[josh_fyi]

We need patent violation insurance. This lets companies share risks, but also makes it easier to aggregate defensive efforts and so get economies of scale. Just having this insurance would scare off most trolls who rely on victims to fold easily.

As for the risk that "real" patent violators would disproportionately buy this insurance, we can

- restrict it to software patents, where everyone is a violator, and there is, as far as I can tell, no such thing as a malicious patent violator.

- include a clause exempting malicious violations from coverage. This would have some fairly objective definition supervised by known neutral parties. Because this clause would be in the context of the group insurance rather than a trolls attack, "real patent violation" could be defined sensibly between reasonable people.

[DigitalSea]

A simple clean cut solution. You can insure everything else from debt to houses, cars, pets, your salary and of course your life so why not some kind of patent violation insurance? I wonder if anyone has attempted to introduce this kind of insurance and if not, why not?

[solutionhn]

The problem I see here is, Insurance is a generic solution and doesn't fit our problem. Maybe we can take the core idea and do it better. I'll wait to see more viewpoints instead of spamming the thread. I'm already nervous if I broke some HN rules by posting this thread.

[josh_fyi]

Could be. In what way does it not fit?