Political Irony

Finally! Score one (and a big one) against patent trolls.

Newegg, an online electronics retailer, has won their patent appeal against Soverain Software.

Soverain is a patent troll, a company that has never produced anything, but has managed to extort millions of dollars against companies including Amazon and The Gap, and was in the process of suing Nordstrom’s, Macy’s, Home Depot, Best Buy, Radio Shack, Kohl’s, Wallgreen’s, and many others.

How? They bought some patents from a defunct company that claimed to cover the online shopping cart, lawyered up, and sued companies in patent-friendly West Texas. Never-mind that taking an obvious and well-known physical concept and implementing it on the Internet isn’t even vaguely deserving of patentability.

Defending against a patent suit can cost many millions of dollars and depress the market cap of a company due to uncertainty. So companies are often willing to settle even bogus claims, and once a few big companies settle it gets harder and harder for other companies to defend themselves. Soverain was working their way to collecting a stunning 1% of the gross revenue of every online retailer.

But back in 2007, Newegg decided on a new strategy: they would not settle with patent trolls, ever. As Newegg’s chief legal officer put it “We basically took a look at this situation and said, this is bullshit. We saw that if we paid off this patent holder, we’d have to pay off every patent holder this same amount. This is the first case we took all the way to trial. And now, nobody has to pay Soverain jack squat for these patents.”

Kudos to Newegg!

Now, I’m a computer scientist and I even hold a few software patents, but I would be very happy if the federal government invalidated all software patents. They do nothing to encourage or reward inventors like me, and in fact cause lots of problems. Imagine you are trying to start an online shopping business, but nobody will invest in you because in order to sell anything online, you would run afoul of patents like those held by Soverain. Soverain could extort any amount of money they wanted from you, and could even refuse to license their patents and put you out of business. Just like that.

Other patent trolls hold patents on things as silly as drop-down menus. These trolls could basically sue the vast majority of websites and force them off the internet. Think about what that would do to our economy.

And because many judges don’t know obvious from a hole in the ground, especially in highly technical fields, lawyers can often get away with this crap.

It has to stop, and this is a great first step in the right direction.

Robert Reich makes a strong argument that the Republican party is finally unraveling. Ronald Reagan managed to put together a coalition of different factions who put aside their huge differences and united against common enemies, namely “communists and terrorists abroad, liberals and people of color at home”. But the 2012 presidential primary exposed the cracks in the party, along with its crackpots:

The Party offered up a Star Wars barroom of oddball characters, each representing a different faction — Bachmann, Perry, Gingrich, Cain, Santorum. Each rose on the strength of supporters and then promptly fell when the rest of the Party got a good look.

The Republican libertarian faction (led by Ron Paul) openly fought with the social conservatives. The big business and Wall Street wing (who are bankrolling the whole operation in return for their tax breaks and subsidies) fought with the “nativists and racists in the Party who want to exclude immigrants and prevent minorities from getting ahead”. And Grover Norquist’s shrink-the-government fanatics fought with the deficit hawks who (like Reagan) don’t mind raising taxes in order to reduce the size of the deficit.

The 2012 election exposed something else about the GOP: it’s utter lack of touch with reality, its bizarre incapacity to see and understand what was happening in the country. Think of Karl Rove’s delirium on Fox election night.

But the biggest problem with the GOP is that it has become a joke. As Bobby Jindal put it, the Republicans need to “stop being the stupid party”.

So what will they stand for instead? A telling article in The Atlantic asked GOP lawmakers at the Republican National Committee meeting what the Republican Party should stand for. These are the people who should be building policy for the GOP, and yet they couldn’t agree at all. Bottom line? “GOP leaders don’t just want to be the party of ‘no’ — but they have a hard time articulating what they want to say ‘yes’ to.”

For now, the last remaining thing holding the Republican party together is their hatred of the president and his administration. But that only makes them look petty and out-of-touch with the rest of America. Think of the toothless attacks on Hillary Clinton during the Benghazi hearing, filled with all the rage of a grumpy old man yelling at kids to stay off his lawn.

Reagan espoused happy nationalism using patriotic imagery. The GOP has now given itself over to the dark side of that force.

© David Horsey

After four (long) years of Obama bending over so far backward that he ended up looking more like a Republican than a Democrat, and getting nothing but hatred and contempt thrown back in his face, it takes a lot of chutzpah to accuse the president of not being bipartisan enough. Heck, Obama’s signature achievement — health care reform — was virtually copied from Republican proposals (including Romneycare), yet the Republicans attacked it as the worst thing ever to happen to the USA, and vowed to repeal it.

They filibuster just about everything, block Obama’s appointments, call him a liar, and compare him to Hitler. They even claim that he wasn’t born in the USA.

Now they are saying that their priority is to outlaw abortion, even though 70% of Americans support abortion rights, including a slim majority of Republican voters.

Will the GOP ever stop being the party of NO?

UPDATE: Great quote from Obama: “The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican.”

If you wonder why no bankers ever went to jail for rampant criminal behavior that almost destroyed our economy, watch PBS Frontline explain it in a way that is so clear it is frightening.

This is an almost hour-long show, but everyone should be required to watch it. If we don’t learn from the past, we are doomed to repeat it.

If you have any trouble with these videos, you can watch them (and even more videos) on the Daily Show website.

© Tom Toles

Who is going to win this debate, or do we lose either way?