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So-called patent trolls may actually benefit inventors and the innovation economy, according to a Stanford intellectual property expert. Stephen Haber ( https://politicalscience.stanford.edu/people/stephen-haber ), a Stanford political science professor, suggests in new research that concerns about too much litigation involving patents is misguided.
A patent troll is a person or company that buys patents – without any intent to produce a product – and then enforces those patents against accused infringers in order to collect licensing fees. Some say the resulting litigation has driven up costs to innovators and consumers.
To the contrary, Haber said, his research with Stanford political science graduate student Seth Werfel shows that trolls – also known as patent assertion entities, or PAEs – play a useful intermediary role between individual inventors and large manufacturers.
http://scienceblog.com/77142/patent-trolls-serve-valuable-role-in-innovation-stanford-expert-says/
[Abstract]: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2552734
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25 2015, @02:02PM
is to reconcile the difference between legal logic, and empirical logic. Inventions are tangible empirical things, patents are linguistic abstractions. The latter is more flexible than the former. Failure to exercise constraint to offset that flexibility empowers language over labor.
Really my biggest beef with the USPTO, is their failure to shine a light on the tremendous amount of spyware that specifically targets the USPTO. There aren't a lot of legitimate apps that support TIFF, and that is all the USPTO uses. So there are dozens of software packages out there that are "free", except for the fact that all patent searches and submissions are man in the middled through China, or Russia, or just subject to typical http content keyword filtering by your ISP.
So people have the right to communicate with their government, as long as China, Comcast, TWC, etc. gets first crack at the communication and any respective intellectual property. I wasn't under the impression that the right to petition your government was contingent on third party brokers? Silk road is petty by comparison. We are talking about industrial espionage with both domestic and foreign benefactors with an impact on GDP that is quite possibly in the billions of dollars.