I guess I wasn't following the Lodsys thing but I had not heard that they bought the patent in question from Intellectual Ventures? I guess Intellectual Ventures is using 3rd parties to troll.
I guess the specific points to note to those who haven't seen the episode:
a. IV uses shell companies to sue others, by selling their patents to these companies, get a cut of the eventual payout in any lawsuits, but I guess in the process have some amount of immunity against countersuits since the suing party is a shell company.
b. Lodsys is based out of the same building and suite in Marshall, Harrison County, TX, where, according to the episode several "patent troll" companies were incorporated with no visible indication on-site of actual employees or a business.
Planet Money did a piece using lots of clips from the This American Life episode, where someone 'doubts' that it's IV, but that they're still an interested party.
I don't know who renowned iOS developer Mike Lee is, but I think this is fantastic. The only way small timers can effect this legal change is to band together like a union. And we've seen how powerful a union can be.
He's a well-known figure in the indie Mac & iPhone communities and is a co-founder of Tapulous and also worked on Delicious Library for Mac. If anyone in this community could do a good job in this fight, it's Mike.
I recently met him at the Startup Weekend Amsterdam and was amazed to find out what a nice guy he is. He is really straight forward, develops ideas on the fly while being totally honest with you.
I'm really glad i could meet him, he is really an inspiring person.
You may not have heard of this, but a union of companies is called a "trust", and there's an entire division of the Department of Justice devoted to preventing them from forming, and destroying them when they do arise: http://www.justice.gov/atr/
Congress has actually enacted specific legislation to exempt the MPAA and RIAA from some aspects of antitrust law. I don't know about the BSA.
To be more specific, though, there are some ways that companies can legally cooperate under current antitrust law — for example, standardizing screw threads and grades of steel. But boycotting the "products" of certain "vendors" is probably not among them.
> I don't know who renowned iOS developer Mike Lee is
Apparently, he's a man who develops software for a proprietary, patent-encumbered platform owned by a company who uses patents offensively. Presumably it's acceptable to use iPatents predatorily because they're broadly linked to a gadget he likes. Or maybe this is just how you think different.
"Imagine a law that allows small software companies to opt out of the patent system."
That's a very interesting idea - startups opting out of the patent system, and then they won't be sued by other companies claiming patent infringement, but it will also mean they don't get to sue others for patent infringement either, even when they get to become a big company. It seems like a fair idea.
If anyone get's to ignore patents then the whole idea of patents as a safe means of discloser becomes somewhat meaningless. I have no problems abolishing software / business process patents, but if a small company can manufacture any patented drug you greatly undermine the value of new drugs.
I'm not going to argue for or against the usefulness of drug patents, but I think the article was referring to opting out of the software patent system.
I think this would mostly amount to the same thing as abolishing patents. Whenever a big company wanted to do something, it could create a new, small, special-purpose company--which just happens to have employees that used to work for the big company, who are paid exactly the same as they were before, and which shares an office with and gets funded by the big company, and so on--to develop the new product. It'd license all of its existing patents to the small company, too [actually, that'd be unnecessary, if the small company has opted out of the patent system]. And maybe the small company would refrain from applying for a patent on anything, but it'd allow the big company (exclusively) to learn what it does, and the big company would apply for (and get) the patents. Only the patents wouldn't do much good, because other companies that followed this strategy would probably be invulnerable to patent lawsuits.
Yes, but the difference is it would happen more gradually, rather than making it a law, and the next day everyone's patents are abolished. Plus, I think it would be a lot harder for politicians to abolish patents vs adding this one as an option. I figure there will be companies opposing this and lobbying the politicians to not support it, but it probably wouldn't be as bad for a law that abolishes them.
That sort of messing about isn't (in most countries) tolerated for tax evasion purposes, and tax authorities have a lot of experience dealing with it. It's solvable.
How does one opt-out of the patent system? Isn't that like saying I opt-out of the US legal system, now I am free do do any drug I like because I don't recognize the US legal system as an authority? That doesn't seem to work.
Just make patents non transferrable, but licensable. Is that not what they were intended to be, with the oversight that let them be transferrable the root of all the dysfunction?
How is that the root of all dysfunction? If trolls can't buy patents, they will cut some other deal with inventors that has the same effect. Or they will just "invent" things themselves[1].
Not to sound too cynical, but if companies like MS, Apple, IBM, Google, etc. have spent the last 20 years amassing billion-dollar patent war-chests and are still giving in to patent trolls, and they haven't managed to get the system changed yet--what chance do a handful of game developers have?
Which is exactly why they don't want the patent system abolished or dramatically crippled right now. I don't think Google would care as much if the patent system is abolished. As far as I know they don't license their technology to others and they haven't sued others for patent infringement. They only use them as a defense against others, but it would be a win for them if all software patents would be abolished. They might not push for exactly that right now, but I don't think they would be very upset about it if that happened.
