I think it's a terrible analogy: 1) Nuclear weapons are not even relatively cheap. (Certainly not for the Soviet Union.) ~$640B over the next 10y, and this is

I think it's a terrible analogy: 1) Nuclear weapons are not even relatively cheap. (Certainly not for the Soviet Union.) ~$640B over the next 10y, and this is during a draw-down in weapons. http://www.ploughshares.org/what-nuclear-weapons-cost-us http://www.ploughshares.org/what-nuclear-weapons-cost-us 2) It's pretty ridiculous to suggest that nuclear powers covertly threatened smaller countries with the threat of their nuclear arsenals, let alone actually attacked smaller powers (unless you count the US bombing of Japan). Using patents doesn't lead to Mutually Assured Destruction, and there are many cases of large organizations using patents to damage or defeat other smaller (or even large) organizations. 3) Many of the patent trolls are surrogates of big players who simply give them plausible deniability. Again, there's no analogy of a big power giving nuclear weapons to terrorists to conduct attacks on its rivals because the downsides are so immense. With surrogate patent trolls it's merely a matter of some bad P.R.