Minecraft is an incredibly popular block-building game that has taken over the gaming community. This fame, however, comes at a price. Namely, a patent troll has targeted the indie game for a shakedown. Patent trolls are one of the scourges of our times, a company or person who uses a broad patent to attack generally smaller businesses in hope of a payout under threat of costly legal action. As patent laws around software are, shall we say, behind the times, patent trolling has become a danger to anyone who makes games or software in general. Notch, the man behind the mines, has vowed to fight the troll. Boing Boing has the story.
Patent trolls must always be fought; their patents must be vacated. The very existence of patent trolling is against the purpose of patents. Patents were designed to give an inventor time to produce and market his product without a big company running him over. However, if the company never produces or markets a product, while preventing others from doing so, then it’s actively perverting the whole system. These people must be found and shut down for the good of society.
There’s also the part where the courts are being used as a weapon of extortion, that’s probably not a good thing, either.