Note that this is from 2008, so some of the code samples are out-of-date (e.g., case is now part of clojure.core).
374 karma · joined December 15, 2010
Small developers: They just join the pool, or don't join and just don't sue anyone. Members in the pool would irrevocably sign away their rights to offensive lawsuits, so how could it turn bad? In other words, the "stash of legal power" is not concentrated by "competitors", but by "we, the people".
Google should start a patent pool with all of their patents. Every company would be granted full license to use these patents, as long as they commit not to sue anyone else (in or out of the pool) for patent infringement. Ideally, they would commit their own patents to the pool as well.
With enough buy-in, this could effectively null out software patents without any legislative change, at least among non-trolls, since with a large enough pool it would be almost guaranteed that a company would violate more patents in the pool than vice-versa.
Ideally, this pool would be managed by a non-profit institution, patents would be committed irrevocably, and the organization would have lawyers to actually sue any other company that filed a patent lawsuit. This may be similar to what's been done for WebM etc., but it seems like the same idea on this much larger scale could be much more powerful.
Main challenges I could see are (1) patent trolls, since there's nothing to sue them for, and (2) who decides what's a software patent -- not sure how clear-cut of a line this is.
The wallet provider could, in principle, be subpoenaed / coerced /hacked / owned by the NSA. I imagine there will eventually be a Tor-like "onion" anonymization method, where bitcoins are routed through multiple such services, so that no single service need be trusted (except to not steal your money). The main challenge with these techniques is avoiding forms of traffic analysis, where I notice B$98.23 heading from A to B, and shortly thereafter, B$98.22 heading from C to D, and infer that these represent a single transaction chain despite being disconnected in the block chain record. Such attacks can be minimized by, e.g., settling on a fixed transaction amount for all transactions with a given service, and adding random delays commensurate with the transaction rate and degree of anonymity required.