It's a way to get media attention for people to glance at it. It's providing a nudge for them to tell you about something that they know off the top of their head.
Patent trolling is a big problem, and a lot of us view opposing it in a small way as a type of community of service.
People usually work on FOSS because they have a personal interest in a project, and want to share that with everyone. So we end up with stuff like device drivers for hardware where the mfgr couldn't be bothered to make a Linux driver, or various useful utilities, a whole OS (which everyone can use), etc. What we don't see much in FOSS is "enterprise software": stuff that's only really useful if you're a huge company. Where's the FOSS alternatives to proprietary human resource management systems, supply chain management systems, etc.? Generally, stuff like that doesn't exist, because no one wants to spend their free time working on things that they personally have no use for, and no one's found a good business case to make a company producing an open-source version.
I agree, and that's a great point I think the patent examiner person was missing. These patents are a hazard for everyone, big or small.
Screwing over a patent troll? That’s priceless.
No amount of money can provide that satisfaction. Heck, I’m not even impacted and I’m gleefully happy. Whoever helped deserves a free beer. Patent trolls are a blight.
If you do the numbers, yes it can. There are a lot of people who could do this searching.
This battle took 2 years, I think ?
from the viewpoint you've presented it's a bad idea to volunteer for basically anything.
even something like enlisting in a nation's armed forces is a bad idea since the risk is so high vs the monetary reward, and the only way people would become soldiers is to join mercenary armies where there is a price exacted that matches the performance.
for many people, they value the intangible more than the money.
https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/06/22/myths-patent-trolls-preven...
Given that I think the narrative is overblown, I don't really see this as a "public service". It's a problem, sure, but it's not a major one.
We did manage to convince them all to go away, but it might have been cheaper to just pay them off. I'm guessing that all they really wanted was a long list of capitulations and licensees before litigating against the big guys.
I'm not surprised that the IPR industry which thrives upon resulting legal fees is less inclined to view things as trolling and any trolling that happens to be not too severe, though. ;)
To reply to you and some others:
I'm not saying that patent trolling is not a problem. My point is that it's not as big a problem as commonly believed (in terms of total monetary losses over the US). The real problem is poor patent quality, which goes beyond patent trolling but does allow trolls to exist in the first place. For those who want to do a public service, address poor patent quality as it's the root cause.
"People working in patent law" have a conflict of interest. The arguments being made in that link are practically in bad faith, e.g.:
> Google and Uber are locked in a patent battle over self-driving automobiles, so does that make Google and Uber patent trolls?
The ordinary definition of a patent troll is a firm that sues for patent infringement as its primary business. Say what you will about Google and Uber, they clearly derive the bulk of their revenue from offering products and services to the public.
> As we consider all of this it is also important to keep in mind that the U.S. tech sector spending on patent trolls is less than 1% of all IT spending.
If you compare a smaller number to a bigger number, the bigger number is bigger. But the thing that matters isn't the size of the problem relative to the size of the industry, it's whether the shakedowns are net positive or net negative.
For software patents in particular, it's the latter, because software is inherently and purposely abstract. Which is incompatible with the reasonable operation of the patent system, because it makes the two viable strategies to patent the abstraction or to patent some specific implementation which is required for compatibility, so that alternate implementations can't be used without disrupting interoperability. Otherwise the number of alternate software implementations of any given abstraction are so large that nobody would purposely use somebody else's software patent, they'd just create their own non-infringing implementation of the same abstraction.
But patenting the abstraction itself is not supposed to be allowed (even though these patents are all too often granted) and using a patent for the purposes of preventing interoperability should be an antitrust violation for the same reason as tying is illegal even when the original monopoly was lawfully obtained, because the value you're extracting isn't the value of the invention, it's the value of compatibility with the existing system. And then there's nothing of merit left.
The consensus among lawyers who benefit from people unnecessarily having to hire lawyers is that the situation is not bad. Well, there's a shocker...
We prevailed and lived to fight another day but that was an incredibly unproductive and stressful time.
So I see this differently as do the many team members who kept their jobs and made good money when we were acquired.
That author is barely even trying to hide his extreme slant, and you posting an obviously extremely biased article as some sort of evidence dramatically undermines your opinion on the topic and frankly calls into question the limits of "assume good faith".
I love the fact that you exist.
> Says something we hate
"Why do you hate what I said?"