I posted the wsj article here a few days ago:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11860308" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11860308</a><p>It's obvious that patent trolls are the most likely candidates to buy out this portfolio, IV would be one of the companies that will try to get a hand on these.<p>The good engineers whose brains led to these patents had no way of knowing that this would happen, but let it be a warning to all the good engineers in the present whose parent companies are patenting things left, right and center for defensive purposes only, of course.
Note a lot of Yahoo engineers were apparently encouraged to get patents for 'defence only' purposes.<p>I do not know if these are among those being auctioned.
And this, my fellow hackers, is why you shouldn't take part in software patents, even when you see your employer in a very positive light. Ten years from now, things might be much worse there, and then your wonderful "defensive patent" is suddenly at an auction to the highest bidder, who might use it as a weapon to extract wealth from innovators.
I am currently facing the grim possibility of a patent with my name on it for a system that's basically a poor imitation of decades-old technology. (But it works great with our other poor in-house imitations of decades-old technology!)<p>Yahoo's "non" fire sale is a good counterpart to the devil on my shoulder trying to rationalize away my participation. My job is actually pretty great otherwise (especially for the town I live in), so I'm stressed as hell at the prospect of quitting over this. I keep thinking of the Milgram experiment, and how confident I was when I heard about it that <i>I</i> wouldn't have been part of the majority that continued shocking a human being to the point of apparent death. Software patents are an abstract evil by comparison, but now that there's a part of me saying "yeah it <i>seems</i> bad, but it probably won't result in any real harm", I can somewhat empathize with that majority.<p>I don't really have a point to make, this just seemed like a reasonable place to vent my shame and frustration.
I would really like to see some of the major tech companies step up and make an example of some of the more prolific patent trolls. Apple and Google should be making a real effort to make this process more risky as they have cash reserves deep enough to deal with any of these companies regardless of the size and the goodwill that these actions would generate would be significant.
Horrible. There should be some disarmament fund. I.e. one that buys such patents and releases them for free, neutralizing their potential danger.<p>Imagine some state selling a pile of old nuclear weapons to the highest bidder, no matter who that is...<p><i>> The best outcome, for Yahoo and all of us, would be for a company like Google, Microsoft or Facebook to buy the whole shebang. While it might give one of those already mighty powers even more leverage, those firms are more likely to retain them as assets in the mutually-assured-destruction game played by the titans of tech when they consider suits against each other.</i><p>MAD analogy doesn't really help. While two power states with nuclear weapons are in some balance through MAD, states without them are instantly at a disadvantage. They aren't part of MAD scheme. Same goes for someone small pitted against such monster as MS. They simply can't defend themselves against massive patent aggression attacks.<p>Plus, MS can easily sell those patents to patent trolls which serve as their privateers with nothing to lose, thus bypassing MAD even against big opponents (it's like big state backing mercenaries which aren't officially affiliated with them, but really do their bidding).<p>So unless someone with good intentions buys these patetns and disarms them, it will be a problem either way.
Not really on topic, but is it possible to acquire a 'defensive' patent? Maybe by placing a patent into public domain or otherwise promise through some legal means not to pursue legal action against anyone who would like to use the patent?
Edison spent much of his career in the courtroom - suing people who violated his patents, being sued by others for violating their patents, and being an expert witness in patent lawsuits.<p>He also spent much of his career inventing workarounds for other peoples' patents.