Startups can now buy insurance against threat of patent trolls

Re:Startups can now buy insurance against threat of patent t... by trhway on Wednesday November 12, 2014 @02:43AM (#8594419)

patents were a way to encourage disclosure of inventions. That objective is now obsolete as pretty much anything can be reverse engineered quickly. So patents morphed into pure rent-seeking tool.

One can easily see that the idea that patents encourage inventions is just plain wrong - just imagine what would happen if patents were abolished - would inventions stop happening?

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Re:Startups can now buy insurance against threat of patent t... by mathattack on Wednesday November 12, 2014 @12:02PM (#8596616)

Inventions wouldn't, but perhaps some kinds of basic research would stop. I don't see this happening in software, but perhaps in Pharma. It's so easy to create a generic, that there wouldn't be any incentive to create something new. At this point we would need the government to fund, and decide what gets funded.

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