Patent trolls are a scourge.
According to research from James Bessen, Jennifer Ford, and Michael J. Meurer of Boston University, patent trolls cost the U.S. economy somewhere over $80 billion dollars per year. These trolls take from the system but they put nothing of any value back into it. As general counsel of a software company, I have little patience for patent trolls and even less for the lawyers who represent them.
I keep a framed quote from Brigham Young on the wall above my desk at work. It says: “As for lawyers, if they will put their brains to work and learn how to raise potatoes, wheat, cattle, build factories, be merchants or tradesmen, it will be a great deal better for them than trying to take the property of others from them through litigation.”
I get lots of smiles when visitors see it. Most people seem to think that I keep it up there as a bit of not-so-subtle irony, that I’m just another lawyer trolling for laughs. I’m happy to let them continue thinking so (mostly because it’s true). But the main reason I keep it up there is to remind myself.
Patent trolls aren’t the only ones who take from the system. In business, we each decide every day whether we’re going to give to the system or take from it. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a sole proprietor or the head of a multi-national organization, we all face that decision. The truth of the matter is we all take a bit from the system every day; that’s why we work. But the system really only works when, on the whole, we put in a little more than we take out.
Some people think like the trolls: they take because they can. They justify it to themselves, fooling themselves that because what they’re doing is legal (or at least, not illegal) it’s also right. Some employees do it when they don’t actually work for all the hours they clock. Some employers do it when they say they can’t afford to pay their employees more when what they really mean is they don’t want to pay their employees more because the employees will work for less.
Adam Smith recognized the danger of pursuing wealth without some principle guiding the pursuit. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments he said “th[e] disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful . . . [is] the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue . . . has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.”
Brigham’s quote isn’t just another example of his dislike for lawyers. It neatly sets forth the same principle that Adam Smith realized more than a hundred years before: takers might prosper in the short run, but they do it at the expense of society and their own moral integrity.
