Super Soaker creator awarded $72.9M from Hasbro

Trolls would have produced no toy at all, for anyone, kept the whole process a secret, and then sued every child who ever flung water at another at a birthday party.

"Its the difference between using a feather and using a chicken." You know it when you see it.

Edit: Just for clarity, its the direction the arrow points. Lonnie Johnson created a product and then went out and sought a company to start producing it. Trolls do it backwards, they go out and find companies that are already producing it and then threaten them with forcing them to stop.

Also, the patent reform bill[1] that was featured not so long ago isn't about holding companies, it's about making the trolling process harder. One of the provisions is requiring the "real party of interest" to be exposed in the litigation, so a shell company litigating on behalf of microsoft would have to get microsoft involved with it. The other big thing has to do with validity and pleading. In many cases the lawsuits are brought about without any valid claim, and are just used as a harassment tactic to get small companies to pay up their fee instead of going through an expensive and painful legal process. Under the bill, the discovery process is halted until the patent is interpreted, and it forces the patent holder to be more specific about which claims are actually at issue.

None of the things put in that bill seem like they would affect the likes Johnson, had this case even been about patents, as he has legitimate and valid patents, and he himself is the real party of interest.

[1] https://www.eff.org/issues/current-legislative-proposals-pat...

We get most riled up by scan-to-email or click-here-for-full-version patents. The idea that you could independently come up with an obvious solution like clicking to upgrade and then need to pay some shitbird for the privilege of implementing it is despicable.

In contrast, you can't make any similar statement about what IV, Lodsys, or other trolls do. For the most part, business don't find out about those patents until after a lawsuit has been filed. There's no benefit derived from what IV or Lodsys "invented" and that's why it seems unfair.

This is basically the idea behind an "independent invention" defense -- that is, if I can prove that I independently invented something without assistance from the whoever previously patented the invention at issue, I should be able to get that patent suit tossed out.

Unfortunately, that's not what the law currently says. Moreover, thee's a fair amount of legitimate pushback against the idea. It's hard (but not impossible) to prove someone knew about a patent before they made something. And the question of whether something was independently invented usually isn't a binary one. If the patent holder tells his friend who tells her friend who mentions something in passing to me which inspires my invention, did I invent my product independently of the patent holder? Hard to draw a bright line there (but not impossible).

How sure are you about that? If they acquire patents, how could they possibly believe that?

Check the inventor of the FM radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstrong

Was he a patent troll too?

We could end the transferability of patents.

He actually does something with his patents, he develops profucts and then licenses the manufacturing.

Patents trolls don't do anything useful. They buy the patents (most of which are trivial and obvious), and then they wait for somebody to implement said trivial and obvious.

Either way, Mr. Johnson certainly appears to be the kind of engineer a lot of people aspire to be .. On one end of the spectrum, a kids toy. On the other end of the spectrum: multiple successful space probes. Yikes! The guys kicks ass!

This is an excellent question. Let me offer a possible answer.

It seems to me that the very fact that batteries, pumps, and water guns had all existed for some time, and yet nobody until Johnson thought to put them together, in itself constitutes evidence that the idea was nonobvious.

It seems to me that a lot of the problem patents we have seen in recent years involve relatively new technologies. For example, once we had low-cost scanners, and once file transmission by email became common, scan-to-email was an obvious idea. But it wasn't so obvious that one of the first people to think of it (almost certainly not the very first) wasn't able to obtain a patent on it. Therein, I think, lies the problem: when a new technology shows up, the PTO simply has no way to know what applications of it count as obvious -- it hasn't been around long enough for the obvious ones to have been thought of already.

Under such circumstances the PTO should be very careful about granting patents. I think a reasonable guideline would be that once a new technology begins to be widely used, the PTO should assume that any idea that simply combines the new technology with existing techniques, or applies it to well-known problems in a straightforward way, is obvious. This would have ruled out all the "X, but on the Internet" patents we have seen go by.

As I have written previously, a deeper problem with our system is this. A patent is a trade: we give the inventor a time-limited monopoly in exchange for disclosure of the invention. But there's no one unambiguously charged with making sure we got a good deal: that the value of the disclosure outweighs the cost of the monopoly. While this is technically the PTO's responsibility, its management and incentive structures aren't set up with this goal paramount. This pushes the problem to the courts; but the courts tend to defer to the PTO's judgment. So really, there's nobody minding the store.