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A comment on Take a stand against patent trolls. Parent comment

Re:Take a stand against patent trolls by probablyrobots on Thursday May 19, 2011 @01:48PM (#2564774)
The OP also argues that the patent could be defeated by a patent review. "Virtually none of the patents that patent trolls buy would be issued today. The vast majority of these patents would not survive a U.S. Patent & Trademark Office patent review. Most were issued during the 1990s when the standards for business process patents were very low."

The OP goes on to say that the victims of patent trolls band together to finance the review to make it cheaper than settling.

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Re:Take a stand against patent trolls by alanthonyc on Thursday May 19, 2011 @02:29PM (#2564942)
The MacroSolve patent[1][2] was requested in 2003 and granted in 2010: forms on devices that transmit data to web servers.

The USPTO is broken.

[1]http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/05/worse-than-lodsys-ma...

[2]http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

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Re:Take a stand against patent trolls by brlewis on Friday May 20, 2011 @07:58AM (#2567282)
It is impossible to expect the USPTO to determine novelty and non-obviousness for software patents. Imagine how difficult it would be to examine mechanical engineering patents if millions of people carried machine shops around in their backpacks.
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Re:Take a stand against patent trolls by splat on Thursday May 19, 2011 @02:08PM (#2564863)
> The OP also argues that the patent could be defeated by a patent review.

Yes, but the OP ignores the probability of failure. I'm claiming that even a small probability of failure would be sufficient to deter most businesses from pursuing the OP's advice because the costs of a defeat are so much greater than the costs of a settlement.

> The OP goes on to say that the victims of patent trolls band together to finance the review to make it cheaper than settling.

I'm not disputing that. The problem I'm pointing out does not have to do with financing the review, but with the fines that are due if you lose the case. Even if you band together to finance the review, if you lose, you have to pay the fines individually.

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