In a bit of a blast from the past, Patent Arcade just posted some history about the Bleem! emulator and their David v Goliath case against Sony back in 2001.

It seems that Bleem! allowed users to user Playstation games on either the Sega Dreamcast or the PC. It had the same physical and digital copy protective measures as the Playstation. That is, it required the disks, and wouldn’t play backups or run without the proper disk in the drive. Certainly there were workarounds that could be exploited, but the same was true for the Playstation itself.

In case it’s news to you, console companies take a loss on each console sold. They hope to recoup that with game sales – where the real money is. This is why Dreamcast bit the dust: once everyone figured out how to bypass the simple copy-protection, no one bought the games, even though the consoles sold fine.

So, with that in mind, it might seen completely rational for Sony to do nothing at all to stop Bleem!. I mean, here’s a company ensuring that even those without the Playstation would still have cause to buy Playstation games. This would be like a burger joint selling nothing but their high profit margin items, like that 30 cent piece of cheese that costs them a penny.

Instead, Sony did what any copyright rich company would do: they litigated to the point of lunacy, losing in every possible way they could lose. However, the court costs were too much for little Bleem! and the company went bankrupt. I can hear notoriously Luddite Sony CEO Howard Stringer yelling: “That will teach you do try and sell our games!”

There is so much wrong with the current patent system, that this post will do little to even scratch the surface. However, a recent story by The Wall Street Journal posted on Slashdot illustrates that patent trolling may be reaching ludicrous speed. It seems Microsoft is selling patents to Linux in order to protect them from patent trolls.

While I’ll not get into the gory details here, this act alone shows how horrid and restrictive the patent system has become. It should be obvious by now that when Microsoft plays ball with a competitor, either the sky is indeed falling or patents are clearly out of control (I’ll let you guess which).

For those just joining us, a patent troll is one who buys up patents in order to sue companies that violate those patents later – knowingly or unknowingly. The only criteria seem to be that the company being sued has the money to settle. Picture if the RIAA sued only rich, white, trust-fund babies for file-sharing – you get the idea.

The fundamental harm here should be obvious: the troll contributes nothing, and only stops (or stalls) those who are contributing. This goes against everything our constitution stands for when reading that such laws are to “ensure the progress of science and the useful arts”. Many would argue that what can be patented has simply grown too wide for its purposes. To receive a patent, something must be: 1. New 2. Useful 3. Not obvious. Sure, there are whole textbooks detailing this, but the point being that when trolls can patent such broad concepts only to trap other businesses later, there’s something wrong.

Perhaps the answer is that the patent owner has so many months to actually attempt creating something with his patent or else sell it or have it fall back into public domain. What good is a patent when the person filing it is not the same person creating the patented design or object? This would still allow failed companies to reap some rewards for having pioneered what some other company perfected, but would discourage companies whose only operating model is leeching off an imperfect intellectual property system.

Though the answer is likely not so obvious as I’ve suggested, I can certainly tell you what isn’t working: our current system. If someone has other ideas, leave a comment.