In his talk “How I beat a Patent Troll”, Drew Curtis, the founder of fark.com, shares his experience of fighting against a patent troll. He describes specific details of the tactics that helped him overcome a terrible suit from a sharker company. Besides, his talk contains a number of mind-blowing facts showing how the economy of the United States has been affected by patent trolls’ activity. His main ideas on beating patent trolls can be evaluated as effective, realistic, and successful. Thus, hundreds of other companies may benefit from Curtis’ experience. Drew Curtis’ talk is not the only remarkable piece of excellent ideas on how to improve our lives and make the world around us a better place that can be found on Ted.com. Searching through this site, one may find limitless amounts of useful facts. The next time, I plan to learn important lessons from Ben Goldacre’s talk “What Doctors don’t Know about the Drugs they Prescribe”, Malte Spitz’s talk “Your Phone Company is Watching”, and Shyam Sankar’s talk “The Rise of Human-computer Cooperation”. There are many more valuable pieces of practical information on any important field of human life on Ted.com.
Drew Curtis’ talk raises really important issues that exist in American society. The problem of patent trolls has already cost the United States economy a few billion dollars (Bessen, Ford & Meurer, 2011). The very term ‘patent troll’, discussed in Curtis’ talk, is related to Grimm’s fairy tale image of a hungry monster that waits in his coverture to catch innocent passers-by. A patent troll is a term used to denote an individual or a company that acquire a patent to suit the other companies working in the field for manufacturing the product that they have a patent for. However, these patent trolls produce nothing. The only purpose that such patent trolls have is to win huge amounts of money as a result of court trials against infringement or as a sort of a “ransom” that the companies engaged in the process may offer such sharkers (Teska, 2011). Thus, such sharker-companies have a lot in common with Grimm’s trolls as what they do is very similar to Grimm’s trolls’ tactic. Patent trolls simply acquire a patent and wait until there will appear companies that may be accused of the infringement. A decade ago the problem of patent trolls existed only in technological fields of industry, but nowadays almost every field of the United States economy is affected by it. According to Vrountas, Loftus & Palmer, (2011, p. 40), Restaurants, hotels, publishers, and others have recently faced unexpected demands from “patent trolls” to pay substantial royalties for using what has become basic technology (such as website search engines, searchable databases, or wi-fi internet connections) or face the daunting prospect of defending a patent litigation suit potentially a continent away from the company’s home office.
This comment shows how terrible the consequences of the patent troll problem for the United State economy have already been. In Curtis’ talk, the statistics’ data is shown that each year patent trolls make American people lose more money than terrorist attacks do. This is an immense reason to start acting to overcome this problem as actively as possible and implement some of the easy and helpful ideas that Drew Curtis explained in his talk.
References
Bessen, J., Ford, J., & Meurer, M. J. (2011). The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls.Regulation, 34(4), 26-35.
Teska, K. (2011). Patent Trolls. Mechanical Engineering, 133(8), 35-38.
Vrountas, C. T., Loftus, R. S., & Palmer, C. (2011). PATENT TROLLS WHO, WHAT, WHERE & HOW TO DEFEND AGAINST THEM. (Cover story). New Hampshire Bar Journal, 52(3), 40-45.