Numbers don’t lie: Patent trolls are a plague

Jeff Bezos is not the most obvious advocate for change to the patent system. The founder and driving force behind Amazon, he has in the past encouraged his staff to file for controversial Web patents on obvious ideas like “one click to buy.” Under his guidance, Amazon has wielded those patents as part of lawsuits against competitors; the one-click patent was used against Barnes & Noble, for example. At one point, the Free Software Foundation was even coordinating a boycott of Amazon as a result.