[cperciva]

a company with no business model outside collecting patents

Every time stories like this come up, there's a line like the above. And every time, I wonder: Why is this relevant? I could say equally well that Stripe is a company with no business model outside of taking money from credit cards; it doesn't mean that they're bad people.

The fact is, companies out-source all the time; why is out-sourcing patent infringement lawsuits any worse than out-sourcing credit card processing, overdue account collections, or web design?

[elwin]

The purported purpose of patents is to increase the amount of useful stuff produced by the economy. The purpose of patent trolling is the opposite: the product stops getting produced, and the amount of useful stuff decreases. That makes patent trolling more harmful to consumers than normal patent lawsuits.

[tzs]

Patent trolls generally seek royalties or one-time license fees, rather then seeking to stop production. Patent owners seeking to shut down production are generally patent owners who are trying to stop a competitor.

[cperciva]

It's not in the interest of Intellectual Ventures in the slightest to force people to stop infringing -- if people stop infringing, they get nothing.

If you're interested in maximizing the amount of useful stuff produced by the economy, having patents sold off to Intellectual Ventures is far better than having them continue to be owned by companies which want to do nothing other than shut down their competition.

[DougBTX]

Being the devil's advocate: if a company can invent a product and earn a profit through licensing a patent for that product, is it not likley that they could reinvest more in product development by out sourcing the collection of licensing fees to a company which specialises in collecting license fees, and finding new licensees? And is this fee collecting company not a patent troll?

[bdhe]

... overdue account collections ...

This is actually an interesting point. Both collection agents and patent trolls go about asking people to pony up the payment for goods (to put it colloquially) and they both do it on behalf of a third party, for whom doing it by themselves will involve a lot more of a hassles.

The distinction comes in the fact that in the case of collection agents, the payments owed to the goods are seemingly legitimate or at least socially accepted (perhaps collection agencies that come about collecting payments after those subscription-renewal or hidden-monthly-fee scams might be construed as as much a nuisance as patent trolls). I guess socially, asking payments for ideas only seems reasonable if the persons going about asking for the payments themselves come up with the idea.

It is a little weird and subtle. Can someone come up with a better distinction?

[mjdwitt]

I think that it's possibly an even more basic difference. Many people are still quite unclear to adamantly opposed to the concept of paying for an idea, which means the very purpose of patent trolls is at best ethically murky to these people.

[cperciva]

If I'm adamantly opposed to paying to park my car, does it mean that parking tickets are ethically murky?

Living in a civilized society means that we sometimes have to play by rules we don't like (until we can convince everybody else that it's time to change the rules).

[mjdwitt]

I agree completely. This is, in fact, the difference that I am pointing out. In the case of paid parking, most people would agree that the trade of money for a parking space on land which someone else ones and maintains at cost is a fair trade. Similarly, most people would agree that debt collection as a whole is a fair industry in that it seeks to make sure that those who owe money for value received pay that money owed.

My point is that–especially in the world of software–this general consensus does not exist for the patent industry, (that a large majority of everybody else is already convinced that it is time to change the rules,) and that this general dislike for the rules is the real source of the anger directed at patent trolls. This aligns with your earlier point about there being no difference between outsourced and in-house torture, in that I would say that people are just as upset about Microsoft's, Oracle's, and even Google's patent portfolios as they are about Intellectual ventures. The only difference between IV and those others is that they manage to win people over (or at least mollify) with the rest of their work.

Edit: I would say that seven_stones cutting straight to the morality of software patents in general pretty well illustrates my point here.

[outside1234]

the reason that's important is because the company has no products, there is nothing it can be infringing on and so there is no mutually assured destruction to reign in the madness.

[duskwuff]

And, unlike other service businesses, a patent troll company generally provides no meaningful service to its clients -- its only product is typically "we won't sue you".

[vogonj]

the service is ideas. if patents are, indeed, on non-obvious concepts, they can provide the spark for new inventions, and -- if you sign a licensing agreement with the patent troll -- you are paying them for the right to build, market, and sell something they invented.

the question is whether the patent review process is working or not.

[Woost]

Ideas don't have a dollar value. I'm guessing that not one company who signs a licensing agreement with the patent troll does so because they want access to a library of ideas. They do it because they're working to build a real product, and the patent troll comes along and says "sign this and pay us or we'll make your life miserable and it will cost more"

[vogonj]

or, if you look at it from their perspective, they came up with the idea, went to the trouble of formally describing it and filing paperwork so that it could be released to the public, and then another company either independently invented it or just read their description and built one.

say IV had the patent for a burr coffee grinder. even if they never build a non-prototype grinder, they went to the trouble of conceptualizing, prototyping, and writing down their idea for an invention so someone else could build it. that invention has merit, even if Intellectual Ventures doesn't build one.

the question is whether (ignoring particular types of inventions like computer software, which is legitimately tricky to reason about) all of the inventions are legitimately novel inventions which go through an inventive process of discovery (for lack of a better phrase), or whether they are rote improvements on concepts which are already state-of-the-art, or shots in the dark hoping to land some profitable patent litigation later. and nobody but Intellectual Ventures knows what their intention is.

[VladRussian]

>if you look at it from their perspective, they came up with the idea, went to the trouble of formally describing it and filing paperwork so that it could be released to the public

they went for all this trouble only for such a noble cause?

>they went to the trouble of conceptualizing, prototyping, and writing down their idea for an invention so someone else could build it.

you just made my day.

[VladRussian]

>the service is ideas.

the service is what i ask for. If i don't ask for it, it is extortion ("tax" when extorting entity is some kind of government)

[vogonj]

a) nice "taxation is theft" dig in there.

b) the entire purpose of the patent system is that ideas can be entered into a register and time-limited monopolies granted by the government in exchange for their public release at the end of the monopoly period.

the only weird part about non-practicing entities -- and I say this from the perspective of a Microsoft employee with no patent cubes yet to his name, who works in the same room as people with 15 -- is that they are effectively outsourcing the entire process of reducing their inventions to practice.

[VladRussian]

>"taxation is theft"

extortion and theft are different :)

>is that they are effectively outsourcing the entire process of reducing their inventions to practice.

no. I have a few myself. The best purpose of these sh!tty "invention patents" is to protect yourself from somebody patenting that stuff and coming after you later. The worst - it to poison/booby-trap "Monopoly"-style the mental space of ideas so whenever somebody accidentally stumbles across or have no other way than to pass through they would be forced to pay. The trade secret laws wouldn't prohibit me from coming independently on my own with the same or similar idea and executing upon it :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret#Protection

[seven_stones]

Sometimes the smartest people say the...

Why is outsourcing torture any worse than outsourcing web design with WebGL? Extraordinary rendition vs. extraordinary rendering!

Hmm, maybe it has something to do with the nature of the thing being outsourced.

[cperciva]

Torture is bad. Is out-sourced torture any worse than in-house torture? I don't think so.

I'm not getting into the issue of whether patents are good or bad; my question here is why do people consider out-sourced patent lawsuits to be so much worse than in-house patent lawsuits?

[seven_stones]

That's a different question than the one you originally posed.

Your question was why outsourcing X was any worse than outsourcing Y or Z.

The answer is because different things are different.

As to your current question as to why outsourcing X is worse than in-house X, you're obstructing discussion by trying to preempt discussion of the merits of X in the first place.

If you don't want to get into the issue of whether software patents are good or bad, then you want to remove the only meaningful part of the discussion.

To use the torture example, ask yourself: Would you rather be detained in the U.S., or in Syria? It's begging the question to assume that the outcome is the same either way, i.e. torture, death.

Behavior changes depending on consequences. It's very hard to get soldiers to kill "the enemy" in close combat, when they can see the other person is a human being like them. It gets easier as you increase the gulf of humanity between them; shelling from distance, or dropping bombs from altitude, or now, flying drones from complete safety with only a video screen and not the smells or screams or feeling of personal danger to the pilot.

Behavior tends to completely devolve when one side can engage in aggression essentially consequence-free, or believes it can.

All you have to do is look at the civility of discourse on the Internet, or appreciate the ideological battle the West has against religious martyrdom that leads to suicide bombers. The latter is a huge concern, because you can't have a functioning society where nothing can dissuade destructive behavior.

Alternatively, patent trolls are like the introduction of an aggressive exogenic species into an ecosystem. With no natural predators, the new species will wreak havoc on the existing balance.

Soon it will be more profitable to sue people than to make anything, and then making anything will just become a liability. Much like investment bankers playing games with financial instruments to become wealthy on paper without making anything real, finance's evil twin will be patent trolls who become wealthy by destroying real wealth.

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." - Bill Gates, 1991

The only way we've gotten around the standstill, to the extent we have, is via cross-licensing and mutually-assured destruction.

So the tl;dr to your question is: Because the outsourcing in this case creates an asymmetric warfare model. The "outsourcing" is kind of like a "godmode" switch on an FPS game. The guy who runs the server goes around fragging everyone else while invulnerable which ruins it for everyone but him.