Patent Trolls: Make Them Pay
I've posted this a few times on HN.  The solution to this problem is, in my humble opinion, very simple.  Rather than presenting a divided community to trolls, we have to present a united front.  This would come in the form of a legal support organization that would be 100% dedicated to fighting trolls on behalf of it's members.<p>Call it insurance, if you will.  Member companies would pay a monthly or yearly membership fee.  In exchange for this the organization would evaluate any and all patent lawsuits and consider them for representation.  It's stated mission would be to defend members from trolls.<p>How?<p>Well, for starters, imagine a legal organization with hundreds of 
millions of dollars in the bank.  How many trolls would dare risk going up against them?<p>Second, I am not a lawyer, but I imagine that there would be a way for this organization to also create a cross-licensing ecosystem for member companies.  Maybe this is ridiculous.  I don't know.  Imagine that every patent of every member company becomes an automatic IP license --only for the purpose of patent defense-- for all members.  This means that for my annual fee I could have a virtual shield consisting of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of patents protecting me.<p>How much is that worth?  Any company doing anything at all that is not trivial should easily be able to afford a $10K per year fee.  larger companies could do a lot more.  Smaller ones less.  It is not hard to imagine raising tens of millions of dollars per year and even reaching a hundred million.  With careful management this organization could easily amass a billion dollars in the bank over a number of years.<p>This would effectively destroy the troll business without legislation and it would probably do wonders towards decimating bullshit software patents (or bullshit patents in general).