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cory doctorow
So far, very few of us have been really bitten in the ass by
EULAs, but that’s because EULAs are generally associated with
companies who have products or services they’re hoping you’ll
use, and enforcing their EULAs could cost them business.
But that was the theory with patents, too. So long as everyone
with a huge portfolio of unexamined, overlapping, generous pat-
ents was competing with similarly situated manufacturers, there
was a mutually assured destruction — a kind of detente repre-
sented by cross-licensing deals for patent portfolios.
But the rise of the patent troll changed all that. Patent trolls
don’t make products. They make lawsuits. They buy up the ridicu-
lous patents of failed companies and sue the everloving hell out
of everyone they can find, building up a war-chest from easy vic-
tories against little guys that can be used to fund more serious
campaigns against larger organizations. Since there are no prod-
ucts to disrupt with a countersuit, there’s no mutually assured
destruction.
If a shakedown artist can buy up some bogus patents and use
them to put the screws to you, then it’s only a matter of time until
the same grifters latch onto the innumerable “agreements” that
your company has formed with a desperate dot-bomb looking for
an exit strategy.
More importantly, these “agreements” make a mockery of
the law and of the very
idea
of forming agreements. Civilization
starts with the idea of a real agreement — for example, “We crap
here
and we sleep
there,
OK?” — and if we reduce the noble agree-
ment to a schoolyard game of no-takebacks, we erode the bedrock
of civilization itself.
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