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Unless I'm mistaken, it certainly wouldn't stop patent trolls, who buy/keep patents precisely so they can use them. The only thing it would stop is companies ho

by zerovox 14y ago

Unless I'm mistaken, it certainly wouldn't stop patent trolls, who buy/keep patents precisely so they can use them. The only thing it would stop is companies holding patents for defensive reasons, who have no intention of actively pursuing patent violators but who patent their ideas in-case they are sued by a patent troll with a similar idea/patent. Google claims to follow this in terms of open source projects[1]. [1]:http://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/ http://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/

jcromartie 14y ago
But "defend it or lose it" means going after all infringers, which patent trolls certainly don't do. They are currently very selective about enforcing their patents, choosing to assert where they will win.
- chawco 14y ago
  I'm not sure it's completely practical, but this would have some interesting interactions with obviousness -- if you need to sue half the industry, it may say something about the obviousness of the patent itself.
  - Pwnguinz 14y ago
    Hindsight is 20/20. Everything is obvious, once someone already paves the way to the solution. This is why, in principle, there is the "prior art" clause. It's just not enforced well enough in the software realm--but the mechanism to prevent patenting something widely known a posteriori does technically exist.
    - hashmymustache 14y ago
      Well the non-obvious requirement of patents to be granted in the first place is defined such that experts in the field would not come up with it in response to the problem it solves. This is not the case with most software patents.
apendleton 14y ago
Patent trolls buy them and keep them to use them eventually, but will wait a long time before doing so so that lots of members of industry will have infringed before starting to sue. In trademark law, you can't do that: if you're lax and let your mark become generic, it's basically impossible to go back and go after infringers after the fact (this happened to "nylon," for example). There would still certainly be patent trolls, but as a start-up, you wouldn't have to worry as much about them... if you wanted to implement a feature that other companies were also implementing, you could do so with a reasonable amount of safety: either they weren't patented, or they were and there would be noisy lawsuits going on about them, or the patents existed but were no longer valid due to lack of defense.

by zerovox 14y ago

jcromartie 14y ago

But "defend it or lose it" means going after all infringers, which patent trolls certainly don't do. They are currently very selective about enforcing their patents, choosing to assert where they will win.

chawco 14y ago
I'm not sure it's completely practical, but this would have some interesting interactions with obviousness -- if you need to sue half the industry, it may say something about the obviousness of the patent itself.
- Pwnguinz 14y ago
  Hindsight is 20/20. Everything is obvious, once someone already paves the way to the solution. This is why, in principle, there is the "prior art" clause. It's just not enforced well enough in the software realm--but the mechanism to prevent patenting something widely known a posteriori does technically exist.
  - hashmymustache 14y ago
    Well the non-obvious requirement of patents to be granted in the first place is defined such that experts in the field would not come up with it in response to the problem it solves. This is not the case with most software patents.

apendleton 14y ago

Patent trolls buy them and keep them to use them eventually, but will wait a long time before doing so so that lots of members of industry will have infringed before starting to sue. In trademark law, you can't do that: if you're lax and let your mark become generic, it's basically impossible to go back and go after infringers after the fact (this happened to "nylon," for example). There would still certainly be patent trolls, but as a start-up, you wouldn't have to worry as much about them... if you wanted to implement a feature that other companies were also implementing, you could do so with a reasonable amount of safety: either they weren't patented, or they were and there would be noisy lawsuits going on about them, or the patents existed but were no longer valid due to lack of defense.