In an amended SEC filing ahead of its IPO, Reddit warned potential investors that "...on March 18, 2024, Nokia Technologies sent us a letter indicating they believed that Reddit infringes certain of their patents. We will evaluate their claims." Nokia, of course, leaned into, ahem, patent licensing and networking equipment as its business many years ago, and reminded people of it with last year’s logo redesign. Companies paying Nokia licensing fees include HTC, Apple, and more recently, Oppo.
If you’re enforcing a patent that would have been come up with other people in the same field, then the patent is invalid, many of us would consider going after people with an invalid patent – patent trolling.
Patents are meant for UNIQUE ideas and things that nobody else would have come up with on their own. But increasingly they’re being used for obvious ideas that thousands of other people also have around the same time, to lock out competition.
Patents last for 20 years, that’s a long time for something unique and groundbreaking to become mundane and seemingly obvious in hindsight, especially when almost everything these days builds on top of something already existing at a break neck pace.
But the problem with the current system is that everybody has to try to patent absolutely everything they come up with because if they don’t somebody else might and then sue you for it, and instead of the patent offices actually doing their jobs and dismissing them outright so they would be free to use for everyone, they grant patents on the most simplest or broadest of things.
The silver lining is that plenty of great new things have been made specifically because people have been trying to avoid someone else’s patents - “necessity is the mother of all inventions”, literally.