Take a stand against patent trolls

I was going to write up a full article, but I'll just post this here instead.<p>I was thinking shame might work a little bit. Most people, even lawyers and patent trolls, think of themselves as being good people. Calling them out directly can have quite an affect.<p>MacroSolve is one of the companies suing iOS developers over forms (<a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/05/macrosolve-joins-lodsys-in-suing-mobile-app-developers.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/05/macrosolve-joins-...</a>).<p>Dr. Dale Schoenefeld, a CS professor and bureaucrat at University of Tulsa (<a href="http://www.utulsa.edu/offices-and-services/information-technology/about/administration.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.utulsa.edu/offices-and-services/information-techn...</a>), is on the board. He probably doesn't care that I think he's a scumbag, but I imagine he might care how he is perceived by students and his colleagues.

In order for this to be effective, defendants need to be able to discover other defendants being sued by the particular troll firm for that particular patent. Then the defense can be funded by multiple companies and the defense becomes more formidable.<p>This almost screams for a website - a central place to facilitate matchmaking between companies under suit by a particular troll.

Who is fighting to keep software patents as-is? Who are we up against? I have NEVER read anything in their favor. If we live in a society where the laws need to be changed, why are they just not changing? What horrors could actually come from abolishing software patents?<p>I just don't understand why this is still an argument. Who are we even arguing against? I never see anyone disagreeing with the argument. It's as if everyone hates the same thing yet it continues to exist and all we have to do is change it. So someone just change it.

The tacit assumption upon which this argument rests is that the trolls are guaranteed to lose in court (at least after an appeal). While that might be a fair assumption in the most egregious cases, in many circumstances the lower court will not be particularly skilled in patent law and an appeal to a specialized appeals court is by no means certain. A rational businessman might well chose to settle a case even if the probability of losing is just 5% simply because the penalties for patent infringement are so high in comparison to the settlement costs.

I've always wondered: what if you just responded to a patent troll with "screw you" and refused to play their game? What if you just did the absolute minimum and didn't take their bait to reach settlement? What could you face? Could you go to jail?

And will Crutchfield be taking that stand? Because posting an article like this and then refusing to follow your own advice is foolhardy at best.

While we're on the topic of annoyances that get in the way of worthwhile activities, how about websites that publish interesting articles and then stick eye-catching auto-scrolling displays right next to them? It never ceases to amaze me how rarely it seems to occur to web-based publishers that someone might actually want to read their stuff.<p>Well, thank goodness for Readable.<p>Hey, maybe I should patent auto-scrolling ads, and then sue sites like this one. That would be patent trolling with positive social impact as the goal.

I wish someone had a patent on the business process of buying patents just to sue companies that actually try to provide some value to the world and then went around suing these parasitic lowlives.