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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

What are the other ways to protest? I don't mean that as a rhetorical question. I'm genuinely curious.

Sit-ins have been extremely effective, where there's a free press and where companies want to avoid negative publicity. You can't eject people forcibly without looking thuggish, and reporters flock to them.

Only problem: you actually have to care enough about an issue to risk getting arrested. I'd be surprised if anyone cared that much about Apple's patent trolling.

On a small scale, petitions will work better than a hash tag on a Google-owned website. The person that made the decision is the judge. So a rational way to protest is to protest the decision itself.

On a large scale, make something disruptively innovative to fight back.

#BoycottApple may work by alarming and reminding Apple of their unethical act (to the crowd). But the effect is small because it has nothing to do with Apple's product quality and customer service. If no one buys Apple products any more, we won't necessarily be better off.

That said, I think Apple seriously doesn't have to go this far. If they have the energy to continue innovating there shouldn't be any fear.

Has petitioning or protesting a judicial decision ever affected change? I think I would lose faith in the judicial system in such a thing worked.

The problem here is that we're trying to apply social pressure to a legal problem. Being intensely social creatures, our instincts tell us it should work, or that it's at least worth a shot.

What we're trying to fix is that companies can even get injunctions for stupid reasons, and that patents are used as warfare rather than for encouraging innovation. Boycotting every single company that abuses patents is simply not going to fix the problem, especially since some of those companies don't even sell products.

Look at Righthaven -- a boycott would have been meaningless, but the right case came along and Righthaven lost its teeth. And this only involved two branches of the government! Imagine what you could accomplish if you could actually pass laws to fix the patent system...

You're not going to change a judge's mind by protesting. But you are going to change Apple's nonsense lawsuits if the negative PR keeps building up against them. And that's what these boycotts could achieve if they become large enough.

Remember Amazon and one-click? There was sufficient backlash that they never tried anything like that again. Could work with Apple.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent says the revised patent was confirmed and they've been paid for licenses to use it (by Apple and possibly B&N). I don't see any effect the backlash had.

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