Black or white: either you're a patent maximalist or you are "anti-patents" (or "anti-patent" as Watchtroll puts it, see below)

Summary: Like IAM, which tries to portray sceptics and critics of software patents as "anti-patents", IP Watchdog (or Watchtroll as we call it) is 'trolling' the Electronic Frontier Foundation, simply because it expressed an opinion that patent maximalists cannot tolerate

Watchtroll's site, being the usual loud-mouthed proponent of software patents (sometimes even very rude), responded to a topic on which we commented this morning. Daniel Nazer (EFF) noticed that this "New IP Watchdog post [is] slamming "DC Based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a leftist anti-patent activist coalition"" (it's not anti-patent, it is pro-patent quality, as are we).

Here is the relevant passage from the post: "Another incursion into research university governance and operations is now underway. And this time all research universities are affected. Led by the DC Based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a leftist anti-patent activist coalition that has initiated a 50-state legislative campaign to shrink research university patent licensing rights at the state level. (See) The measure’s purported objective is to prevent publicly funded university research patents from being licensed to so-called “Patent Assertion Entities” (PAEs, also known by the pejorative term “patent trolls”)."

Like IAM's editor in chief, they are also in denial about the trolls problem, just like people who are in denial about climate change (because this reality, once realised by the public, is a threat to one's business).

The OSI took note and wrote about my article via Former OSI Dir. Jim Jagielski who wrote: "Shows the danger of s/w patents… is it time to finally squash them once and for all?"

Carlo Piana, a famous lawyer for Samba and generally a very nice intellectual (against software patents) wrote on Friday: Has anybody, ever, read a #patent on software without thinking "WTF"? Honestly. And now I have read like 100 of them. And I'm no developer."

Benjamin Henrion (FFII) responded: "the state urgently needs to intervene between me and my keyboard to save innovation!"

The matter of fact here is clear; anyone with a keyboard and some rudimentary coding skills is affected by software patents and the population in general suffers from slowed innovation and artificially increased prices (often due to lawyers' fees and patent trolls if not billionaire patent bullies such as Microsoft and Apple). We wrote about it this morning. ⬆