lotnet.com/

This is it, for companies that are not generating money, it's free to join too.

This is a good idea.

I'm surprised a clever 501c3 isn't quietly buying up patents, and burying them, or using them as legal weapons against companies that abuse the patent system.

Just did a quick search, and there is a company.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-takes-another-step-t...

Hold on, I'm going to go patent this idea. :)

I wonder if it's possible to make some sort of patent troll insurance company.

There have been efforts along these lines, e.g.: RPX [0] and Allied Security Trust [1]. And the general idea is called Defensive Patent Aggregation [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPX_Corporation

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_patent_aggregation

You could gather a bunch of anons on some hard to track website then mail bricks and letters to them.

Every envelope has to be opened. The content can be the usual wordy mess and be made to look a lot like the official kind of mail they receive so that it all has to be kept and sorted to make sure nothing important is skipped.

See also the Open Invention Network: https://openinventionnetwork.com/

Might work, still sounds like a protection racket though.

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