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Now this Patent Troll has even more ammunition to shakedown companies in future whilst encouraging creation of even more low-life leeching NPE's.

Clearly Patent Trolls adds negative value, harms progress and increases cost of business - how long will this legal racketeering be allowed to continue?

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> low-life leeching NPE's

NullPointerExceptions?

Non Practicing Entities - i.e. trolls.

Damn. Cause if someone patented NullPointerExceptions they'd sure be rich.

Done. [1]

1. http://www.google.co.ug/patents/EP0881577A2?cl=fi

This is an extremely narrow patent that doesn't do anything like claiming all uses of null pointer exceptions. It just claims what strikes me as a rather minor optimization on how attempts to dereference a null pointer can be detected. It surprises me a little that it was considered worth patenting, but I guess it is fairly general in that it could be used in a lot of language implementations. The benefit is hardly worth writing home about, though.

My tongue was firmly in cheek.

Oops! Sorry, I missed it :-)

What the fuck.

Or maybe they act to keep the big players honest?

The big players can afford it, their existence just adds a barrier to entry and causes more harm to young/unestablished companies.

If these were companies that actually did something, instead of waste everyone's time and resources, you'd have a point.

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