If the patent is signed up to a person, then that person, presumably this mythic (literally, these people don't actually exist much except in the movies) lone inventor, HAS to either exploit that patent personally or invite a lot of annoying legal logistics whereby a company practically buys his patent but is forced to litigate, license, and otherwise interact with the patent they bought via that person. A person can of course sign a contract that stipulates exactly how he must listen and do exactly what company X says in regards to that patent, so even here it doesn't really help much, but lets move on to the far more common case #2:
A small company has set up a few patents for themselves, but either goes under and is shopped around by the liquidator or is bought outright (possibly for the patent IP), or is effectively forced to give itself to a troll in a patent suit (this rarely happens, the troll just wants a quick settlement payday and the company may as a result go under a few months later). Its common to just disband said company and transfer the IP but it is not required. They can just let the company live, a mere shell of its former self, staffed by a few lawyers and researchers. I.e., the company is turned into the troll. This is rather convenient, even, because if that now-troll company accidentally ends up in court, then its got Ltd protection built in (whatever damages it has to pay, parent company always have the option to declare the company bankrupt. The patents in it are at that point mostly worthless anyway). The third case is a major company going under or in dire straits and shopping their extensive portfolio around, Novell style. Presumably in this new world, Novell actually has their patents not all assigned to Novell itself, but to an extensive hierarchical network of subsidiaries. Any large corporation tends to actually exist of hundreds, if not thousands, of companies, all interconnected in a web of ownership. Novell can simply sell all shares of their patent subsidiary to some other company. We could try and make laws to prevent that kind of thing, but hierarchical networks of companies are used absolutely everywhere to dodge taxes, limit risk, ease transfer of assets between corporations, for logistical convenience (i.e. Joint Ventures), etc, and quite a few of those uses aren't exactly welcomed by the state, yet they've already figured out trying to write down what you can and can't do cannot evidently work (or they'd have come up with some stuff already). Hence the conclusion: This does absolutely NOTHING to the big players, but it does hurt Joe Inventor and Jack Q. Small Business Owner because the lawyer fees go way up. Now you don't just have to pay the patent filing and research fees, you also have to set up a subsidiary company to file them in, if you ever have the intention of selling them. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/javaposse/-/yghLQNQRbaoJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
