The flaw, here, I think, is that's it's still prohibitively expensive. If it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to invalidate a patent, we're probably talking hundreds of millions of dollars to invalidate <i>all</i> of the patents that could be used for trolling.<p>That's part of the problem, right? For each patent we hear about being killed, there are ten, twenty, or a hundred more waiting in the wings to take over. And why wouldn't there be, since there appears to be little financial downside for the trolls.<p>Anyway: Having the community spend millions upon millions upon millions to fix this problem would just be another financial drain on the industry. This is a situation where the government needs to step in and do its job, because there's a busted system and the players involved are simply not capable of fixing it without the government's help.
Tim O'Reilly created a site called BountyQuest in 2000, where he posted a $10,000 bounty to invalidate Amazon's 1-click patent.<p>"The way the system works is that a company or individual, remaining anonymous to the public, must pay BountyQuest $2,500 to post a bounty on the site. BountyQuest, which is to receive a 40 percent commission on bounties paid, will monitor the process and will be liable to pay the bounty if the posting group cannot or will not pay it to a deserving party."<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/23/technology/23PATE.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/23/technology/23PATE.html</a><p>However Tim then shut the site down, saying "I had high hopes for BountyQuest, too; it seemed like a great idea. But while I still believe that the failure to search for prior art remains a major problem for the patent system, the company was not able to make a successful business bridging the gap. Of course, this could simply have been an execution issue, or market timing. But it could also have been the fact that the patent mess is a thorny thicket that doesn't lend itself well to penetration by amateurs."<p><a href="http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2003/bountyquest_1003.html" rel="nofollow">http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2003/bountyquest_10...</a>
I really don't understand what you're advocating or what mechanism you hope to develop.<p>You basically want to put out bounties for law firms to take cases against patents? What patents would they target? What adversarial setting would they defend / attack patents in? Couldn't this result in a race to the bottom about what things people want in the public domain - ie. a bunch of people petitioning to have a law firm attack Amazon's One-Click patent? Basically if someone made something desirable enough, then an efficient market would funnel enough money into trumping their patent through your concept, destroying whatever incentive the company had to make something valuable.<p>I could be off on what your suggesting, so i apologize.<p>While there are lots of flaws & advantages in the patent system, one major opinion I have is that there should be some sort of use/active-pursue requirement. Ie. you can't claim property ownership over an idea unless you're actively putting it into product / trying to figure out how. Or maybe a shorter length of the patent (ie. 5/10 years), unless you're actively pursuing it.<p>This would be similar to adjustments in other types of property law. Ie. a lot of property law is based on incentives to define ownership / acquisition in a means that most benefits society. For example in the old property case Brazelton, they didn't award ownership to the person who found a sunk ship & squatted on it, but rather awarded ownership to the person who came later but actually had the technology to lift it.
I think Ask Patents is supposed to be like this. HN already posted an article about this a few weeks ago.<p><a href="http://patents.stackexchange.com/" rel="nofollow">http://patents.stackexchange.com/</a>
I mean, (disclaimer: I'm an engineer there) you could use Crowdtilt for something like that. "Put together $x to fund lawyers to defeat patent Y" or "I know how to undermine Patent Z and I need to raise $x to make it work" or whatever.<p>I don't actually know enough about patent law to understand how this would need to be done, but if it's just a question of putting together money to fund professional counsel or research, you don't need something specific to this; there are several things in the existing crowdfunding ecosystem that can cover your needs.<p>And I am suspiciously going to neglect to mention the other ones.<p>But seriously, you can do this on a bunch of existing platforms, if it's just about putting money together, and if what you need is some kind of white label solution, so that it's focused around specifically that topic, you can do that on CrowdHoster (disclaimer: still crowdtilt.)
The EFF is probably the closest to doing something like this, but they picked the patents and there isn't a way to support killing just one: <a href="https://www.eff.org/patent-busting" rel="nofollow">https://www.eff.org/patent-busting</a>
The simplest market-based solution for killing troll patents I can think of involves anti-troll entities effectively using the troll's tactics against them: mass mailing people whose product might be accused of violating a dubious patent with a no-win no-fee offer to strike down the patent. Contributing to a pool to fight a patent is potentially even cheaper than settling it, especially if the quality of the patent and the NPE's incentive to defend it is low.<p>(of course the less good side of this solution is that the entity best placed to play the role of white knight is one actually linked to the troll who knows exactly who has received the litigation threats. That's probably where trusted bodies like the EFF should get involved)
I don't agree that killing patents is the right approach, how about this as an alternative: The site's admin team could identify patents of particularly useful or disruptive potential and users could pledge a value to bring this patent into the public domain, and their pledge could remain valid for some reasonable period of time, the site could then put forward the aggregate pledge and buy the patent with the view to releasing it. Perhaps a price could be agreed upon up front. The same could be done to bring creative works like books into the public domain.
What I know of patents is that they need to be sufficiently novel in order to be valid.<p>The challenge the patent office has is being able to effectively ensure that a patent is novel - it is simply not possible for them to determine if an innovation is truly unique and sufficiently novel, so they grant patents on the basis that they can be disputed if the idea is proven to be not sufficiently original in the future, after doing as many checks as reasonably possible internally via their examination staff.<p>We need a crowd-scale community who can tap into its broader knowledge to prove these patents are invalid before they are granted, ie at the patent pending stage. This isn't an easy task, but I would imagine that once it is working effectively it would be sufficient dis-incentive for trolls to bother lodging dubious applications in the future.
There is already some crowdsourcing of patent research being done like at <a href="http://www.articleonepartners.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.articleonepartners.com/</a> which essentially offers monetary rewards for the top contributions of prior-art or whatever the particular study asks for. Granted, you don't get to pick which patents are listed to research, but I suspect this sort of bounty program greatly lowers the cost and increases the breadth of material available to patent researchers for any number of purposes. And if patents can be challenged for a reasonably small cost, that should mean more silly patents actually get challenged.
RPX[1] is doing some interesting things with Patent Troll Insurance, but it's really only a viable option for huge corporations who want to buy into the troll-defense patent pool.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.crowell.com/NewsEvents/AlertsNewsletters/all/Court-Dismisses-Patent-Troll-Attack-on-Patent-Aggregator-RPX-For-Now" rel="nofollow">http://www.crowell.com/NewsEvents/AlertsNewsletters/all/Cour...</a>
1. Agree
2. Though about this a long time.
3. Believe their should be three tiered fee system for patents.
4. Low income entities--first two patents free.
5. High income entities--pay 2x current fees.
6. Anyone abusing the patent system would be barred for
a certain amount if time, or life.
If you want to get rid of software patents, move to Europe. US is not so great after all with all the idiocracies related to software laws, patents and security.