Mike Masnick,

This post is a good example of your spewing nonsense because you keep commenting on patent issues with minimal understanding of patents and the players.

Microsoft built its market position on others inventions. Microsoft has never been especially inventive. Microsoft only started filing patents after they were handed their head a few times.

There are two basic paths which companies take. One path is companies who are true inventors. They start with a few important patents and build from there. The other path is the one Microsoft, Micron, Dell and others take, where they ride the coattails of real inventors. For every company based on true innovation (not the way big companies use the word) there are generally scores of asset thieves trying to make an easy and quick buck.

As both types of companies age they usually become alike. This is ironic and counter intuitive but it is true. The companies who started as true inventors gradually lose their ability to produce significant inventions but generally retain an entitlement minded arrogance and become predators on subsequent generations of inventors. They try to compensate for their inability to produce significant inventions by filing large qualities of increment improvement patents. IBM’s massive patent filings are another example of this.

Meanwhile, the companies who started as parasites generally figure out that filing hordes of minor incremental patents serves as a good defensive tool when they get into a squabble with other large entities, and this is what Microsoft has been doing in recent years. There is a reason that Microsoft is repeatedly sued and that they keep losing or settling those cases.

Like people, companies go through a life cycle. Young ones, both those based on invention and the others take great risks chasing big rewards. Those who succeed become more conservative as they age, risk adverse and when they are king of the hill become very arrogant. They take liberties with others intellectual property counting on their ability to bankrupt junior parties through abuse of the process of law. For the most part that abuse takes the form of them using delaying tactics.

The reason that inventors like rocket docket venues such as Eastern Texas which do not allow procedural delays is that they need a fast resolution to their cases in order to survive.

It is common for inventors to license or sell their first inventions in order to build capital. Later, inventors generally use that capital to produce more inventions and to build companies or to partner with others who are better suited to build companies. The problem is that a majority of those companies along with the jobs and prosperity they would have produced are never getting a chance to flower because patent piracy by the biggest companies causes them to be still born. So on one hand those large companies are shipping jobs and even worse our nation’s collective intellectual capital out of the country and at the same time destroying new job creation. This is not a sustainable business model.

When big companies misappropriate their inventions inventors must partner with patent enforcement entities. The cost of patent litigation starts at about two million and can easily run into tens of millions. There are very few inventors or small companies who can bear this cost alone. Even when they find a patent enforcement partner their path to success is delayed at least five years in a rocket docket venue and in other venues patent pirating companies can delay justice for decades.

There is a huge difference between the nature of any member of the Coalition for Patent Fairness (Piracy Coalition) like Microsoft and a small company based in a few inventions. One difference is the scope and value of inventions. Small entity patents tend to be broader.

Because of the high costs of patent litigation big companies are generally able to steal up to ten million with complete impunity, between ten and a hundred million it is questionable rather an inventor can get justice. It is only over a hundred million that there is reasonable certainty of investors defending a patent. This is why you will rarely see cases with judgments less than a hundred million dollars.

It is important that people understand that there would not be patent enforcement entities if not for the fact that large companies are creating huge liabilities by intentionally rolling the dice infringing others patents. What they like to call trolls are simply property holders defending their rights against those who steal on a very grand scale. Patent pirating companies can end their litigation problems by acquiring rights to an invention before using it.

Ronald J. Riley,

I am speaking only on my own behalf.
Affiliations:
President – http://www.PIAUSA.org – RJR at PIAUSA.org
Executive Director – http://www.InventorEd.org – RJR at InvEd.org
Senior Fellow – http://www.PatentPolicy.org
President – Alliance for American Innovation
Caretaker of Intellectual Property Creators on behalf of deceased founder Paul Heckel
Washington, DC
Direct (810) 597-0194 / (202) 318-1595 – 9 am to 8 pm EST.