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I think your Note at the end betrays your misunderstanding of the situation. There are people who make it essentially their full time job to fill out junk paten
by cshimmin 3y ago
I think your Note at the end betrays your misunderstanding of the situation. There are people who make it essentially their full time job to fill out junk patents and see what they can get approved. They are paying USPTO fees to make this happen. They then use the portfolio so built to extort actual practitioners, or they sell/trade portfolio items to other trolls. There was never any startup dream involved
- skrtskrt 3y agoOften involves buying otherwise-worthless IP from defunct companies with the sole purpose of using it to sue others
- pclmulqdq 3y agoIf you look at the records of issued patents and which ones are owned by known "trolls," a very small minority of them come from this approach. Writing patents to anticipate future inventions is risky and expensive, and most of those patents will be worthless because a non-expert can't anticipate the technical direction of a field very well. Buying failed startups is cheaper and easier, and a lot less uncertain.