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

[Simo Sorce <simo.sorce@xsec.it>]

So, the unique role of SME, is to stay small, and never grab market
share, or to be parasites?

I'm not ok with this vision.

Simo.

On Wed, 2003-05-28 at 09:15, Gregory Aharonian wrote:
> 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
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Simo Sorce - simo.sorce@xsec.it
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