Send a troll doll to Intellectual Ventures
trollthetroll.com
trollthetroll.com
We dig oil out of the ground, transport it to land, turn it into plastic, ship that to manufacturers, turn it into troll dolls, ship those to suppliers, ship them to retailers, ship them to customers, ship them to the patent troll, send it to landfill. (Or, if they have any sense, some children's charity with a matching donation.)
All through this chain that are a bunch of people paid low wages to shift product just for some stunt. I'm not opposed to stunts, I just don't think this is a good stunt.
Instead, show what patent trolls actually stop people doing, and say why it's bad that these things have been stopped. (Single handed keyboards are one example.)
And if you're counting bang for buck, $9 can possibly save 18 lives. Oral Rehydration Salts and zinc cost $0.5 per course, and could prevent about 3/4 of the 1.5 million child deaths from diarrhoea.
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94996/GLOBAL-Follow-the-fizz-...
but it's important to also factor in the value of a laugh.
say the conversion rate of visit-to-order is .1% (probably about right); i.e. 1 troll doll gets sent for every 1000 ppl that hit trollthetroll.com.
And say the visit-to-laugh conversion rate is 50%; 1 laugh for every two visits.
In this scenario, the shitty stunt is giving 500 laughs / $9.
Or 1.8 cents a laugh. Which seems valuable to me..
You do make a good point - humour is important. I might not like the stunt, but that means nothing; there are probably lots of people who love it. And at least you're doing something - those people are now engaged and know something of patent trolls.
(http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/04/oil_dril...)
> So, there is some gain to producing a barrel of oil. It can be used to generate energy, which can be put to various productive purposes. There is value in that energy, which is why it is economically desirable for companies to go dig this stuff up out of the ground. But of course, there is a cost to producing a barrel of oil.
Here's someone talking about digging helium out of the ground.
(http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/podcast/interactive_period...)
> Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, but here on earth, it's rather rare. Most people guess that we extract helium from the air, but actually we dig it out of the ground. Helium can be found in certain parts of the world, notably in Texas, as a minor component in some sources of natural gas.
And, with tar sands, we do dig the oil rather than drill it.
If that's actually the case, you should contact Givewell, because that's a couple of orders of magnitude better than their current best charity ($1,600 per marginal malaria death prevented). Is this just something you read somewhere, or is there strong evidence that this treatment is actually orders of magnitude better than bednets? If it's the former, you probably shouldn't submit it without doing at least a bit of research (and if you don't want to, I can), whereas if it's the latter, I recommend you submit that charity for review here: http://www.givewell.org/submit-for-review
The figure I give is just the cost of a course of ORS+zinc. Givewell will want to include other costs such as distribution and administration and so on.
Someone should patent that idea and sell it to IV.
Prior art is in monsastaries that sell captive doves for tourists to free (which are then recaptured), so it should be easy to transcribe to a patent for instant approval.