I'm having a problem with patents. I'm not worried about infringing on other people's patents — that's not the problem. The problem is:

1. Investors and customers like require you to have patents before they will give you their money
2. There's a lot of junk patents out there, including in my own industry.
3. Organizations like EFF and Public Patent Foundation don't have the resources to go after more than a tiny subset of the most totally critical patents.
4. The only other effective protection against junk patents is to have your own and barter them in a kind of bizarre MAD -inspired game of brinksmanship.

It's very much of an arms-race situation. In the absence of any effective brakes, all tech companies are acquiring patents as quickly as possible (damn the validity, get what you can) in order to have as many as the other guy and forestall anything from going to court by effectively making a "trade".

The best effective brake would be a change in the US Patent laws and regulations. A good place to start would be to ban process patents, and a good follow-up would be to allow challenges to patents before they are issued. It's a bit insane that a member of the public can't challenge the validity of a patent in the US while it's still being examined — that's the logical time to consider challenges. In the EU the system is allows them.

However I doubt that's going to happen. Instead I think it would be good to form some kind of distributed project to issue petitions to invalidate junk patents. It's not the hardest thing in the world to do, especially if you have good prior art. People will need to educate themselves more about patent law — it's not a black art, but there's some fairly common misconceptions. If someone started such a project I'll pledge right now that I'd join up and actively help.

In the meantime, I have to protect my company. And that, unless someone can prove my premises wrong, or provide a viable alternative, looks like it will mean that I have to acquire patents. If I don't, I'm shooting myself in the foot from a business point of view.

Comments welcome...