Re: [Patents] cases of killing competition with patents?

[Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com>]

Why would the big bother to attack the small?  First, there is no money
to get from the small.  Second, the settlement will do nothing to
affect the finances of the big company (it is meaningless for a company
like IBM to win a judgement of a $1,000,000 from a small software
company).  Third, the big company opens itself up to anti-trust charges.
Fourth, there are public relations problems in the sense that the big
company could lose more in lost sales than it could win in a court.

More typical is the strategy Unisys adopted with its GIF patent.  It
demanded licenses from those making lots of money using its patented
compression algorithm, and mostly ignored anyone else (for example,
individuals and non-profits using GIF images on their Web page).
Filing a lawsuit, even for the plaintiff, costs money, tens of thousands
of dollars.  If that amount is more than you can recover from the lawsuit,
it would be a waste of resources for the company to sue (a waste that
opens them up to stockholder lawsuits, in theory).

The big company might want to sue to stop the small company from grabbing
market share, but for a variety of non-patent reasons, I don't think that
is a big fear of big companies.

Tuesday, the opposite happened.  A US jury awards an individual who sued
eBay over two software patents, a total of $35,000,000 in damages.

Greg Aharonian