Patent troll. There are few words that inspire more ire, few phrases which provoke more disgust in someone who knows anything about copyright law. Patent trolls are the bottom-feeding scum of the industry. They purchase, acquire, or invent ludicrously general software patents- for example “a security solution which makes remote license check to a remote server on an Android device.”
Sounds pretty damned stupid, right? That’s an actual patent, held by an organization known as Uniloc, who managed to successfully sue both Microsoft and EA, and has now set it’s sights on Mojang, and their game “Mindcraft.”
Yes, the typo actually appeared in the patent filing. They don’t even know the name of the game they’re trying to claim is infringing upon them, not to mention the fact that they’ve apparently patented one of the most basic security features in Android. Take a look at their website- they don’t appear to have a single product to their name, and the entire site consists of them chittering about their “intellectual property” and claiming that they are “protecting their rights.” You can read the original patent here. Seems pretty broad, doesn’t it?
Thing is, if Uniloc really does hold the rights to this form of DRM, as they claim to…why are we just hearing from them now? Considering how widely used the technology proposed in the patent has become…why haven’t they been collecting royalties hand over fist for the last several decades? I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again- in the case of Uniloc, something stinks.
The sad thing is, under current copyright law, Uniloc isn’t the only patent troll out there. Far from it- we’ve even seen organizations as large as Google, Microsoft, and Apple stoop down to their level. They buy patents en masse from their original owners(yes, they are allowed to do this). Once they’ve done this, they’re pretty much free to go around trying to collect licensing fees from and bring lawsuits against competing organizations or their subsidiaries. It’s a wholly underhanded business strategy which seems custom-tailored to stifle innovation and take down the competition without having to actually create a better, competing product.
In short, patent law is broken, and it needs to change. It used to be that patents were designed to protect innovation. They were created to defend copyright holders against people who would steal their idea and use it for their own gain. Instead, they’ve become another tool in the arsenal of litigious organizations, clogging the courts with frivolous lawsuits and wasting countless millions of dollars which could be spent on so many better things.
It gets worse when you consider how much a patent or copyright costs to actually acquire. In most cases, the original creator doesn’t even hold the patent- it belongs to a larger organization, who can sell or utilize it however they see fit. Is this what the original creators had in mind when they first dreamed up the idea of copyright? Is this what was meant to happen when patent law was in its nascent stages?
I highly doubt it.
The worst part about this is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between the organizations which actually have legitimate claims and those who are just in it to bludgeon their rivals into submission with pointless legalese and unreasonable licensing fees. Did Apple actually have a legitimate reason to believe Motorola copied their design of the iPad with their Galaxy Tab? Is Siri actually copyright infringing? The list goes on, and on, and on, and on…
And most of it is, at the end of the day, utter nonsense. Perhaps we need to make it more difficult to bring such suits against competing organizations, so we can actually see the industry move forward, instead of flailing around in a legal quagmire.
Image Credits: [Extreme Tech]
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