[rkalla]

I am going to take an unpopular stance here... I think.

When patents are enforced by big legal entities, we all scream foul, "Patents are meant to protect the little guy, not make lawyers rich!"

Now we have a musician (a "little guy") suing a much loved successful startup... and we are still screaming, but instead of "Stop the lawyers!" we are yelling "Stop the hipster artists!" (at least lhnn was).

If this musician was suing Real Player or Rhapsody or some entity we didn't all love, I wonder how different the response (here in the comments) would have been?

  if(!entity.isUnderdog())
    complain();
  else
    support();

I may be missing a case in there... :)

[phillmv]

I think you may have misunderstood the average complaint.

The complaint isn't about little guy vs big companies, it's about bullshit patents. A big company using a bullshit patent to squeeze out a little guy is just the most egregious example of bullshit.

In this case, it's less so that it's a "hipster artist", but it's more that he's a "douchebag artist" with a bullshit patent. Bullshit patents cost all of us money by distracting people from doing awesome stuff.

[rkalla]

  > In this case, it's less so that it's a "hipster artist", 
  but it's more that he's a "douchebag artist" with a 
  bullshit patent. Bullshit patents cost all of us money by 
  distracting people from doing awesome stuff.

All you did was validate my point (as annoyed is that is going to make you)... this sentence is dripping with preconceptions about both the person trying to assert their patent and the patent itself, neither of which I assume you are intimately familiar with.

If I took the identical scenario and replaced "douchebag artist" with Sergey Brin or Steve Jobs and left all other facts the same (the same patent, the same timeline, the same lawsuit) this discussion looks A LOT different.

Now you have people asserting the patent validity and how it overlaps with X and infringes on Y, but with some easily dismissable artist at the helm, most people have the same response you do -- shove him into a socially defined box and throw it all out the window as bullshit antics of some random douchebag wearing a hemp necklace.

All of these discussions are bullshit - they produce nothing except strife and accomplish nothing.

[phillmv]

No. I for one would be comfortable describing those people as douchebags as well.

Larry Ellison, for instance – widely considered a douchebag.

I can't speak for others, but I'm fairly certain the issue are bullshit patents.

>All of these discussions are bullshit - they produce nothing except strife and accomplish nothing.

Complaining is human, and it allows us to get a measure of everyone else's opinions. If you removed griping from HN you wouldn't have much else left.

[forgottenpaswrd]

"When patents are enforced by big legal entities, we ALL scream foul, "Patents are meant to protect the little guy, not make lawyers rich!""

Please, don't use "ALL" because that is not true, I don't cream this, so your statement is a fallacy easily to demonstrate. It is only you who has problems with big entities by default.

Patents are about successful implementation of inventions. Business patents should never be granted in a free market economy because it destroys it and create a "privilege and monopoly buying" society." in witch people in power could buy privileges witch gives them power and the possibility to buy more privileges.

The moment you need to ask permission to the state to operate in your business you are not in a free market anymore, you are in a centralized economy in witch everything is decided by the people in top.

US of America is becoming a totalitarian state, step by step.

[drzaiusapelord]

>"Patents are meant to protect the little guy, not make lawyers rich!"

No. I'm against patents because ideas shouldn't be owned, especially obvious ideas. Patents have never, ever served the little guy. That's pro-IP propaganda and at best a 17th century idea that never panned out.

[rickmb]

I sincerely hope you enjoy playing with your straw man.

P.s.: Most patent trolls are "little guys", and they are usually suing where the money is.

[Symmetry]

Wait, you're accusing Hacker News of only caring about bad patents when the victim is an underdog, but you're using as your example a case where the person doing the suing is in fact much smaller than the entity being sued?

If you're going to accuse people being driven by unconsidered emotions, perhaps you could come up with an example that suits your case?

[rkalla]

Underdog was probably the wrong choice for the code snippet, surely you understood my point was popular-vs-unpopular.