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Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

The company may be able to collect ownership of the patent from the shell company as payment to cover the legal fees.

This means that a troll would lose the set of patents every time they lost a case. Unless they were willing to outbid the winning party to recover the patents from the shell, in which case the winning party would recover their legal fees.

So it's not pointless. It does increase risk for trolls. Although I do agree that much larger reform would be better. And requiring the posting of a bond is a fantastic idea.

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Not necessarily. Some of the companies are structured such that they don't own the patent, just certain rights to it. Basically they sue on behalf of someone else which both reduces the risk and also allows the patent owner to claim that they're not the one behind the suit.

I'd imagine that those rights would just be tied up so they weren't transferable (so if the company did go under they would no longer be an asset) and that this structure would become the norm.

What you'd need to do is have the suing company stump up the money in advance into some sort of escrow account (or some other mechanism for proving they can pay).

Shouldn't this loophole be closed? Something like: only allow the exclusive owner of a patent to sue potential infringers. That isn't enough to make shell companies a losing proposition, though, because they still contain the risk of losing a suit. I prefer the bond idea, it is a simple and more direct route to making NPEs liable for their actions.

Something along those lines might be an improvement but then you have the issue of a parent company in the US not being able to assign those rights to a European based subsidiary to defend them there.

I think it's probably dealing with the wrong problem which is the need for more fundamental reform of IP law.

I'm quite sure they thought of this and will address it in some way.

> "The company may be able to collect ownership of the patent from the shell company as payment to cover the legal fees."

The patent that, by definition, was just invalidated or neutered in the defendants victory? Why would the trolls care about that?

Unfortunately this just moves the nuclear weapons around. We really need disarmament.

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