Hacker News Reader

Comment by barumrho | Hacker News Reader

I am currently in the same situation. (I posted here on HN a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5272575)

The author was lucky enough to find a lawyer that will defend him pro bono, but in my case (and I assume many other cases that we don't hear about), the cost of defending is more expensive than settling. The problem is that it is really cheap for patent trolls to file a lawsuit, since they basically copy and paste the claim, which is most likely to be too poorly written to stand a chance in court. I wish the court had a strict approval process.

View on HN

Personally, I think it will cost you more to settle in the long run because settling makes patent trolling profitable, which means more companies will do it and you'll get hit more often.

There's a name for this.

In the long run it's in everyone's best interests to fight this but it's each individual member that risks the damage by losing so it goes on. It's not the group being sued it's just one member.

Maybe everyone should pool resources into an entity to take up defence of anyone. I don't think the legal system allows it though.

> There's a name for this.

The inverse tragedy of the commons?

What's inverse about it?

I thought "Tragedy of the commons" referred to people over-harvesting limited resource in an unsustainable fashion knowing it is wrong because it wont matter if "just they" do it. And then everyone does it, and the resource dries up and everyone starves.

This would be inverse in the sense that there is no limited resource being depleted, but bad seeds being sown, choking the environment and making it unsustainable.

To me it seems like the same category of problem, but with the opposite kind of adversary and feedback loop, so I assumed it wasn't covered by that term.

But it's also very likely that this is just the sort of unproductive, needlessly detailed nitpicking which geeks are so very much famous for. I've been known to go down that road before :)

Well, it's related to game theory, but in game theory you're only logical move is the one that gives you the middle result. In this case the options are "pay a fair amount of money now and hopefully never again" or "keep paying small amounts indefinitely", and that for all possible players. You don't come out ahead if you "screw" other players as in game theory and you don't come out further in the hole if another player screws you as in game theory (well, aside from more litigation coming but they have that consequence as well).

> Maybe everyone should pool resources into an entity to take up defence of anyone.

That is called a nonprofit patent lawfirm...I dont know if it exists though.

We just received a letter from the trolls @ Dovden Inv. how has your situation progressed since your post earlier in the year?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com