Patent Trolls

The concept of a patent is quite simple -- it is a 20-year monopoly on a revolutionary, useful, and nonobvious invention, granting ownership rights to the inventor and thus criminalizing the invention’s theft in forms such as production or usage without the inventor’s permission, as if it were any other sort of privately owned property. Internet trolls are provocative antagonists who intend to wreak havoc on internet communities by starting arguments, posting unrelated messages, or generating spam. Patent trolls are not very dissimilar to the internet trolls with whom we have become familiar, except that they, in a sense, “troll” the patent office instead of online forums.

Software has been notoriously difficult to label when trying to claim intellectual property. The differences and similarities between object code, source code, and functionality result in a good deal of confusion as to what a patent of this nature refers to exactly. Some existing software patents claim ownership to common or broad techniques, such as scanning documents to email, offering an umbrella wide enough for patent trolls to at least threaten businesses which utilize these common technologies, if not file infringement suits. The act of accusing businesses with intellectual property infringement and threatening a lawsuit in pursuit of private settlement or licensing fees is called extortion. Extortion is illegal.

If what these patent trolling companies are doing is illegal, how are they getting away with it? For many small businesses, the cost of a lawsuit would be extremely difficult to bankroll, leaving these companies with no other option but to pay the accuser whatever licensing fee or settlement they demand. As explained by John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, 25% of infringement lawsuits are filed in Marshall, TX because juries selected from the mid-sized texas town are more likely to side with patent holders.

The inefficacy of the patent system to prohibit this abuse has allowed parasitic patent trolls to feed off of small businesses, a pivotal component of our economy, and has cost investors hundreds of billions of dollars. The more frightening, lasting effect that this has had is the formation of a hostile environment for new ideas, creativity, and small businesses, especially those which pertain to software. The theme of hostility and danger to startups due to intellectual property claims is quite palpable in the Emmy-nominated series, Silicon Valley. The television series portrays a grave truth about the hardships that many startups face, including threats of intellectual property infringement.

Patent trolling is a pure manifestation of greed, achieved through exploitation of the system which supports it. The ramifications of this greed include the suppression of creative ideas, and the failure of small businesses due to fear. This is not capitalism, it is evil. To repair the system, legislature reforming the patent office to be more rigid and structured in its patent granting decisions would need to pass through congress. However, trial attorneys lobbying the senate have successfully prevented and are likely to continue preventing such legislature from passing, as John Oliver also notes. All of this points to a larger issue in our legal system, but I will leave that for another discussion in a separate venue. For now, the most important thing to understand is that patent trolls are extorting money from many companies using incredibly vague patents, claiming ownership on most others’ inventions or operations while producing no novel ideas, inventions, or anything else themselves.