Sam Palmisano headed the #1 patents maximalist

Photo by Dan Farber

Summary: More new stories and evidence which convince us that any suggested reforms are designed to serve the rich and ultra powerful, not to actually decrease pain and suffering felt by SMEs (globally declining force)

Patent trolls are receiving more attention than the controversy over software patents. They are viewed as enemy number one these days, even though many trolls are using software patents and a lot of patent abuse comes from huge companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and Apple. Here is a response to the New York Times setting the trend by focusing on trolls again:

• NY Times Profiles One Of The World's Worst Patent Trolls

  We've covered patent troll Erich Spangenberg a few times over the years, starting with the time a court told him he needed to pay $3.8 million to DaimlerChrysler after he had signed a patent licensing agreement over some patents in one of his shell companies, transferred those patents to another shell company... and sued DaimlerChrysler once again.

Yes, this is troubling, but why ignore the massive, multi-million-patent cartels of large corporations? Consider what RPX is doing. On July 18th it wrote about 'licensing', noting that: "Interestingly, while the inefficiency of the legal system can often make fighting NPEs with small portfolios and small demands (regardless of the merits) seem economically unattractive, the opposite may be true for “aggregate-and-assert” NPEs with large portfolios and eight- or nine-figure demands. Fighting could often be the correct economic choice."

They must be referring not just to Intellectual Ventures, which uses smaller shells to do the litigation. Consider how Lodsys is connected to Intellectual Ventures and see how nasty it gets:

• Lodsys Sues App Developer For Patent Infringement Because He Called Them A Patent Troll

  Lodsys, as you may recall, is the rather infamous patent troll, which is demanding payment from a ton of app developers, claiming to have broad patents (which it got from Intellectual Ventures, of course) that cover all sorts of smartphone apps. Todd Moore, who runs app developer TMSOFT, was recently sued by Lodsys, claiming patent infringement, because his White Noise app has a hyperlink that would open a URL in another app -- a rather basic thing that tons of apps do. However, it seemed odd to go after TMSOFT, given that, as Moore notes, the app itself only made $500, and Lodsys itself insists that it's often just asking for less than 1% of revenues.

Here is what it's like for startups. A personal story goes like this: "Once a month, Steve Wright* gets a large envelope from his lawyers and goes into a whir. “Every month when that hits my desk, I just get this feeling in the pit of my stomach, like, ‘How bad is it going to be?’” says Wright, the founder and CEO of a New York-based ecommerce startup."

The White House says it is going after trolls [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], but when will it trace them back to their masters? Remember that the entity connected to ~2,000 shell companies is deeply connected to Bill Gates and Microsoft. Maybe deposing Gates and Ballmer would be a good start. They are patent terrorists. While the government pretends to pursue patent justice we also have this:

• SOPA Should Have Ended Backroom Deals About Copyrights and Patents; So Why Is TPP Still Secret?

Why? Because patents when they aid large corporations that fund and run the government remain untouchable and they will get more oppressive over time. ⬆