Solution HN: Patent trolls

5 points by solutionhn 13 years ago | 4 comments

Big companies have the pockets to fight or pay patent trolls but what should smaller companies do to combat this problem?

The problem is not with the trolls but with the system that can't gauge the enormity of the problem because the hundred thousand dollars a small company loses never blips on the radar. But what the system doesn't realize is that this has been hurting so many people from so long and needs to end.

The system and its rules aid the trolls in this extortion and the only solution is to unlink our companies from the system that (unknowingly) aids them in this extortion.

How do we do it? Incorporate offshore in some tax haven, make the local business a cost center that does contract work for the parent. Now the patent troll has to route litigation to unfavorable places without systems to aid them in their extortion and cannot pursue litigation without resorting to costly measures. Once the cycle of easy money is cutoff, and since they are not viable businesses themselves, they will be starved and will die a painful death.

But the intention here is also to transfer the pain points from us to elsewhere. With this structure, businesses will start saving taxes through the new route and now the system is the one losing money instead of the small businesses. This jolt will definitely wake it up from its s;umber and will make it fix the menace.

Maybe this is dumb and you have a better idea. Please share it so that WE can put an end and not some politician.

We are hackers and we'll find a way to kill patent trolls today in HN. Let the discussion begin!

josh_fyi 13 years ago |

We need patent violation insurance. This lets companies share risks, but also makes it easier to aggregate defensive efforts and so get economies of scale. Just having this insurance would scare off most trolls who rely on victims to fold easily.

As for the risk that "real" patent violators would disproportionately buy this insurance, we can

- restrict it to software patents, where everyone is a violator, and there is, as far as I can tell, no such thing as a malicious patent violator.

- include a clause exempting malicious violations from coverage. This would have some fairly objective definition supervised by known neutral parties. Because this clause would be in the context of the group insurance rather than a trolls attack, "real patent violation" could be defined sensibly between reasonable people.

DigitalSea 13 years ago | |

A simple clean cut solution. You can insure everything else from debt to houses, cars, pets, your salary and of course your life so why not some kind of patent violation insurance? I wonder if anyone has attempted to introduce this kind of insurance and if not, why not?

solutionhn 13 years ago | | |

The problem I see here is, Insurance is a generic solution and doesn't fit our problem. Maybe we can take the core idea and do it better. I'll wait to see more viewpoints instead of spamming the thread. I'm already nervous if I broke some HN rules by posting this thread.