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I don't think you have to worry about being compared to the App Store or Google when you cancel accounts of patent trolls.

When you run a business, you have to regard yourself as a building block for other people to rely on to build their productivity, their own business, or their own ideas. If customers have to be fearful of pissing off the owner of a service they're using, that has a chilling effect on progress.

However, when a customer's actions or business model directly threatens those ideals you're trying to uphold -- helping people to improve their own productivity or offer better products or services themselves -- then I think you have ethical grounds to ban them as long as you have a human process to handle mistakes.

The main complaint about Google and Apple is that interacting with them is Kafkaesque. An occasional false positive is acceptable if the company has a process to resolve them fairly... a process that doesn't require the customer to get blogtweetHN traction before the company opens a dialogue.

> a process that doesn't require the customer to get blogtweetHN traction before the company opens a dialogue.

To be fair, I don't think I've ever seen a story where someone complained about an App Store rejection, and that story led to an approval. Typically the story is accompanied by other action, such as actually talking to the App Store review board, and it's the other action that leads to the approval.

  Can you turn away an account based on their “religious” beliefs, 
  however ridiculous, hateful, or exploitative you may find them? 
  Shut down? Answer: No.

For brevity, lets focus on this one example. I would not refuse service based on religious beliefs. But thats missing the point.

I would refuse service based on the actions of the organization.

From that standpoint I think you ultimately made the wrong decision based on providing service to the patent troll. You should reconsider.

  So the question is, is there a way to tell the
  patent troll to go screw himself without
  jeopardizing our trustworthiness with our real customers?

First, thats not the question you're answering. You don't tell anyone to go screw himself.

The question should be: "Is there a polite way to decline service?"

Yes. Its easy and you can explaining it nicely in a few short paragraphs that don't tell anyone to go screw them-self. (Much shorter than a blog post I suspect).

Your blog post, by the way, basically told me your company has no moral compass.

You definitely showed all of us that your moral compass is tightly bound to the law. Instead of telling this despicable customer to leave, you gave him the grand tour.

Your blog post could have been an explanation of your reasoning and moral outrage, making you look better while providing transparency for your customers to trust.

That would have been the easy way out. feel good. But read the post again carefully, and you'll understand why vetting each customer is not a viable solution. Comparisons to the App Store are warranted.

Do you think that Reddit is immoral for allowing many despicable people to hold conversations about despicable topics? This community is normally all about a free and open internet, where companies like Google, Facebook, etc. aren't trying to control what their users can do with their technology.

Trust me, I don't feel good about helping a patent troll. I just don't see any sort of justifiable policy that would allow for us to act any differently.

We will definitely re-evaluate the decision though. This is a tough one, and we're not in love with our current solution.

"So the question is, is there a way to tell the patent troll to go screw himself without jeopardizing our trustworthiness with our real customers?"

(further down in this thread you also said):

"Trust me, I don't feel good about helping a patent troll. I just don't see any sort of justifiable policy that would allow for us to act any differently."

Doesn't need to be "justifiable". "Justifiable" to?

You are, as was said by the sheriff played by Roy Schieder In Jaws "the Chief of Police". And you're not a large corporation (yet) where you have to issue a memo which says "don't sell to patent trolls " either.

You can do whatever you want to deflect or keep any business and nobody needs to know about it. You can simply be passive aggressive with any customer. You don't return phone calls. You don't setup demo dates. You don't get back to them without pricing or details or answers to questions they have. Almost everyone will leave and just think you are a typical non-responsive business and they will go elsewhere. Or you can quote them a high price to scare them away. There are dozens of "not in the book" ways you can get people to not give you business. Bad service is only one. It's not that hard. And you don't have to announce it to the world or justify it to anyone. It's done quietly.

This happens everyday in business for many reasons (that don't even have to do with anything objectionable). A salesman will spend his time with someone who is going to give him more business and be lackadaisical with someone that appears to be a trifler. Lawyers will build their business with any client then they will thin those clients by being less responsive and/or jacking up billing rates. The clients leave. They don't announce "you are not important anymore". It just happens.

Added: "jeopardizing our trustworthiness with our real customers"

The point is to do it where the other customers don't know you are doing this. I'm assuming there are many things in your business everyday that you don't reveal to current customers.

You just need to be transparent about your reasons. Just add a clause which prevents Patent Trolls from using your app. People are angry at the App store because they are blocking genuine apps. You can't compare your situation to the App Store or Google, they both have a huge user base, the advantage of being a small company is that nobody is going to notice that you asked a Patent Troll to stop using your app, and if they did it would only improve your image.

(Yeah, this is actually our CEO, Tyler.)

The App Store isn't evil because it filters. It's evil because it's a monopoly filter.

If there were lots of competing App Stores with their own beliefs, filters, prejudices, ideologies, etc - no problem. Of course this is exactly the case in the CRM industry.

So your conscience should be patting itself on the back, not beating itself up, when it tells a patent troll to go fsck a porcupine. This is exactly the purpose of a conscience: telling you to do what's right, regardless of the official structure of law in your era and country. Patent trolls aren't illegal, but they're evil, and it's wrong to collaborate voluntarily with evil. If the powers that be force you to collaborate, of course, that's something else...

> Patent trolls aren't illegal, but they're evil

If you use Douglas Crockford's JSON library, then arguably its license could make you turn them down on legal grounds: http://dev.hasenj.org/post/3272592502/ibm-and-its-minions =)