Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"Are we going to organize ever and reverse this trend? Probably not. We are all too busy trying to run businesses. You know who isn't busy? You know who has every incentive to spend every waking hour in Washington DC to make sure nothing changes? The patent trolls and the patent lawyers. "

This is in fact, why I went to law school after getting my CS degree, and why i'm a patent lawyer. Because I hope that some day, maybe there will be more of us than there are of them.

However, it would be a great start if, rather than rail against this stuff on the internet, people actually showed up to do something about it when push came to shove. Instead, they complain that they shouldn't have to, and the problem should simply solve itself, and then go back to burying their head in the sand.

Existing advocacy efforts by organizations (EFF, etc) and companies (Google, etc) would be enhanced 100x if they could get even 100k people to give enough of a shit on a regular basis to write a congressman.

"Wahh wahh we're too busy running a business to make our voice heard in Congress, wahh wahh."

The cost of a successful lobbying presence is measured in the tens of millions of dollars a year, which is chump change for an industry as big and influential as the tech industry. Heck, construction companies have a much more organized and effective lobby, and they basically make no money at all (see the article on the front page about their 1% margins). Really, it's not that much money. Raise it on Kickstarter or whatever.

There is a bizarre mental block/persecution complex/"I'm going to take my balls and go home" phenomenon at play in the tech industry that's makes no sense to me. Silicon Valley isn't a special snowflake and Congress isn't going to divine its needs and tend to them. You've got one side telling Congress that absolutely everything needs to be patentable to keep the Chinese from stealing all our technology, and nothing but deafening silence in response. What exactly do you expect to happen in that circumstance?

" and nothing but deafening silence in response. What exactly do you expect to happen in that circumstance?"

Saying this tells me you have literally no idea what the tech industry is doing in Washington. I've been there. I've watched them up close, fighting patent fights. There is no deafening silence on the part of large companies, or lobbyists, only on the part of people and small business owners The reason the construction industry is more effective is because the unions and other organizing efforts are effective at getting people involved.

In the end, if it's just a bunch of companies pissing on each other, congress mostly doesn't care. If you start getting constituents involved, they start to care.

Construction gave ~55M; they have low margins but vast revenue, probably more than the tech industry.

Complaining to DannyBee about the tech lobbying presence is missing the point. In terms of what he might be able to influence, Google actually has a significant (and growing) lobbying presence on a number of issues:

http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=d000022008...

And, last I heard, software patents were a prominent issue on Google's list. The point he's making is that the EFF and Google and the few others directly pushing on this aren't enough and that "enough" people who care enough to regularly write congressmen could make a big difference.

More generally, it is worth underlining that the tech industry is not unanimous on this issue. Should the anti-software patent side start to get some traction in Congress, you could expect pro-software patent players to push back - not just patent lawyers and trolls but probably also companies benefiting from the current regime (e.g. IBM, Microsoft and Apple). In that sort of situation, I suspect the organized lobbying on both sides starts to cancel out and engaged voters start to make an even bigger difference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com