Law Students Fend Off a Patent Troll
I'm surprised there isn't an EFF-like non-profit that provides pro-bono patent defense to start-ups, against patent trolls.  I would donate to that organization.<p>I've seen a lot of horseshit patents asserted against start-ups.  If there was an organization that followed the troll around and offered defense services against all of their defendants, it would make trolling a lot harder, and might reduce the numbers of these parasitic lawyers involved in this shameless trade.<p>I just read about a Fish & Richardson patent partner who started filing his own "inventions" with the patent office, based on slight modifications of the patents he was filing for clients, and then sold those patents to trolls for huge sums.  Its actually really easy to write patents focused on sabotaging your clients, if you are a lawyer and become familiar with their future roadmaps.<p>I know a bunch of trivial claims I could write right now and they would be worth a few million in a couple years, because Google, Facebook, and others would have to move in that direction in a few years (related to Machine Learning and image recognition).<p>All you have to do is follow conferences, understand the papers, and then write some trivial, and obvious evolutions of those techniques.  Obviousness is something defendant's find extremely difficult to prove for highly complex technology, because the juries are made of people that have no idea what programming is, much less Machine Learning, and the judge is probably some moron, that thinks he is really smart, and assumes that he patent office is full of diligent geniuses ... and so he will give a lot of weight to the plaintiff's "USPTO certified" claims.<p>All it takes is for a programmer to be involved in one patent litigation and you see the patent system for what it is.  A colossal system of giant, continuous, expensive injustice implemented in the hope of preventing an extremely rare form of injustice (when a true original inventor is cheated by a shameless larger company).<p>Imagine we institute an expensive system of highly trained commandos to follow every nerd in America around in high schools across the country, to protect them from bullying and to be their friends.  It would certainly stop all physical bullying.  But would it be worth the giant overhead/expense?<p>That is what we have to start asking ourselves.  Even if the patent system prevents some rare injustices, WTF, is this continuous, and overwhelming cloud of uncertainty for every start-up and company worth it?<p>I feel like China and India are doing quite alright without overburdensome strong patent protection.  And Europe seems fine with a hamstrung software patent system.  And even in the US, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, IBM, and Apple got their start before software became patentable ... and they all did, and are doing fine.<p>If you see someone arguing for patents, they are almost always some fucking lawyer, troll, or someone sitting on a giant portfolio.  The people actually making software every day don't want this shit system.  VCs that fund start-ups, don't want it ... even though you would expect they want it, to protect their investments.