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Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to draw a legal line between a few lawyers with some bad patents and a garage inventor struggling to make his idea profitable.

Not because those are hard to differentiate logically, but because one side is all about manipulating the legal system while the other has no knowledge of it nor funds with which to navigate it. Also, the system is supposed to protect the latter from big corporate legal departments that want to steal his idea. It's a hard problem because it's profitable for bad actors to get wrong decisions made.

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This is a great conversation. Cloudflare certainly sees the value of the patent system, we have a number of our own patents that we employ defensively to make sure we can continue to run our business securely.

> Cloudflare certainly sees the value of the patent system,

OK...

> we have a number of our own patents that we employ defensively to make sure we can continue to run our business securely.

Huh? This doesn't support the beginning of the sentence at all. If your only use of patents is defensive, then the system is all cost and no benefit to you. Getting rid of the system would give you all of the "benefits" you currently enjoy. What value are you seeing?

Defensive patents are for making cross-licensing deals when IBM, Apple, and so on, come calling with their stack of patents to demand a slice of your revenue.

Right... The parent's point was that saying "we see the value in the patent system: it allows us to defend ourselves when others use the patent system against us" doesn't really make logical sense.

Right, but you wouldn't need defensive patents if patents didn't exist... this would be like arguing "I am glad we invented guns, because we need them to defend ourselves against people with guns"

> then the system is all cost and no benefit to you.

That's not strictly speaking true.

Having and using defensive patents has the advantage of disadvantaging competitors who don't have defensive patents but wish they did.

(Not that this is necessarily what djk44 would like to state as his reason for seeing benefits, just as a general fact)

Rephrasing your point: By damaging some other people more than it damages you, the system may hand you a relative advantage over people who are hit more badly than you, even as it hurts you in absolute terms.

This is not a compelling argument that the system has any value. "Sure, it's destroying value at our company, but that's fine because it's destroying even more value across the street!"

> It's hard to draw a legal line between a few lawyers with some bad patents and a garage inventor struggling to make his idea profitable.

You don’t necessarily have to draw the line. One potential legislative solution would be to simply throw up our hands, admit we can’t stop one without stopping the other, then deliberately choose to sacrifice the (vanishingly small number of) good actors in order to get rid of the huge number of bad actors.

How many lone garage inventors are out there fighting big companies over their legit inventions vs. the number of ridiculous patent troll cases?

Industries like the chemical and pharma industries would look very different without patents. A place like CISRO would not be able to exist absent patents.

The X-Plane guy and his dozen person company went through hell trying their assess off to prove they were being trolled.

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