> Someone should start a collective fund for smaller companies to help with legal support so that more troll claims can be fought instead of settled.

You mean the eff? Probably not exactly what you had in mind, but pretty close I think?

> You mean the eff? Probably not exactly what you had in mind, but pretty close I think?

Well, of course, that requires people to put money in the fund.

https://supporters.eff.org/donate

Also, EFF is on option for smile.amazon.com. I've generated $9 for them so far, would have been more if I had remembered to use smile more often. Amazon is nice enough to remind me once in a while to use it, I wish it would just be automatic when I'm logged in, I refuse to install a plug in for that feature.

I had the same issue until I discovered there were plugins for Chrome[1] and Firefox[2] that will automatically redirect you to smile.amazon.com anytime you are on amazon.com. I have seen issues with the Firefox one when you aren't actually logged in to Amazon at the time, but the Chrome one works great.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smile-always/jgpmh...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amazon-smile/

Thank you for pointing this out. I wasn't aware of that extension. I've only generated $14.12 in the multiple years I've used smile (inconsistently). It'll be interesting to see how much that changes in the next year.

Plugins make my skin crawl, especially one from Amazon :) uBO is the only add-on I make an exception for.

FWIW, neither linked plugin is from Amazon.

I guess saying "especially from Amazon" was pointless because, now that you've pointed that out, I definitely don't feel any better about them :)

Make sure you search for "Electronic Frontier Foundation". The results for "EFF" are not helpful and the first result "Eff" appears completely unrelated.

I almost said "like the EFF" but stopped short because I don't think that the EFF gets involved in individual patent troll battles unless they have a tangible negative impact on digital civil liberties for everyone.

Am I totally out to lunch on this?

https://www.eff.org/issues/patents

Note that there's an important difference between publishing a position, general advocacy work in the interest of the public good, and being a reliable financial contributor to the legal fees required to defend yourself against a patent troll.

I heart EFF regardless, because if nothing else they unapologetically offer a progressive template for how the digital world could be. They challenge us all to be better versions of our digital selves.