I think the existence of non-practicing entities is at least a small counterweight to that. A cartel doesn't do you much good if an NPE can come in and slap you with a multi-million dollar lawsuit. A million dollars here, a million dollars there, and soon enough you start talking about real money.
Actually it does if all of the patents are licensed to a defensive patent pool arranged like http://www.rpxcorp.com/.
But, you ask, what good does that do? Well read the explanation in http://www.rpxcorp.com/index.cfm?pageid=23 for why not to take a wait and see approach. You'll see that they are willing to sell their patents. So if a member is being sued by a troll, RPX can offer a deal where the troll drops the existing lawsuit, and is sold a new patent with a license protecting current (not future!) members of RPX.
How likely are they to actually engage in this kind of behavior? Well RPX is already selling patents to trolls, and thinks that companies will take the risk that they'll care a patent you care about seriously enough that it is listed as a major selling point. If they can increase that risk while serving current clients (eg Google), what reason would they have to hesitate about that deal?
This may be paranoia. But there are 3 patents that were taken out in my name by a previous employer that have wound up in the RPX portfolio. I am somewhat worried that they will eventually wind up being used to sue companies.
> This may be paranoia. But there are 3 patents that were taken out in my name by a previous employer that have wound up in the RPX portfolio. I am somewhat worried that they will eventually wind up being used to sue companies.
This is why we have to make it not-socially-acceptable for programmers to play along with the patent games.
From now on programmers should know that if they have (new) patents in their name, they will be considered part of the problem.
And as I'm sure you are well aware, now you(or your current employer) could end up being sued for a patent you yourself invented.
John Carmack had it right all along: just say no to patents.
Re-read my comment. I demonstrated exactly how a defensive patent pool can protect its members against NPEs without paying a lot of money. Of course if they follow that strategy and it works, the rest of us wind up worse off.
