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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

"Couldn't this result in a race to the bottom about what things people want in the public domain - ie. a bunch of people petitioning to have a law firm attack Amazon's One-Click patent? Basically if someone made something desirable enough, then an efficient market would funnel enough money into trumping their patent through your concept, destroying whatever incentive the company had to make something valuable."

I see absolutely no problem with this. If the patent is defensible, then no amount of law firm action or monetary incentive should make any difference in removing the patent. Most software patents are probably indefensible which does already say a lot about software patents.

Calling for changes to patent law is where I don't understand what you're hoping to accomplish. If there was going to be any change, it would already have happened.

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> Calling for changes to patent law is where I don't understand what you're hoping to accomplish. If there was going to be any change, it would already have happened.

If true, that's a pretty depressing statement, however, it sounds like fallacious reasoning to me. Just because the law hasn't changed yet doesn't mean that things are doomed to stay this way forever.

The problem is that everyone with enough economic or political power to do something about the patent situation has a strong incentive to preserve the status quo, because they benefit from the competitive barrier large patent arsenals create just as much.

So no one wants to touch on meaningful reform, because that would blow up just as many of their own patents. Even companies that claim to amass patents purely for defensive purposes have this incentive.

There's also an agency problem. To fight patents you need patent lawyers, but patent lawyers have a strong incentive to expand the volume of patent litigation. It's like asking why the NYSE doesn't implement one of the simple solutions that would stop HFT: they're getting a cut on the volume of trades, so they don't care at all how decoupled from economic reality trading becomes.

A problem I see is that companies would have to spend time defending legitimate patents just because consumers want the technology to become widely available. The scheme could cause business to waste money litigating defensible patents just because there's enough stir / money behind advocacy for opening up the idea.

I would say that the burden of proof, and accompanying legal defense costs, should rest with those who seek a state-backed monopoly of an idea, rather than with patent "infringers" as it is now.

If it's a legitimate patent, it's likely to hold up, and/or be seen as too tough of a target, and so be seen as a waste of resources to go after.

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