The Limits of Deterrence

NPR's excellent Planet Money show on software patents is a great primer on how absurd the patent system has become. Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures comes off particularly bad, looking like a mafia-style protection racket.

I think there's an even more damaging conclusion to draw, though, if one accepts the model of patent portfolios as the equivalent of nuclear arsenals:

"All the big tech companies have started amassing troves of software patents -- not to build anything, but to defend themselves. If a company's patent horde is big enough, it can essentially say to the world, 'If you try to sue me with your patents, I'll sue you with mine.'

"It's mutually assured destruction. But instead of arsenals of nuclear weapons, it's arsenals of patents."

In that kind of world, Myhrvold's essentially assetless company is a stateless actor with access to weapons of mass destruction. That is a potentially very unstable situation.