I think dogpiling Intellectual Ventures is striking at the branches, and not at the root. The problem isn’t “patent trolls.” The problem is patents:
> Even if patents actually accomplished their advertised purpose — “securing for limited Times to … Inventors the exclusive Right to their … Discoveries,” as the US Constitution puts it — they’d be a very bad idea. The claim that one can own an idea is silly on its face, and not a claim that anyone would pay the slightest mind to were it not enforced at gunpoint by the state.
> But the advertised purpose of patents is not their actual purpose.
> Their actual purpose is to restrain competition and limit innovation so as to provide economic advantage — monopoly pricing power, in fact — to established firms who, by virtue of their ability to pay off (pardon my indelicate language; I believe the word I’m looking for is “lobby”) politicians, bureaucrats and judges, can thereby indulge their desire avoid market competition on price or quality. [1]
> Even if patents actually accomplished their advertised purpose — “securing for limited Times to … Inventors the exclusive Right to their … Discoveries,” as the US Constitution puts it — they’d be a very bad idea. The claim that one can own an idea is silly on its face, and not a claim that anyone would pay the slightest mind to were it not enforced at gunpoint by the state.
> But the advertised purpose of patents is not their actual purpose.
> Their actual purpose is to restrain competition and limit innovation so as to provide economic advantage — monopoly pricing power, in fact — to established firms who, by virtue of their ability to pay off (pardon my indelicate language; I believe the word I’m looking for is “lobby”) politicians, bureaucrats and judges, can thereby indulge their desire avoid market competition on price or quality. [1]
[1] http://c4ss.org/content/24371