For the fourth year in a row after his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama joined Google and other viewers on Google+ for a “Fireside Hangout”. This rendition of FDR’s fireside chats allowed 5 people to ask the president questions on Valentine’s Day. Part of the Hangout involved the President’s view on patent trolls and their affect on new ideas.

“They don’t actually produce anything themselves,” said Obama of patent trolls. “They’re just trying to essentially leverage and hijack somebody else’s idea and see if they can extort some money out of them.”

President Obama’s statement on patent trolls were in response to Limor Fried’s question about trolls impediment to high-tech startup growth. Other topics that related to the technology industry were high-school computer programming and copyright issues. The President’s full response included information about the internet and piracy:

The technology is changing so fast, we want to protect privacy, we want to protect people’s civil liberties. We want to make sure the Internet stays open. I’m an ardent believer that what’s powerful about the Internet is its openness and the capacity for people to get out there and introduce a new idea with low barriers to entry.

We also want to make sure that people’s intellectual property is protected. Whether it’s how we’re dealing with copyright, how we’re dealing with patents, how we’re dealing with piracy issues. What we’ve tried to do is be an honest broker between the various stakeholders and to continue to refine it — hopefully keeping up with the technology — which doesn’t mean that there won’t be some problems that we still haven’t identified and that we have to keep working on.

Although patent trolling may be seen as a profitable business, these people or companies must be stopped. As the Limor Friend stated during the fireside hangout, they are becoming a major impediment to technology startups. In fact, one of the first things that new companies have to do is search through GoDaddy and the USPTO directory to ensure that their product is not already taken. If the space is already taken, you will most times find that a website or product is completely unused or unfulfilled.

A patent troll is a person or company that excessively files for and enforces patents. The worst type of troll are the ones who obtain patents and do not follow through in building or producing the final product. The most common type of troll in modern technology is a domain name troll. These are people or businesses who strategically register desirable domain names.

You can watch the full Hangout on YouTube if you missed it:

How do you feel about patent trolls and new ideas? What suggestions or ideas do you have to stop them? Let us know in the comments below.

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Lodsys is a company which purchases potentially great and super broad patents, and it employs these patents to threaten to litigate those who “might be infringing” on them. They do this by searching for a patent, finding out how many people are working on it and then they buy that patent.

Just a month ago, Google mustered the courage to protect and defend the Android coders against Lodsys. A few months earlier, Apple had also waged a fight against the patent troll.

After US President Obama had just signed a legislation on the nation’s shift to a “first to file” system from the “first to invent”, the issue about patent reform has become really sizzling hot.

You might think that this is no help to the patent troll situation at hand, and in fact, the legislation could exacerbate the matter. According to researchers Mike Meurer and James Bessen from the Boston University, patent trolling costs around $500B since 1990.

The two researchers also expounded that the cost of patent litigation has been exceeding benefits and rewards bestowed to the inventors from the year 2000. Since then, the problem got out of hand. Bessen and Meurer stated that within the past four years, the expenditure has an average of $83 billion annually and this is a lot greater than a quarter of industrial research and development funds in the United States during those times.
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Companies charge a fee to Application developers to post glorious reviews

Apple’s utopian iTunes application store has fallen victim to typical troll manipulation.

Rob Walch, host of Tii, emailed me concerned about what he uncovered.   When you are looking for apps to download in iTunes, or looking in any app marketplace for that matter, user reviews are something that heavily influence the decision making process of most buyers.  This is essentially a user forum for that specific product. If 10 guys said it crashes and runs like crap, most people would likely avoid paying for that download.   Naturally, it would work the other way.

We at Mobile Magazine get harassed quite often by shady types of advertising “offers.”  Even larger well known companies offer us mula in exchange for attention and praise on their specific product or page.  So when something like that comes up, it flies right on over to the trash bin. But how do you ignore manipulative fake product reviews when they appear to be from your peers?  Not many ways right now, sure we can go click on the “report a concern” link on every single comment we find suspicious, but shouldn’t Apple have some type of check that says, “hey, this guy since December 17th has rated every single app 5 stars, and oh, most of them are from the same company.”

The perps run a blatantly obvious website: YourAppReviewed.com. YAR’s response to Tii about them creating fake reviews was this: “As we are not posting fake reviews, it’s not something which is conflicting with Apple rules. Our reviewers are real iPhone and iPod users.  We don’t pay them to post fake positive reviews but to give their honest opinion Apps.  Don’t worry about that.”

Ok, so a company sends you money to review their app,  and not by any other means then pure coding and development genius they coincidentally get rated 5 stars, every time. Explain that one to me again?

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