Why Patent Trolls Win

If you negotiate with terrorists, it'll encourage more terrorism. This appears to be just as true of terrorists who try to destroy your innovation and/or livelihood as it is of terrorists who hijack airplanes and blow people up. RIM has just found out that their $600+ million settlement with patent terrorist NTP is going to cost them even more -- now other patent trolls see them as an easy target. Visto Corp of California, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against RIM in the Eastern District of Texas, hoping that NTP's recently successful shakedown of RIM with illegitimate patent claims will result in a similar outcome for them.

Regardless of the merit of Visto's claims (RIM counters that not only do the patents not apply to RIM technology, but that the patents are invalid anyway), this also clearly demonstrates the great harm that software patents cause -- how many patents could RIM's products and services possibly trespass upon, and when does RIM cross the break-even point into negative profits and be forced to shutter their wildly popular products, as dozens of trolls each demand a section of the pie greater than the pie itself?

All this, from a patent system which is constitutionally mandated to promote the useful arts and sciences. Tell me again, how do litigation cases like those started by NTP and Visto promote anything at all resembling that?

Update: as a note of interest, Visto is the company that licensed NTP's patents near the end of the BlackBerry trial. In exchange, NTP became a minority stake-holder in Visto. So in a very real way, Visto's lawsuit is just NTP's lawsuit all over again, with a different set of overly broad and obvious patent claims