Don Marti

Sun 01 Feb 2015 06:06:47 PM PST

Two half plans?

Ever wonder if this plan...

The Chinese government has adopted new regulations requiring companies that sell computer equipment to Chinese banks to turn over secret source code...

...is the other half of this plan?

The Chinese regime is getting into the patent trolling business, having set up a company that will start suing American companies....

You know how regular patent trolls have to seek out infringers and then go through a complicated discovery phase? Both just got hella easier. This trolling operation not only gets pre-researched cases, it can also go through the code submitted for "security" in order to build a shopping list of patents to acquire.

Vertically integrated economic nationalism in action.

Of course, patent reform in the USA could stifle this plan, but a little lobbying cash can go a long way to perpetuate the current dysfunctional system. The funny thing is that open source companies have figured out how to be super-careful with patent-sensitive material in their codebases from the start, so will probably be much less vulnerable.