When Patents Attack | Hacker News Reader

When Patents Attack

thisamericanlife.org

109 pointsriordan14 comments

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, so this is just a naive suggestion but I'd like to hear some informed discussion on the issue:

Couldn't a company like Intellectual Ventures be prosecuted under some form of antitrust law? There seems to be evidence of predatory behavior and the nature of how they do business seems to violate a few main goals of antitrust law, namely to prohibit agreements or practices that restrict free trading and competition between business and to ban abusive behavior by a firm dominating a market, or anti-competitive practices that tend to lead to such a dominant position.

A patent is an explicit grant of a right to monopolize a market. The whole point is to restrict free trading and competition.

I'm not talking patent theory 101; I'm talking about the business of what amounts to the securitization of patents for the purpose of extorting money (either from businesses who pay IV as an insurance policy so they won't get sued or from businesses who have to pay settlements for violating a patent).

Unfortunately, that's almost the purpose of patents in general. In many industries patents aren't usually licensed so its even worse. In those you don't extort for money, you have an X year monopoly on a whole technology.

IV is probably the best example of don't hate the player, hate the game. They've looked at the game and figured out how to play it. It's like the expert Scrabble players who know all the Scrabble words, but none of the actual definitions. It's completely legal, but probably not in the original spirit of the game.

Maybe the easiest way to kill of patent trolls would be to regulate patent licensing?

Maybe even forbid licensing all together, at least for some kinds of patents?

Or, some mandatory licensing scheme dependent on the kind of patent with a low enough fixed percentage of the price?

You can listen to the whole show here: http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/441.mp3

Wow. Good link, but I thought this wasn't supposed to be available until tomorrow?

The link isn't published yet, but they use a predictable URL for the mp3 file so it is not difficult to find. This sort of early reveal is probably frowned upon by the organization that produces the radio show, though.

I'll admit that I let my curiosity overtake my sense of ethics in this case. :/

In my experience, they're available as soon as WBEZ finishes airing them for the first time.

This is a duplicate of a popular story that is still on the front page of HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795743

Lots of duplication lately. Is this a way to game karma? Simply repost a popular story.

This this particular duplication is (in my opinion) likely because of the title - the one you linked primarily mentions Intellectual Ventures. Personally, I like it best when people use the original title of the page / piece; in this case, "When Patents Attack!".

Wow, I couldn't disagree more. "Intellectual Ventures on TAL" (the other submission) describes exactly what the link is. "When Patents Attack" communicates only that this is a link about patents.

Sorry about that - skimmed the page and totally missed the original. Mea culpa

I listened to this show during an out-of-town drive this morning. It is an excellent piece of journalism that digs into the business of patent trolling. The section about how the shell companies with empty offices in Marshall, Texas was particularly insightful.

One interesting thing that the show up brings up is this. Intellectual Ventures (IV) sold Lodsys the patents that they are currently using against indie mobile developers. At some point, the chief counsel for IV mentions that their usual practice is to sell the patents AND get a percentage of the royalty streams from licensees. The link between the Lodsys sales and downstream revenue for IV wasn't explicitly made, but I would bet that is the case.

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