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Comment by marshray | Hacker News Reader

s/patent troll/small inventor/ and all your logic remains valid.

The only thing this significantly benefits is large companies' ability to kill off smaller competition.

Patents should be completely abolished as a relic from the age of steam. This is the 21st century.

Woah, wait a second. Small inventors are not filing suits against dozen of defendants in carefully chosen jurisdictions. Often, they'll just target the top few companies breaching the patent. They aren't looking to make a living on patent settlements, they're looking to make a living on the technology they invented.

Soheil Sharafabadi sues 3 Universities over mustard seed patent - http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009794832_a...

Jim de Cordova sues one company over sleep mask patent - http://news.yahoo.com/dreamcloud-sleep-mask-inventor-sues-sl...

A retired engineer sues Clorox over bleach patent - http://ww2.gazette.net/stories/082407/businew12306_32368.sht...

A Pennsylvania woman sues Victoria Secret over bra patent - http://www.docstoc.com/docs/75307539/Pennsylvania-Inventor-S...

There are dozens of stories like this. The profile of a small inventor case looks nothing like these patent troll cases.

there are... dozens?

Are you seriously defending the billions that the patent system costs our economic system with the idea that it protects "dozens" of individuals and small businesses?

Seriously, if you stack up the number of patent lawsuits and license fees extorted by IBM, TI, Microsoft, and others against small tech firms, the damage to small business by the patent system is overwhelmingly larger than the benefit some small businesses might gain from it.

His point is merely that the logic does not evenly apply to patent trolls and small inventors. He is saying nothing about the overall benefits of the patent system.

The point is not that the patent system is wholly sane, but that it is made somewhat more sane by a careful imposition of legal costs that by and large affect only patent trolls.

Small inventors are not filing suits against dozen of defendants in carefully chosen jurisdictions. Often, they'll just target the top few companies breaching the patent. They aren't looking to make a living on patent settlements, they're looking to make a living on the technology they invented.

Why not? Simply because small inventors have to pay retail price for their lawyers, whereas the patent trolls typically are (or have regular full time) lawyers. There's nothing inherent in the "small-inventor-ness" of the plaintiff that makes them file suit in certain patterns.

Therefore, a small inventor may get a better deal either selling the patent to the manufacturing company or making good on the threat to sell it to a trolling firm who will aggressively seek to ruin them. Better that than waste their life savings on legal expenses that will likely drag on for years.

I'm very concerned no one in the tech press have pointed at that the biggest technology companies are in the stages forming a cartel. Small companies are now locked out of the handheld mobile device market unless they can raise and pay millions of dollars in licenses and fees. The future looks sad.

Well, yeah, that's the point of a patent.

Many people seem to be in disbelief about this but the purpose of a patent is to give the holder a monopoly on the "invention", at least in the sense that the patent can be used to prevent anyone else from doing anything productive with it.

Stupid, huh?

I'm having trouble putting your two statements together into a coherent whole. You say that making life more difficult for patent trolls will make it harder for smaller shops,but then go on to advocate abolishing patents, which does not strike me as terribly friendly to the smaller inventor.

Essentially - Creating products and selling them in an open marketplace is easier and fairer for the Entrepreneur than obtaining and defending patients is.

Anyone that wants to actually ship a product is aided by removing the fear of patent lawsuits.

If someone wants to sit around and think up ideas, and earn license money from those ideas, well then they need patents. Producing products is just different than thinking up ideas and filing broad patents and suing people that actually produce products.

A. I advocate abolishing patents. Some type of temporary protection would need to be provided for the very rare exceptional case of the development of new drugs. I can think of very very few, if any, cases where 21st century patents have actually contributed to "progress in the useful arts". Instead, they are universally a drag on people who actually produce things of value.

B. People may point to an exception case here and there, but the proverbial small inventor with a patent is a thousand times more likely to have his life savings eaten up by lawyers than to actually get paid for a useful invention. I don't think an improved patent system is actually going to help the small inventor.

C. This particular law looks to me like it further enhances large companies' ability to kill off smaller competition.

I don't think that there is a contradiction here.

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