I didn't realize Federal law considered non-violent threats to be extortion.

But this still isn't going to count. The little shell companies have paperwork granting them the right to threaten to sue based on the patent, therefore they have the right to send you a letter threatening to sue. OTOH you do not have the right to a) file a false police report, or b) receive money in exchange for not reporting crimes. The difference between extortion and being a real hard-ass in negotiations is that an extorter would be breaking the law if he carried out his threats.

It's possible the 40-odd shell companies do not have the correct paper-work to sue based on these patents. It's equally possible they are misinterpreting the patent, or it was granted improperly. But since they don't actually file suit that never comes before the Courts, their right to sue is never challenged, and things like "extortion" simply don't come into play. They may be wrong, but they're idiots, not criminals, until a Judge rules against them.

That's why I love this case. It's pretty much the only way to get these trolls into court and figure out whether they are legally allowed to do this.

That's a stretch.

They have this patent. That means they have the right to sue you for infringing it. That means they have the right to tell you "we will sue your ass if you don't pay us." To be extortion they'd have to threaten actual violence.

The legal options to thwart them are basically a) creative prosecutions such as this one, and b) patent reform. Since the Federal government runs patents, and the Federal government is designed in such a way that reform requires lots of people to really want it, b) is not a practical option.

By the general definition of patent troll, no.

Patent trolls typically patent something that's obviously going to be needed in a few years, without doing any actual engineering work. Then when somebody does the engineering work they demand a cut of the profits. The technical "work" they do is about as difficult as that of Star Trek producers. There are actual diagrams of how a Phaser works, but nobody's ever built one. Patent trolls simply figure out how the parts of several potential future technologies would need to go together, diagram it, and then hope that everything turns out the way they want.

Sometimes trolls do the engineering work, but fail to bring anything to market. Australia's CSIRO actually invented things, but didn't do any of the engineering work required to bring products to a mass-market. They didn't publicize their findings very well, so when some people actually did the hard work of discovering this stuff independently and also the hard work of making the product easy to manufacture they could not patent it. The patent belonged to CSIRO already. So they paid CSIRO to use their own work.

Wouldn't help.

Under eminent domain rules you have to pay at least the fair market value of the thing you seize. Frequently you pay double or triple.

If these patents are valid, and do what the trolls say they do, they are worth a shit-load of cash. We're talking hundreds of millions, minimum.

If trolling is rewarded with a nine-figure check from Barack Obama, an awful lot of people are gonna start trolling.

RICO can only be used if they can prove you also committed another crime. Which means somebody has to convict these guys of something before ANY conspiracy charges stick, much less RICO which only applies to certain crimes.

None of those crimes seem to be relevant to Vermont's lawsuit.

In general I agree. The US social safety net is inadequate. If the European job market didn't suck moving would be on my to-do list.

But your sister may not know about several elements of the US Social Safety net. One is ObamaCare. As of January it will be very difficult to be priced out of health insurance. From a patient's point-of-view the system will be quite close to several European systems -- notably the Dutch, Swiss and German -- in that you will have to be insured by your employer or buy insurance on a private market, with insurance prices varying based on your ability to pay.

Higher Education is more complicated. It is very easy to end up with a degree that cost more then it's worth. This has happened to me.

But if you're talking about Undergraduate education (ie: a Bachelors degree), then there are plenty of options. High-status, extremely-high-cost Universities are actually the best bet. Most American kids could go to Harvard (sticker price: $37k a year for four years, plus room and board in Boston) for free if they can just get in.

Indeed, the major reason the sticker price is so goddamned high is that Harvard subsidizes most kids with the tuition of the richest ones. Emory and the other Ivy league schools offer similar deals, as do many state schools.

The problem is you have to plan this shit out way ahead-of-time. You need to find out the exact deadlines for applying for financial aid BEFORE you send in a college application, and since the programs are administered by the schools you have to know that for each school your kid might end up going to.

I don't think anyone except European workers seriously thinks the principle "a job is a job for life," is good for economic dynamism. Unfortunately for folks who prefer government policy to be as close to an economist's ideal as possible; European workers and European voters are pretty much the same group of people.

Moreover for about half of Europe dynamism would suck ass. Germany and Northern Europe are doing fine with their fossilized labor markets.

As for paid time off, you do realize that salaried Americans don't get that much less paid time off then Europeans? 20 days a year is exactly what the UK mandates. It's less then Germany, Denmark, or Greece (Germany is 24, the other two 25), but it's much more then our actual neighbors (Canada and Mexico are typically two weeks because they don't have a half-dozen holidays nobody remembers).

To an extent you're right. If both those employers had wanted to pay their prospective employee then the immigration rulings would not have mattered.

Thing is in both cases the "employee" was in a situation where they wouldn't have been paid anything as a native. In the UK six-month internships are unpaid. UK Labour law was basically protecting navite Brits right to do a six-month internship for free, not ensuring Brits got fairly paid.

As for the Canadian cousin, you do realize that a) Canada is not a low wage country, and b) at this very minute there are probably several hundred Brits helping family in London for room and board. Some of them are probably doing work that the government would call employment.

I'm using virtue in a slightly obsolete sense of the term here, which is basically synonymous with "merit."

As for lowered standards, you have to keep in mind that standards can be extremely misleading. Lets say you have two kids with nearly the same numbers. One went to a private school which puts everyone in AP classes in the 10th grade, builds it's curriculum around getting into college (ie: doing well on the SAT/ACT), everyone has a tutor to make sure they do well, and the rich kid took the test multiple times. The poor kid's first language was Spanish. He went to a small school that does not offer AP classes, and designs it's curriculum around getting into a Trade School. He had no tutors. He took the SAT once because it cost money and money was tight.

According to most people's definition of "standard" rich-kid is just as deserving of a slot in school as poor-kid. But the simple fact is you know those numbers from rich-kid are a ceiling, OTOH the numbers from poor-kid are a floor. Ideally you'd take both, charge rich-kid enough to educate both, and let poor-kid learn for free. But if you've only got room for one poor-kid is probably more academically deserving even if his GPA and SAT are slightly lower.

According to it's webpage Clemson is $22k including room and board. Their estimate for tuition, fees, and loan costs is roughly $13k. That $13k number is pretty close to what USNews has. USNews has USC at about $10k.

So if your little darling can get into those schools, but won't qualify for financial aid at someplace like Emory or Harvard, it'll save you money. The Emorys and Harvards of the world tend to be $35-40k in tuition, and located in very expensive towns, so room and board ain't cheap. But even Room and Board in Boston is probably significantly cheaper then $22k a year at Emory, if your darling can be one of those 20% of Harvard's class that gets a full ride due to being on the lowish end of the middle class (300% of poverty is the cutoff, and 300% of poverty is slightly above average), you'll save money.

They ask the colleges for their costs.

The number in USNews is pretty deceptive. Most schools quote the cost for in-state tuition plus mandatory fees, and (maybe) some cash for books and computers. As a father you are probably paying for all that, plus room and board, and a little walking-around money. But the only real info you had when deciding which school to apply to was probably USNews list.

As for tuition inflation, I honestly have no idea how these guys are spending their money. It's not sports, sports departments frequently get subsidized from the general budget but they don't get subsidized much. Benefits for college employees are great, but not that great.

It seems of be a combination of state governments cutting their budget deficits by cutting aid to state schools, massive inflation in administrative salaries, and equally massive construction budgets.

Indeed it is. But it's blocked for me. I guess I've read my 10 NYTimes articles for this month.

It's a good thing I specifically downloaded it myself. It's an even better thing that NYTimes.com does not know I have three browsers, so I actually get 30 free articles a month.

You do realize that roughly 60% of 18-year-olds live in households that make less then 300% of poverty, and only 20% of Harvard's class, which means the top 40% claim 80% of the slots?

In other words, assuming virtue is not correlated with parental income, a poor kid has to three times as virtuous as a top 40% kid to get into Harvard, and the top 40% kid can get in if he's only half as deserving. I'd be stunned if the numbers aren't more skewed as you get to more extreme incomes. Roughly 1/10 of 18-year-olds are in sub-50% of poverty households, I'd be stunned if 5% of Harvard's incoming class is that poor; I'd be equally stunned if they turn anyone in the top 0.1% away.

I am glad Harvard let's some poor kids in. I don't blame them for preferring the rich. Without subsidies from rich folks Harvard would not be able to give poor folks a free education. That does not mean college admissions are anything like a fair judgement of the talent-level of the admittees, or that people aren't extremely silly for thinking that Affirmative Action devalues black degrees compared to a white kid named Ford or Walton.

A lot of the reason people complain college is useless is that it doesn't teach you things that can only be taught with actual experience in industry. You can't teach a kid how to maintain a company-wide computer system that's filled with random cruft nobody understands (and you can't delete/fix any of it without breaking things you didn't know were there) if a) all your programmers are PhDs who consider it their life-work to avoid poorly-documented cruft in their computer systems, and b) the Dean pays for major upgrades every few years (students won't go to a school where they have to use outdated software). You can't teach a kid to use every software package he might come across because really old shit shows up in surprising places and you've only got four years to do it. You can't teach kid how to deal with a distracted Pointy-Haired-Boss-type if the kid's paying you $20k in tuition. The kid's just gonna transfer someplace that doesn't charge $20k to deal with a jerk.

The problem here is that most families with $65k have no idea how to turn their 90th percentile kid into the kind of kid who gets into Harvard. They don't know about "SAT Coaches," don't know which extracurricular activities to push, don't have friends who can donate massive amounts to the orphanage little darling just founded in Kenya, etc. If one parent makes $150k, the other makes $60k, and their friends all work at Hedge Funds, it's really easy to look great on a college application.

More importantly they generally don't know that Harvard will be free for their kid. They see the Harvard name, they see the price tag in USNews is astronomical, maybe they google the actual tuition charges of roughly $37k, and instead of pushing their kid to apply to Harvard and spend $0 they push him to apply to [cheap state school] and spend $10,000 or so a year.

There was recently on article on three Latina friends from a small city in Texas. The one who went to Emory had loans, but that was because as a teenager she didn't understand all the paperwork requirements needed to get aid. Her family had nobody who had ever gone to a school like Emory, so they couldn't help very well.