Hacker News Reader

Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

"patent trolls" is an unhelpful term because it is in the eye of the beholder.

Was Amazon being a patent troll patenting single-click-to-purchase? Was Apple a troll in patenting Swipe to Unlock? They were using those patents in their products.

On the other hand is the Tolkien Estate patent trolls? They're not producing anything new.)

If I have a dozen patents, and some company wants to buy them from me, is that any different to me selling my company? Surely I can sell my assets?

The root issue are not "patent trolls". Being sued by Amazon is no less disruptive than by Trolls r US.

The root issue is the nature of the patents being issued.

The root of copyright issues are (mostly) not about actual copyright, but the length of copyright.

View on HN

Usually they're called NPEs, non practicing entities and differentiated because their use of patents is to use them to extract tolls rather than to build things.

Which isn't to say that established players don't also use them to create moats around technology of interest, or that the nature of certain patents doesn't lend them to abuse. They could, for example, require that the thing which makes the patent 'novel' also be 'patentable subject matter' for example, rather than letting one patent some novel software running on a non-novel computer and meet the standard one piece at a time.

Also I wasn't aware that Tolkien or his estate had any patents. Copyrights, surely, but patents? That's surprise me.

> The root of copyright issues are (mostly) not about actual copyright, but the length of copyright.

The other issues are getting worse over time. Lack of first sale doctrine. DRM preventing fair use. That Aereo thing where you're not allowed to rent a preconfigured antenna and recorder from someone else.

Yes, very few works need more than the original 7 years in order for them to get a sufficient return to make them economically viable.

When/where was it 7?

IIRC under the Statute of Anne, it was 7 (plus 7 if you paid again).

It seems like a good balance between private monopoly and public interest for the shirts of artistic works copyright protects.

Statue of Anne was 14+14. I'm not sure exactly if/how payment worked.

I wonder if that applies to novels that don’t become bestsellers? A book that simply does okay. People buy it, never a ton of them, but always a few, every few days, for a long time. No idea what the answer is, just something that popped into my head.

>Was Amazon being a patent troll patenting single-click-to-purchase? //

Just on that example. I think Amazon were fine to get a monopoly (in USA) on commercial implementation of one-click. But realistically it's worth a couple of years at most of monopoly for something which arises naturally out of the progress of the web, which Amazon rode the wave of (and contributed to). Locking that up for 20 years doesn't serve society; it's clearly anti-democratic [ie against the best interests of society as a whole] to have that extended term for business methods/software.

In this case it's trivial to work around, but that's not true of all 'small idea' patents.

This is if course my personal opinion, unrelated to my employment.

> I think Amazon were fine to get a monopoly (in USA) on commercial implementation of one-click.

But who benefits from that other than Amazon when, as you say, it arose naturally. Does anyone think one-click purchase is something that would never have existed if not for Amazon?

Fair points.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com