9 ms·

There needs to be an anti-patent-troll membership organization. You pay a fee relative to some metric and the organization acts as insurance against parent trol

by ummonk 4y ago

There needs to be an anti-patent-troll membership organization. You pay a fee relative to some metric and the organization acts as insurance against parent trolls by fully defending any patent lawsuits that are obviously unjustified. And to keep costs low, membership in this organization would be public to deter patent trolls from even trying to sue a member in the first place.

Bellamy 4y ago
Not a bad idea!
acdha 4y ago
Here’s John Walker’s proposal for that in 1993 after getting extorted by the XOR patent troll: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_105.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_105.html I think the problem is that most of the major companies are comfortable writing it off as a cost of doing business and don’t want to give up the possibility of using strategic patent suits themselves.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  > don’t want to give up the possibility of using strategic patent suits themselves This is a highly under-appreciated aspect of the patent world. Companies that buy and own lots of patents do so defensively. Big companies even enter into patent cross-licensing agreements with each other, where they basically say "I know you probably infringe on my patents and I probably infringe on yours, but we'll make a deal and indemnify each other". But they want to maintain those patents to harass upstart companies that would threaten their core business, so when the trolls come along, they just pay to license and move on. One of the few examples of a big company fighting patent trolls is Intuit vs encryption patent trolls, of all things. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/intuit-beats-web-encryption-patent-that-defeated-newegg-at-trial/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/intuit-beats-web...
  - mauvehaus 4y ago
    Having beaten my head against the immovable mass of Quickbooks, I'm shocked to find myself cheering Intuit for anything. I'm not about to switch back, but that earns my grudging respect.
  - ummonk 4y ago
    Yeah, but if such an insurance scheme can protect smaller member companies and prevent patent trolls from targeting them, I'd say that's mission accomplished. Let the patent trolls go after the companies that will pay them off, but make sure they're strongly deterred from going after the little guys.
    - cratermoon 4y ago
      The current patent regime does nothing to deter going after the little guys. Or even, really, the big guys. Newegg was essentially gutted by the same patent troll that Intuit beat, as the article notes. Also, Intuit's victory didn't invalidate the patent, they just were found to be not infringing.
r3trohack3r 4y ago
I've seen an organization like this on HN in the past - but struggling to find the post. A quick search turned up https://lotnet.com/ https://lotnet.com/ which I think is it
- greensoap 4y ago
  Lot is for patent holders to commit their patents to the group and everyone gets a license. Rpx is probably the closest thing. They will try to kill a patent if it is being used against their members. But they don’t cover the cost of litigation. There are also patent pools where everyone pools their money to buy a certain patent. There may be some insurance you can seek out. But I don’t know if anyone in the space that is using that type of thing
hedora 4y ago
Such things definitely exist in the form of mutually assured destruction cartels. All the members license all their patents to everyone in the cartel. If anyone (external or not) sues anyone in the pact, it automatically cancels any patent licenses they have from members of the cartel, and the cartel launches a patent enforcement suit using their combined portfolio. Of course, none of that helps with patent trolls, just like the ability to turn Russia to radioactive glass doesn't defend Washington DC from an independent actor with a suitcase nuke.
dpifke 4y ago
It's not quite what you're describing, but you can join Open Invention Network for free: https://openinventionnetwork.com/ https://openinventionnetwork.com/
- remram 4y ago
  This is about members not attacking each other, not about defending each other. It could be a first step towards that though.
wombatpm 4y ago
Run the numbers: Assuming you need a legal staff of 20 with avg cost 500k per. So that’s 10 million per year. Double it for rent, SGA, etc. we’re at 20 million per year. Offer a protection package at 10k per year, you need 2000 paying customers. Since all the lawyers are on staff, you can have them invalidating patents when not defending case. If you structure it like a mutual insurance company, you could return a portion of premium based on expenses once a war chest is amassed. Is this something I could take to y-combinator?
- jbms 4y ago
  Maybe YC could be the target customer? They bankroll a single company as insurance against all their investments being targets of attacks. They can afford it. They might attract all the best startups as a result, if those feel better protected.
  - leaflets2 4y ago
    And it's in YCs self interest to make their startups safer? Wouldn't this be in all venture capitalists self interest? (Not only YC) Maybe they could join (or start their own)
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  This is a great idea but it needs to be executed by lawyers, not tech people. Please not another tech startup of lawyers.
- gregsadetsky 4y ago
  Really good idea to bring it to yc - they know how much legal fights like these have cost across all of the cohorts. And obviously they would pitch it internally to all existing + future startups. Maybe this is what ends this garbage once and for all?
  - 8ytecoder 4y ago
    I think $10k/yr is fairly reasonable even for startups. However, a lot of these trolls go after small businesses, don’t they?
grayfaced 4y ago
The risk models for potential members would vary wildly. The fee structure would have to account for different levels of risk based on the activity of members. And then what if one member faces a lawsuit that could be an existential threat to that company, how much of a legal defense is the appropriate response? And then who determines the legal strategy (settle vs court)? This sounds like ransomware insurance. Often you would expect the insurance to help you recover from losses but instead they just pay the ransoms since it's cheaper. Which in-turn makes the insurance holders even more of a juicy target.
- ummonk 4y ago
  I don't think it's quite analogous to ransomware insurance because a patent troll incurs its own costs from fighting out a lawsuit in court. So by credibly committing to bitterly fighting out each patent troll lawsuit, it can deter patent trolls from suing its members, and actually lower overall costs. Credible deterrence is important in an iterated game.
headsoup 4y ago
No, they need to fix the systemic issues that allow patent trolls to succeed.
- missedthecue 4y ago
  It's easier to unilaterally start up a membership org than it is to unilaterally reform US federal patent law in a fundamental way.
pronoiac 4y ago
I think that Intellectual Ventures started out as a defense against patent trolls, but after gathering enough of a patent portfolio, they started playing offense in a way that looks like patent trolling.
- staticautomatic 4y ago
  The important thing to know is that they did so because the economics of defensive aggregation were insufficient to return capital to the investors.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Which makes it even more disgusting. IV is what wrecked the reputation of a lot of people for me.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
aspectmin 4y ago
I was sent this the other day. Haven’t had a chance to dig deeper. Free for companies under $10M in revenue? (If I remember). https://lotnet.com/sem/ https://lotnet.com/sem/
- SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
  I'm probably misunderstanding (not a law guy) but that seems like a strange mechanism - members of that group transfer legit patents to the patent troll, on the condition that the troll doesn't sue them. This seems to be arming the troll with the tools to attack outside groups - making it somebody else's problem is not the same as eliminating the problem. I'd rather see the Cloudflare approach, beat the barbarians back from the gates then destroy the troll's IP inventory with examples of prior art.
  - lights0123 4y ago
    The key is if. If "members of that group transfer legit patents to the patent troll", every other member receives a license for that patent.
Dalewyn 4y ago
The Japanese video game industry does this in an ad-hoc way. Smaller game studios ask bigger companies, like Nintendo, to register some patents in their stead so the bigger companies can keep them safe with their elite team of lawyers. The bigger companies like Nintendo in turn gatekeep the patents from trolls and abusers, letting the industry at-large use the patents for a greater good while suing anyone who doesn't play nice into oblivion. It's not perfect, and it certainly only works because businesses in Japanese society generally view each other as friendly rivals rather than outright enemies, but it's an ingenius solution to a legitimate social problem.
- WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
  Doesn't OIN work in pretty much the same fashion?
- mschuster91 4y ago
  So basically because the official environment (laws and courts) doesn't do its job, large private entities end up taking over in what is essentially a protection racket. Sounds a bit too much like the Mafia IMHO.
  - hnhamdani2 4y ago
    The more you realize that for Japanese society, it's been the same as how it was since a long time. Zaibatus/Keiretsu is just a modern evolution of feudal era Daimyo/Samurai. As a rule of of thumb, they're trying to good for the masses but indeed they are (benevolent) dictator in some ways.
  - ballenf 4y ago
    Seems like it's ok to let societies draw different boundaries around what the government's "job" is.
    - r00fus 4y ago
      I think what mschuster91 is saying is that there are regulatory functions that, if an impartial government doesn't do it, will be done by big corporations in the space, or it's just a free-for-all where trolls roam free. Exercise to the reader as to whether the EU, US or Japanese model is most effective.
reedciccio 4y ago
There's at least one i know of: https://www.unifiedpatents.com/ https://www.unifiedpatents.com/
alecco 4y ago
Most large corporations have a huge chest of patents they use to keep incumbents out. Their lobbyists would never allow a change to the current status quo. Lobbying should be banned. Fix the root of the problem.
- zackmorris 4y ago
  Or the anti-patent-troll organization can use its membership fees to hire lobbyists and work towards banning software patents altogether.
spullara 4y ago
This company was trying to do something like that: https://www.rpxcorp.com/ https://www.rpxcorp.com/ Intellectual Ventures started out that way but quickly went on offense.
plafl 4y ago
There are already insurance companies offering coverage for legal expenses. The interesting part here is maybe that by restricting it to patents the insurer has a very clear idea of the risk being covered, as all the patents are public. Edit: on the other hand your potential customers will be difficult to convince. To pay insurance you must have risk aversion, something I don't expect to be abundant among startups
denton-scratch 4y ago
There's sense in making it like insurance. Litigation is notoriously risky; the cost of settling is usually orders of magnitude less than the gain of winning. In that respect, it resembles the kind of thing insurers specialize in. So this is simply a specialist insurer, whose USP is that if they think they can invalidate a patent, they go for it. I'd have thought that deterring patent trolls is the opposite of what they ought to do; I imagine something more like a honeypot operation - every effort is taken to ensure members look just like ordinary marks and suckers. It could cause strains if someone came after a member with a valid patent. The club would decline their claim, they'd have to settle and redesign their product, and they might go bust.
- marcus_holmes 4y ago
  this makes sense to me - pay a premium each month, get protected from trolls. Up to the insurer whether to pay the "licence fee" or fight them in court, and they can make that decision on behalf of all their customers.
belter 4y ago
Trolling Effects - https://trollingeffects.org/ https://trollingeffects.org/ LOT Network - https://lotnet.com/ https://lotnet.com/ "Patent Trolls and You: EFF Virtual Boot Camp for App Developers" - https://youtu.be/X6eaDSd54_c https://youtu.be/X6eaDSd54_c
ndr 4y ago
Ask Patents might be the osint version of that. People will do a lot of things for internet points. One example: https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/3566/scaling-based-on-pixel-density-microsoft-patent-application-prior-art-requ/3569#3569 https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/3566/scaling-bas...
rkangel 4y ago
I think the main difficulty is in the "obviously unjustified" determination. Member organisations would be trying to get the anti-patent-troll org to defend any and all IP claims against them. Not all IP claims are patent trolling, some are legitimate and you don't want there to be big arguments whether this is a troll attack that needs defending. Perhaps the way to do it is by the type of claimant rather than any analysis of the merits of the case. For example, one standard would be "Anyone who brings a claim while not actually being a competitor of the defendant".
- pitaj 4y ago
  It's not like it's impossible to decide what counts and what doesn't. Insurance companies reject claims all the time.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    And you think the insureds don't argue about it? let alone litigate it? have you ever dealt with insurance coverage for a litigation?
    - netsharc 4y ago
      Spontaneously, my idea to protect against such a ligitation would be, put it in the contract that if the insurance rules that the client has no valid case, the client can take it up to a committee, for example the pool of all clients. And have it in the insurance contract that the decision of the committee is final. Obviously/hopefully it'd be in the interest of the other clients that their insurance payments won't being spent on the wrong type of cases.
      - freejazz 4y ago
        If I'm purchasing litigation insurance, I'm not going to want a provision where the denial of my coverage is determined by a pool of individuals who have an interest in not granting the coverage. Insurance agreements are legally binding contracts and that's why they get litigated over. Your scheme essentially waives an insured's right to a breach of contract claim over non-coverage.
ChrisLomont 4y ago
There's tons of them. Google patent lawsuit insurance.
throw10920 4y ago
I worry that this would introduce cost disease[1] in legal fees. In the case of healthcare and education, I believe that cost disease is caused partially by an excess of funding - subsidizing. In the case of healthcare, it's insurance. In the case of education, it's grants and student loans. These mechanics greatly reduce the pressure of service-providers to reduce prices - and so they increase prices because they want profit. If legal fees, which are high enough as it is, were also subject to subsidization through this kind of organization, then even though members would be temporarily better-off, I would expect that as more people made use of these organizations, legal fees would start to rise even more - a tragedy of the commons. Besides, aren't these lawsuits symptoms of a problem? We want to address the disease (overly complex legal system requiring an expensive education to understand, mechanics that allow for patent trolls), not the symptoms. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
patentlyredmud 4y ago
You mean like https://www.rpxcorp.com https://www.rpxcorp.com ?

by ummonk 4y ago

Bellamy 4y ago

Not a bad idea!

acdha 4y ago

Here’s John Walker’s proposal for that in 1993 after getting extorted by the XOR patent troll: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_105.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_105.html I think the problem is that most of the major companies are comfortable writing it off as a cost of doing business and don’t want to give up the possibility of using strategic patent suits themselves.

cratermoon 4y ago
> don’t want to give up the possibility of using strategic patent suits themselves This is a highly under-appreciated aspect of the patent world. Companies that buy and own lots of patents do so defensively. Big companies even enter into patent cross-licensing agreements with each other, where they basically say "I know you probably infringe on my patents and I probably infringe on yours, but we'll make a deal and indemnify each other". But they want to maintain those patents to harass upstart companies that would threaten their core business, so when the trolls come along, they just pay to license and move on. One of the few examples of a big company fighting patent trolls is Intuit vs encryption patent trolls, of all things. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/intuit-beats-web-encryption-patent-that-defeated-newegg-at-trial/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/intuit-beats-web...
- mauvehaus 4y ago
  Having beaten my head against the immovable mass of Quickbooks, I'm shocked to find myself cheering Intuit for anything. I'm not about to switch back, but that earns my grudging respect.
- ummonk 4y ago
  Yeah, but if such an insurance scheme can protect smaller member companies and prevent patent trolls from targeting them, I'd say that's mission accomplished. Let the patent trolls go after the companies that will pay them off, but make sure they're strongly deterred from going after the little guys.
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    The current patent regime does nothing to deter going after the little guys. Or even, really, the big guys. Newegg was essentially gutted by the same patent troll that Intuit beat, as the article notes. Also, Intuit's victory didn't invalidate the patent, they just were found to be not infringing.

r3trohack3r 4y ago

I've seen an organization like this on HN in the past - but struggling to find the post. A quick search turned up https://lotnet.com/ https://lotnet.com/ which I think is it

greensoap 4y ago
Lot is for patent holders to commit their patents to the group and everyone gets a license. Rpx is probably the closest thing. They will try to kill a patent if it is being used against their members. But they don’t cover the cost of litigation. There are also patent pools where everyone pools their money to buy a certain patent. There may be some insurance you can seek out. But I don’t know if anyone in the space that is using that type of thing

hedora 4y ago

Such things definitely exist in the form of mutually assured destruction cartels. All the members license all their patents to everyone in the cartel. If anyone (external or not) sues anyone in the pact, it automatically cancels any patent licenses they have from members of the cartel, and the cartel launches a patent enforcement suit using their combined portfolio. Of course, none of that helps with patent trolls, just like the ability to turn Russia to radioactive glass doesn't defend Washington DC from an independent actor with a suitcase nuke.

dpifke 4y ago

It's not quite what you're describing, but you can join Open Invention Network for free: https://openinventionnetwork.com/ https://openinventionnetwork.com/

remram 4y ago
This is about members not attacking each other, not about defending each other. It could be a first step towards that though.

wombatpm 4y ago

Run the numbers: Assuming you need a legal staff of 20 with avg cost 500k per. So that’s 10 million per year. Double it for rent, SGA, etc. we’re at 20 million per year. Offer a protection package at 10k per year, you need 2000 paying customers. Since all the lawyers are on staff, you can have them invalidating patents when not defending case. If you structure it like a mutual insurance company, you could return a portion of premium based on expenses once a war chest is amassed. Is this something I could take to y-combinator?

jbms 4y ago
Maybe YC could be the target customer? They bankroll a single company as insurance against all their investments being targets of attacks. They can afford it. They might attract all the best startups as a result, if those feel better protected.
- leaflets2 4y ago
  And it's in YCs self interest to make their startups safer? Wouldn't this be in all venture capitalists self interest? (Not only YC) Maybe they could join (or start their own)
Waterluvian 4y ago
This is a great idea but it needs to be executed by lawyers, not tech people. Please not another tech startup of lawyers.
gregsadetsky 4y ago
Really good idea to bring it to yc - they know how much legal fights like these have cost across all of the cohorts. And obviously they would pitch it internally to all existing + future startups. Maybe this is what ends this garbage once and for all?
- 8ytecoder 4y ago
  I think $10k/yr is fairly reasonable even for startups. However, a lot of these trolls go after small businesses, don’t they?

grayfaced 4y ago

The risk models for potential members would vary wildly. The fee structure would have to account for different levels of risk based on the activity of members. And then what if one member faces a lawsuit that could be an existential threat to that company, how much of a legal defense is the appropriate response? And then who determines the legal strategy (settle vs court)? This sounds like ransomware insurance. Often you would expect the insurance to help you recover from losses but instead they just pay the ransoms since it's cheaper. Which in-turn makes the insurance holders even more of a juicy target.

ummonk 4y ago
I don't think it's quite analogous to ransomware insurance because a patent troll incurs its own costs from fighting out a lawsuit in court. So by credibly committing to bitterly fighting out each patent troll lawsuit, it can deter patent trolls from suing its members, and actually lower overall costs. Credible deterrence is important in an iterated game.

headsoup 4y ago

No, they need to fix the systemic issues that allow patent trolls to succeed.

missedthecue 4y ago
It's easier to unilaterally start up a membership org than it is to unilaterally reform US federal patent law in a fundamental way.

pronoiac 4y ago

I think that Intellectual Ventures started out as a defense against patent trolls, but after gathering enough of a patent portfolio, they started playing offense in a way that looks like patent trolling.

staticautomatic 4y ago
The important thing to know is that they did so because the economics of defensive aggregation were insufficient to return capital to the investors.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Which makes it even more disgusting. IV is what wrecked the reputation of a lot of people for me.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

aspectmin 4y ago

I was sent this the other day. Haven’t had a chance to dig deeper. Free for companies under $10M in revenue? (If I remember). https://lotnet.com/sem/ https://lotnet.com/sem/

SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
I'm probably misunderstanding (not a law guy) but that seems like a strange mechanism - members of that group transfer legit patents to the patent troll, on the condition that the troll doesn't sue them. This seems to be arming the troll with the tools to attack outside groups - making it somebody else's problem is not the same as eliminating the problem. I'd rather see the Cloudflare approach, beat the barbarians back from the gates then destroy the troll's IP inventory with examples of prior art.
- lights0123 4y ago
  The key is if. If "members of that group transfer legit patents to the patent troll", every other member receives a license for that patent.

Dalewyn 4y ago

The Japanese video game industry does this in an ad-hoc way. Smaller game studios ask bigger companies, like Nintendo, to register some patents in their stead so the bigger companies can keep them safe with their elite team of lawyers. The bigger companies like Nintendo in turn gatekeep the patents from trolls and abusers, letting the industry at-large use the patents for a greater good while suing anyone who doesn't play nice into oblivion. It's not perfect, and it certainly only works because businesses in Japanese society generally view each other as friendly rivals rather than outright enemies, but it's an ingenius solution to a legitimate social problem.

WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
Doesn't OIN work in pretty much the same fashion?
mschuster91 4y ago
So basically because the official environment (laws and courts) doesn't do its job, large private entities end up taking over in what is essentially a protection racket. Sounds a bit too much like the Mafia IMHO.
- hnhamdani2 4y ago
  The more you realize that for Japanese society, it's been the same as how it was since a long time. Zaibatus/Keiretsu is just a modern evolution of feudal era Daimyo/Samurai. As a rule of of thumb, they're trying to good for the masses but indeed they are (benevolent) dictator in some ways.
- ballenf 4y ago
  Seems like it's ok to let societies draw different boundaries around what the government's "job" is.
  - r00fus 4y ago
    I think what mschuster91 is saying is that there are regulatory functions that, if an impartial government doesn't do it, will be done by big corporations in the space, or it's just a free-for-all where trolls roam free. Exercise to the reader as to whether the EU, US or Japanese model is most effective.

reedciccio 4y ago

There's at least one i know of: https://www.unifiedpatents.com/ https://www.unifiedpatents.com/

alecco 4y ago

Most large corporations have a huge chest of patents they use to keep incumbents out. Their lobbyists would never allow a change to the current status quo. Lobbying should be banned. Fix the root of the problem.

zackmorris 4y ago
Or the anti-patent-troll organization can use its membership fees to hire lobbyists and work towards banning software patents altogether.

spullara 4y ago

This company was trying to do something like that: https://www.rpxcorp.com/ https://www.rpxcorp.com/ Intellectual Ventures started out that way but quickly went on offense.

plafl 4y ago

There are already insurance companies offering coverage for legal expenses. The interesting part here is maybe that by restricting it to patents the insurer has a very clear idea of the risk being covered, as all the patents are public. Edit: on the other hand your potential customers will be difficult to convince. To pay insurance you must have risk aversion, something I don't expect to be abundant among startups

denton-scratch 4y ago

There's sense in making it like insurance. Litigation is notoriously risky; the cost of settling is usually orders of magnitude less than the gain of winning. In that respect, it resembles the kind of thing insurers specialize in. So this is simply a specialist insurer, whose USP is that if they think they can invalidate a patent, they go for it. I'd have thought that deterring patent trolls is the opposite of what they ought to do; I imagine something more like a honeypot operation - every effort is taken to ensure members look just like ordinary marks and suckers. It could cause strains if someone came after a member with a valid patent. The club would decline their claim, they'd have to settle and redesign their product, and they might go bust.

marcus_holmes 4y ago
this makes sense to me - pay a premium each month, get protected from trolls. Up to the insurer whether to pay the "licence fee" or fight them in court, and they can make that decision on behalf of all their customers.

belter 4y ago

Trolling Effects - https://trollingeffects.org/ https://trollingeffects.org/ LOT Network - https://lotnet.com/ https://lotnet.com/ "Patent Trolls and You: EFF Virtual Boot Camp for App Developers" - https://youtu.be/X6eaDSd54_c https://youtu.be/X6eaDSd54_c

ndr 4y ago

Ask Patents might be the osint version of that. People will do a lot of things for internet points. One example: https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/3566/scaling-based-on-pixel-density-microsoft-patent-application-prior-art-requ/3569#3569 https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/3566/scaling-bas...

rkangel 4y ago

I think the main difficulty is in the "obviously unjustified" determination. Member organisations would be trying to get the anti-patent-troll org to defend any and all IP claims against them. Not all IP claims are patent trolling, some are legitimate and you don't want there to be big arguments whether this is a troll attack that needs defending. Perhaps the way to do it is by the type of claimant rather than any analysis of the merits of the case. For example, one standard would be "Anyone who brings a claim while not actually being a competitor of the defendant".

pitaj 4y ago
It's not like it's impossible to decide what counts and what doesn't. Insurance companies reject claims all the time.
- freejazz 4y ago
  And you think the insureds don't argue about it? let alone litigate it? have you ever dealt with insurance coverage for a litigation?
  - netsharc 4y ago
    Spontaneously, my idea to protect against such a ligitation would be, put it in the contract that if the insurance rules that the client has no valid case, the client can take it up to a committee, for example the pool of all clients. And have it in the insurance contract that the decision of the committee is final. Obviously/hopefully it'd be in the interest of the other clients that their insurance payments won't being spent on the wrong type of cases.
    - freejazz 4y ago
      If I'm purchasing litigation insurance, I'm not going to want a provision where the denial of my coverage is determined by a pool of individuals who have an interest in not granting the coverage. Insurance agreements are legally binding contracts and that's why they get litigated over. Your scheme essentially waives an insured's right to a breach of contract claim over non-coverage.

ChrisLomont 4y ago

There's tons of them. Google patent lawsuit insurance.

throw10920 4y ago

I worry that this would introduce cost disease[1] in legal fees. In the case of healthcare and education, I believe that cost disease is caused partially by an excess of funding - subsidizing. In the case of healthcare, it's insurance. In the case of education, it's grants and student loans. These mechanics greatly reduce the pressure of service-providers to reduce prices - and so they increase prices because they want profit. If legal fees, which are high enough as it is, were also subject to subsidization through this kind of organization, then even though members would be temporarily better-off, I would expect that as more people made use of these organizations, legal fees would start to rise even more - a tragedy of the commons. Besides, aren't these lawsuits symptoms of a problem? We want to address the disease (overly complex legal system requiring an expensive education to understand, mechanics that allow for patent trolls), not the symptoms. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

patentlyredmud 4y ago

You mean like https://www.rpxcorp.com https://www.rpxcorp.com ?