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Comment by mdsteph | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree that killing patents is the right approach, how about this as an alternative: The site's admin team could identify patents of particularly useful or disruptive potential and users could pledge a value to bring this patent into the public domain, and their pledge could remain valid for some reasonable period of time, the site could then put forward the aggregate pledge and buy the patent with the view to releasing it. Perhaps a price could be agreed upon up front. The same could be done to bring creative works like books into the public domain.

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I am not sure if patent trolls will want to part with their main source of income for any reasonable amount.

I would worry about the opposite problem: Troll gets crap patent for $X, sells it to community for $10X and then goes out and gets ten more crap patents.

The patents won't be killed if they're valid; it still has to go through the USPTO. Why do you think that killing those patents is not the right approach?

Your approach (if it worked) would just incentivize filing more patents to try to get bought out.

I agree that non valid patents should be killed. If a patent is valid perhaps its usefulness in monetary terms to the community is still worth more than the present value of what trolls and legitimate patent holders could expect to earn by holding it.

Aren't patents that issue assumed to be "valid" no matter how kafkaesque that might be?

I was using 'valid' to mean that the community thinks they're valid, not to mean that the USPTO thinks they're valid.

>The same could be done to bring creative works like books into the public domain.

This is a great idea. Unpopular works would be inexpensive to acquire rights for, so dedicated fan communities could try this.

Some out of print works might only cost a token amount. Might be able to buy them in bulk from publishers.

The problem with this - at least as I understand it - is that patent trolls make a lot from patents on a one-by-one basis - much more than companies want to pay or feel is affordable.

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