But in all seriousness, humans are very good at rationalizing their circumstances. Tell yourself something often enough, and over time you will come to believe it. Even if someone introduces you to an alternative view, alternative evidence, or logic that suggests the contrary, humans are equally skilled at rationalizing away such claims. In the event you were to demonstrate some social ill resulting from the actions of this law firm, the likelihood that you would spark a change in their behavior is low.
I recall an HN post a few months back regarding the ways in which, and rates at which, people dismiss evidence that questions their views, and the ways in which they seize upon and emphasize claims that agree with them. Will edit with link if I can find it.
EDIT: After some searching, could not find the article I was searching for, but did find a number of others addressing the same issue. The best among which were these two:
I'm not one of these guys, but I would think it's pretty easy to justify actually.
Say you're just some guy who has one brilliant idea in his life. You lack any kind of talent or resources to bring this idea to market but you came up with it so surely you should be able to benefit from it, right?
Trying to execute on it is a no-go because the idea is so good that some big company is going to catch on to what you're doing and devote vastly more resources than you could ever get access to to steal your idea out from under you.
So, instead, you patent it. After all, this is what patents are for. But now that you've done that, now what? It could take longer than the life of the patent for you to produce anything on this if you ever can at all.
Is it ok to sell your patent? Then you could get your FU money now without all the risks involved in actually trying to implement it (the big guys can just make something close enough that people will buy it without violating your patent). Everyone wins then because the thing will get made, but the little guy doesn't get left out. Except, of course, when a patent troll company is the buyer.
But the patent troll company, no doubt, see themselves as saving the little guy and then litigating to get enough money to save more little guys out there.
more importantly, at what point did a group of folks, presumably sitting around a conference table, make the conscious decision to execute this type of strategy?
Motorola and Cisco have jumped in, and expect others with vested interests (Google, Microsoft, Apple etc) to pile on in behind and absolutely crush Innovatio. So we can hope...
I laughed at this comment but it also such a serious comment at the same time. Money is exactly the drive behind this movement.
I would back 100% the action to remove the "digital" patents from society. I think some patents are essential when people have a genuine reason to file one but such generic patents should not be granted. It's like Amazon's 1 click buy patent, it's pathetic. You should not be able to patent an action or a method but only inventions of a physical nature.
It's like eBay being granted the patent to be an online auction and no one else can do it, it's unreasonable.
The problem is, these people will only work on a patent law suit until the water runs dry, there are plenty of rivers out there so they just move on. By the time someone has said how stupid it is and stops it, they have already made a small fortune.
