Patent troll reform hit the news last week when President Obama proposed a number of administrative measures designed to rein in the practice of buying up patents solely for the purpose of negotiating for licensing deals or court-ordered payouts. See, for example, "Tech Firms Back Obama Patent Move" in the Wall Street Journal.
Indiana Law prof Gerard Magliocca, writing at Concurring Opinions, approves of the moves but is skeptical, advocating for a more radical approach -- abolishing patents for software altogether. Whatever you think of that recommendation from his 2007 Notre Dame law review article on the subject, Blackberries and Barnyards: Patent Trolls and the Perils of Innovation, you have to admire that he prefaced it with a quotation from one of the Michigan Supreme Court's "Big Four," Justice Isaac Christiancy:
[A]mong a host of dormant patents, some will be found which contain some new principle . . . which the inventor, however, had failed to render of any use in his own invention. And some other inventor, ignorant that such a principle had been discovered . . . had the genius to render it of great practical value . . . when, lo! the patent-sharks among the legal profession, always on the watch for such cases, go to the first patentee and, for a song, procure an assignment of his useless patent, and at once proceed to levy black-mail upon the inventor of the valuable patent.
Art: Illustration by John Bauer in Walter Stenström's childrens' anthology, Among pixies and trolls, 1915.
