| Patent and copyright laws are both in serious need of radical reform in the US and globally. Thank you Rackspace for not caving in to the patent trolls, but as you wrote, it has become a never-ending game of "whack-a-troll". That's because with existing legislation, the patent troll business model is financially very sound if also inherently corrosive to society as a whole. "The dynamics of local vs. global optimization" is jargon from the team-building and process-design communities that applies here: a successful business strategy for the patent trolls is a huge failure for the community as a whole. This could also be considered a perverse incentive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive There are perverse incentives in both copyright and patent law that undermine the original Constitutional goals of "promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts..." that are especially powerful in our age of ever-increasing innovation where digital computers and The Internet have created a radically different "landscape" than that which existed when the first such laws were drafted. Ideally, thoughtful legislative reforms would prevent such perverse incentives in the future so that both copyright and patent law would once again be aligned to serve the common good rather than the good of a few. Large and democratic communities (such as those Joel Spolsky helped create) full of good questions and answers could go a long way towards helping to craft such thoughtful legislative reforms. See Ask Patents http://patents.stackexchange.com for such a community on patents, and http://goo.gl/5YDHa for such a proposed community on copyright. Anyone who feels strongly about these issues, please go get involved by "Follow"ing the proposed CopyrightX community and submitting 5 Example Questions. With enough voting and other participation, the CopyrightX community proposal can graduate to an actual community like Ask Patents. And with two vibrant communities full of good questions and answers related to IP law, perhaps future legislation will be free of perverse incentives, and we can once again rely on our laws to serve ALL of our best interests. In the interim, thanks again Rackspace for being willing to continue the costly game of "whack-a-troll" on behalf of all of us. |