According to this Ars Technica article, an intellectual property firm has initiated a subpoena against a multitude of companies for “patent infringement.” Who would have thought that two unrelated companies are involved in the suit?
The highlight of this article is how one company — Wi-LAN —, who has not been making any wireless products, has yet been given legal authority to sue companies that basically did the manufacturing grunt of their patents. Silly, isn’t it?
This dilemma can be summarised by this analogy: you are the artist who had detailed how a sword is to look, feel and be made of. Some blacksmiths had similar ideas, although they do not know of your works. You’re commissioned by the King to make those swords exclusively (by legal default), but since the blacksmiths, by nature, have made all kinds of swords, by chance one of them perfected the sword that is durable, and other blacksmiths follow. Your “sword” bore similar features to that of the blacksmiths’, so you decided to haul them over to the King’s court for counterfeiting your works. (Kind of, since the idea of IP is remotely basic in medieval times.) That’s how it is. This company should at least be into manufacturing if they were to have some legitimate clout on holding onto their exclusivity (how I hate how this legal term has been abused too many times to justify corporate inaction i.e. not making anything and making money by suing). On the whole, the politics of IP has become one huge mess that I feel deserves to be trashed and rebuild from scratch.
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