Of Patent Trolls and Patent Wimps

Who needs patent trolls when you've got patent wimps?

If broad patent reform is a lost cause - as seems probable - Mr. Balsillie and Mr. Zafirovski would be wise to spend their energies bulking up their in-house intellectual property teams and hiring good U.S. lawyers.

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The Canadians may find that it's easier, and significantly cheaper, to swallow their pride and work within the U.S. system, rather than betting on its demise.

Oh, yeah, right: just like it would have been far more sensible for Richard Stallman just to have accepted the inevitability of closed-source, proprietary software back in the 1980s.

Idiotic patents - and indeed the entire, broken US patent system - have never been under such pressure as now; more and more people are realising that patents do not promote innovation, but actually act as a brake on it. As ideas of openness spread, the present system of intellectual monopolies will gradually be exposed for the sham it is. Any suggestion that people should "swallow their pride" is misguided in the extreme.