Patents
What is it called when you patent something in order to try to stop anybody from practicing the patent because you believe the technology is evil or simply likely to be abused? I first heard that people were trying to do this in biotechnology in order to prevent anybody from practicing certain genetic engineering techniques, or perhaps cloning techniques. Of course, this only works for the lifetime of the patent, but perhaps it seems like a delaying tactic and people might hope that, during the intervening time, laws or norms or architectures might have changed enough that the technology would no longer be used to quite the same ill effect.
Is this tactic simply hopeless because of the costs of enforcing a patent (especially for noncommercial purposes and perhaps without trying to obtain damage payments)? Is it a good thing for people to do this, assuming that they are right in their judgments about how a technology is about to be used? If this practice became somewhat prevalent, would it be a new source of pressures for patent reform?
Apart from genetic engineering, I've heard talk about patenting concepts in censorware and DRM not in order to collect license fees but in order to try to prevent people from building modern censorware or DRM systems. I don't know of any such patents that have been granted, and I've never yet heard of anyone even threatening to enforce a granted patent for solely ideological reasons.
If you wanted to pursue this, an interesting field is the technology of proximity detection (recently discussed here), how machines can try to tell whether other machines with which they communicate are physically near or far. There are a lot of subtleties about this that are likely to be considered patentable subject matter, and perhaps there would be some good in having unlicensable patents held over the heads of people considering implementing proximity control schemes, or considering improving those that don't perform well.
