Yeah, that works if one company is Apple and the other is Samsung, I don't think that's a relevant discussion because it's far from the norm of what actually happens in patent litigation. Acting like posters on HN are going to accrue billion-dollar patent portfolios is one of the more ridiculous things I've seen here bandied as a "strategy."
Many posters on HN work for companies like Apple or Samsung. The solo inventor with a patent is a rarity, and they usually don't have the resources to enforce their patent rights anyway. The path to becoming a patented inventor these days usually involves becoming an employee of a large institution in R&D, signing over all your rights to the patent, talking with a lawyer, letting the lawyer write the patent, and then letting your employer litigate (or not litigate) its defense.
So what they work for Apple or Samsung, they aren't here getting advice on how Apple or Samsung manage their portfolios nor do they have any involvement in it so I'm not sure why that renders my criticism inapplicable. I'm not describing the solo inventor either, so I have no idea why you bring that up.
This entire conversation is in the context of general advice regarding patents and you are here insisting that the strategy of two of the largest companies in the world serve as model advice because some of their employees work here.
Here's the post I was responding to:
> But so many people have to jump through the process just as a defensive act so they have a sliver of reassurance that using the novel thing they came up with will not lead to immediate cease-and-desist injunctions from IP-fortified competitors. What a collective waste of human creativity.
So many do not have to do this. For so many people this is beyond the practical. It's only relevant to the people running Apple or Samsung to collect these portfolios. It's not practical advice for so many people.
No, the "so many people" are the rank & file engineers and researchers who are actually applying as inventors on those patents. They don't make the policies, but they are the ones who have to put up with the bullshit. That's what the "collective waste of human creativity" is - hired researcher types who would rather be, well, researching rather than doing a song-and-dance of describing their inventions in legal terms that will make it past a patent examiner but don't actually work once communicated in those terms, all so their employer can put up legal minefields in the dance of mutually assured destruction.
