Comment Re:Patent reform will never happen (Score 4, Informative) 186
Unless the big fish start feeling the pain of the current patent regime. If patent trolls get too greedy, they may undo themselves.
Not likely. Patent trolling has been going on for CENTURIES. It's NOT a new thing. in fact, abusing the patent system has been worse in the past than it is right now. Sure it seems like a lot, but remember, you're on a tech website and tech is where a lot of patent fights are right now in the past 30 years. But since the 19th century, there have been tons of patents and patent wars and patent trolls.
Way back when, it was sewing machines. There were so many patents filed related to sewing machines that it ended up in a stalemate as no one could actually make a sewing machine without violating someone's patent somewhere.
And yes, many patents overlapped then as well.
To counter this, a conglomerate went out and bought up many of the patents (eventually becoming Singer) so people could go to one place to buy licenses for a set of patents and make sewing machines. Probably one of the first patent pools around, and this was an era where FRAND didn't exist. So you ended up with a huge corporate entity that basically holds everything sewing machine related to which you paid license fees for.
Then there were vehicles... the internal combustion engine was highly patented and the current Otto cycle engines we use today was patented, avoided, etc. Then other aspects of the car were patented, avoided, sued over, etc.
Then there was the case of intermittent windshield wipers (invented about a half dozen times), but the modern version would be by Robert Kearns who did a fully solid-state version, and offered it to the Ford Motor Company who copied the ideas and made their own, resulting in a massive patent litigation that spanned 26 separate car manufacturers and lasted until the mid 90s through appeals and the Supreme Court.
Yes, you can imagine that in the 90s when intermittent wipers were basically almost standard, patent litigation was STILL going on about it.