Patent Trolls

The current state of the use of Intellectual Property in the tech industry makes it very hard for an individual or company to create a product without the possiblity of infringing on one or a few IPs of someone else. As such, U believe that changes should be made that would make it much easier for someone to create or innovate on a product (within acceptable guidelines) without the fear of legal backlash.

One aspect that shoudl be looked at in this argurment is integrity. Steven L. Carter's essay "The Insuffiency of Honesty" elaborates on the nature of the meaning of the word. It also includes what Carter thaings integrity is. Carter believes that integrity has three critical parts; in which if one of them were missing, it wouldn't truely be integrity. He defines integrity as "Discerning what is right & what is wrong; acting on what you have discermed, even at personal cost; and saying openly that your are acting on your understanding on what is right & wrong". This definition will be used later to explain the integrity (or the lack thereof) in most IP-related tech lawsuits.

Public Radio International's "This American Life" episode "When Patents Attack..." examined the nature of these technology lawsuits involving Intellectual Property. These types of lawsuits are of the same varity that the two tech giants Apple & Samsung are currrently litigating. This American Life's report focused on lawsuits from, for the most part, shell companies that attempt to collect money (via "licensing fees") from companies large & small, claiming that they're infringing on one or more of the IPs the shell company owns.

"...It's just a way for lawyers to make money";"Complicated, broken"; "It's basically a flim-flam game that anybody who knows how to take advantage of it, is doing...". These are some responses that This American Life's reporter (Insert name here)heard at South Park, a park in San Francisco where many tech workers and engineers eat lunch. Astov