> France Brevets was set to receive 35% of any revenue related to “monetizing and enforcement” of the patent, with Burley agreeing to file at least one patent infringement lawsuit within a year, and collect a “total minimum Gross Revenue of US $100,000” within 24 months, or the patent rights would be given back to France Brevets.
This is insane to me, it sounds almost like the patent holders are leasing out patents to anyone who is willing to work as a patent troll and chance their arm at some payouts, otherwise they have to return the Patent?
I mean that just sounds like a new level of low for patent troll farming entirely.
It's what happens when someone realizes some useful construct could be treated as first-class citizen[0] in the financial sense.
Much like in modern programming languages[1], you can "hold a function in your hands" - pass it as value and return it and assign to variables, in finance someone notices, "hey, this thing can be packaged up like an asset and sold/leased/leveraged". Here, someone figures a business model - "I have a patent, patent trolls make money threatening people with patents -- hey, let me lend them my patent and ask for a cut!".
For some reason, in programming this leads to good thing; in the economy, it leads to bad things.
Just wait for when someone figures out how to make securities out of loaned patents and then package them up into bulk-tradeable assets.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42086555
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