"When Patents Attack!"

     The web audio show This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass, features in the episode “When Patents Attack!” first hand interviews, research, and commentary by NPR correspondent Laura Sydell and This American Life producer Alex Blumberg. The focus, as the title of the episode suggest, is patents and their unintended use as springboards for countless lawsuits.

     The show begins with host Glass introducing the story of a man named Jeff Kelling. As a software developer, Kelling explains how he and his friends (also developers) started their own business creating a way for user to share photos over the Internet. After years of success with this business, Kelling receives a letter stating that his business was in violation of patents that another company was holding and therefore owed them money. The choices Kelling had were to either go to court which was too expensive for his business, or settle outside of court which he did.

     The reason this case is mentioned is to point out a key factor: the company that sent the letter bought the patents from someone else (the original inventors, even before Kelling) but wasn't using the patent to make products, instead filing lawsuits against others who did. This leads to the authors introducing a key term “patent troll” coined by Peter Detkin who at the time was a lawyer. The term refers to an analogy that Detkin makes with the fairytale Three Billy Goats Gruff, “cause the whole Billy Goats Gruff thing, it’s someone lying under a bridge they didn’t build, demanding payment from anyone who passed. I said, “How about a patent troll?”(Detkin).

     The majority of the show follows Sydell, and Blumberg as they investigate further into the issue of patent trolls. The commentators focus on the patent buying and usage company Intellectual Ventures. Examination of interviews containing dialog of people in relation to Intellectual Ventures or knowledge of patent law rights forms the authors' argument against patent trolls. The authors use this large company as an example of just how big an influence the patents can have on creativity and innovation. Even large corporations like Google, Apple, and Microsoft will spend billions of dollars to obtain patents to use as “protection” against lawsuits. Stated during an interview about thirty percent of patents (in the U.S.) cover roughly the same technologies and ideas which can really cause legal issues. This is suppose to be a system to protect inventor and allow them to profit from their ideas but the audio show suggest instead that they are now stifling innovation as inventors fear of being sued.

     I find the issue to have a lot less significance to our class than the closely related issue of copyrights but the issue itself seem to be very important to our economy here in the U.S. There should be a regulation to combat the role of patent trolls, decrease the chances that one company can control so much intellectual property becoming similar to a monopoly.

So what do you think about the patent troll strategy, an effective way to make money or a damaging practice to the industry of inventors?

The trolls use a strategy of threatening to take people to court knowing that they would lose but take advantage of the fact that small companies don't have enough money to pay for court fees. Do you believe that this is a flaw in our judicial system?