Not everyone is an abuser, but the trolls have no problem abusing from any
angle possible.
On that note, I partially disagree with the Judge
Posner's definition of a Patent
Troll:
Patent trolls are companies that acquire patents not to
protect their market for a product they want to produce -- patent trolls are not
producers -- but to lay traps for producers, for a patentee can sue for
infringement even if it doesn't make the product that it holds a patent
on.
As unfortunate as it is, the definition is much wider then just
NPEs.
In my humble opinion it extends out to - and including - those
practicing entities who have been granted a patent on something they knew - or
should have known - was trivial and are willing to simply ask for licensing fees
even if they have no desire to initiate lawsuits. Sadly, the patent stamping
authorities are facilitating a very large portion of the trolls by simply
granting the patents.
Without patents being granted on something as basic
as "rectangular with rounded corners", the only trolls we'd have to face are the
ones like SCOG who are making claims they know they can't uphold in a Court Of
Law.
Caveat: It has not been proven in a Court Of Law SCOG did such.
However, for myself the public record is complete enough there is sufficient
proof to show beyond reasonable doubt that they knew - or should have known -
Linux did not infringe their copyrights. And most certainly by the time they
reached the end of discovery against IBM and had so few - was it 389 lines? -
lines of "actual evidence" out of so many - how many 10's of millions of lines
of code were examined? - they should be totally red-faced from
embarrassment.
RAS[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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