Patent trolling as ugly a business as trolls

TrollTracker, an anonymous blogger who keeps track of patent trolls, has had a bounty on his head for quite a while, thanks to scum like Ray Niro [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. S/he appears to be complaining about cyber-threats at the moment.

It is absolutely unacceptable for people to post threats in the comments. They will be deleted as soon as I see them. I was just made aware of one such threat posted over a month ago, and was appalled. I don't care if the threats are meant to be sympathetic towards me, it will be deleted.

A commenter adds:

Do you have any idea what $10,000 bounty on a person will buy on the street?

This truly makes the world of patent trolls look like the mafia, does it now? As quick reminder of what started most of this mess:

Ray Niro Offers $5,000 Bounty For Information On My Identity

[...]

Yes, Ray Niro has decided to offer $5,000 to find out who I am. According to the article, he wants to know "who is saying all those nasty things" about him. I don't think that's fair. I may have disparaged the validity of Acacia U.S. Patent 5,253,341, and I may have claimed that Niro was asserting the '341 patent against me just to shut me up, as he did to Greg Aharonian so many years ago (something that the article's author also implies), but that's not nasty. Is it?

At least it says "identity" and not "kneecaps". :-)

Anyway, on the European front, several changes are made and Alberto Barrionuevo will apparently become the new President of FFII. We are sad to see Pieter Hintjens walking away because he has been truly brilliant.

According to the report cited above, FFII Vice-President Mr Barrionuevo (Spain) follows Mr Hintjens as FFII President.

Also on the issue of software patents, digitalmajority.org points to web a page which contains a Google and a Microsoft patent. Google's patent is seriously bizarre because it the title reads: "Document compression scheme that supports searching and partial decompression". Does such an 'invention' not predate Google's existence? Are portfolios being compiled just for numbers and not for their quality? Are they usable at all? Are their value associated with their potential in the hands of folks like Ray Niro, who make a living out of making other people miserable? ⬆