As a former patent examiner, I was struck by how low the payout for Project Jengo was. $125,000 for all people submitting prior art? (There were hundreds of submissions, so it's split among many people.) I would like to help out with such things and I think I have the experience to do it well, but even being a GS-7 patent examiner making $75,000 per year is a better deal! That's especially true given that Cloudflare's not only expecting people to find prior art, but to also write the legal arguments about why it reads on Sable's claims.
If they're serious about their prior art bounty program, they're going to need to increase the bounties. Actual patent search firms charge a lot more money, and even lowly paid bureaucrats make a lot more.
Having talked with several of them, most of the people who submit the prior art as part of Project Jengo would do so even if there were no payout. Several winners have actually asked that the payout be donated back to other organizations fighting patent trolls. This isn't intended to be anyone's full time job. It is intended to reward technical people with industry knowledge who may be able to help surface prior art and are as sick of patent trolls as we are.
Personally, I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate, so I would expect to be paid more, not less, in the situation you describe. I suspect the same is true for many others as well.
> most of the people who submit the prior art as part of Project Jengo would do so even if there were no payout
I'd say this is due to selection bias. People who wanted a bigger payout didn't participate.
You all's program is basically over now, but I think anyone considering a prior art bounty program in the future should check best practices for bug bounty programs. The two seem similar to me. Paying more will get more and better submissions, and it doesn't seem to be particularly expensive to me.
This is no different than security bug bounties. The pay out for those are generally way way below industry rates.
The reason they are succesful is because they signal to people that the person on the other side actually cares about the report somewhat. If they are paying for it, even just a little, they are unlikely to immediately throw your report in the garbage or threaten to sue you. Its not really about the money.
Paying more doesn't always motivate people more or get more (quality) people to do a thing. Compensation and associated psychology is complicated, because people are complicated.
e.g. I am willingly working very hard at a job where I could make 10x or perhaps even 100x elsewhere with equal or less effort. And I often spend my time on things that are completely irrational by your types of economic measures or even "pay to work."
I think this is the key point. Voluntary prior art hunts have been a successful strategy for defeating stupid patents[1] for many years now. There may be arguments in favor of bounties for more obscure or less stupid patents, but when the collective demand to fix this problem is so high, the price point is rather low.
[1] "Stupid patents" is a technical term here -- or it has been since Mark Cuban funded an EFF staffer to challenge bad patents on the condition that the position was titled the "Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents".
The crazy thing about home improvement stuff is oftentimes you save a shitload by diy'ing it.
I've saved about $162/hour on various home projects when compared to quotes I've been given. Considering I'm a relative noob when it comes to this stuff I've gotta imagine they're charging much higher hourly rates than this.
This $162/hour is way more than what my salary as an hourly wage would be and it's also tax free to boot.
There's an incredibly high overhead on getting work as a contractor, billing for it, etc. There's a whole lot of unbillable hours you need to amortize.
(At the same time, people DIYing tend to underestimate their real opportunity costs).
The best outcome is that you end up liking tinkering and have pride in your work. That's a very high discount to the real cost.
I totally understand the high overhead aspect, but I assume knowing what you're doing is supposed to help immensely with that.
Pride in work is a big thing. As someone who works at a desk, some manual labor on the weekend is a nice change of pace. It's also not pointless exercise. And in my experience the best way to get something done right is to get free advice from the pros and do it yourself. Because the people the pros hire to do it won't care as much as you.
The problem I see with people doing these cost analyses for home or car DIY repairs is that they always compare two simple things: 1) the out-of-pocket cost of the professional job vs 2) the hourly cost of the DIY job, plus parts and materials. They completely forget to account for the cost of their their time in scenario 1.
Having your car or house fixed by someone else isn't that easy. Unless you have a personal butler, it's not like you just tell some person "fix this" in 5 minutes or less and walk away, then pay them when it's over. If it's a car repair, you have to transport your car to the repair place, then either sit there while they fix it or find some alternate transportation, then you have to come back after it's done. If it's a 1-hour job, how much time will you waste just traveling to and from the repair shop, plus potentially waiting around for it to be done? You probably could have done it yourself in less time. For a house repair, you don't have to travel there, but you probably want to stay at home while the work is being done unless the house is empty, or you really trust the contractors and sub-contractors. So in either scenario, there's a lot of your own time that's not being accounted for.
And this all assumes that the professional will actually do the job correctly, and you won't have to deal with issues from them doing it poorly. This could easily end up taking FAR more time than the original job. And in my experience, the so-called "professionals" frequently do a shoddy job or are completely incompetent (so now you need to spend a lot of time trying to figure out who to hire so you don't get screwed).
So in my view, if you mostly know how to do something yourself, it doesn't need a whole team of people to do, doesn't require expensive specialty equipment, and isn't highly dangerous, it's quite likely a better deal to just DIY.
I’ve not encountered another critter like you. But here you are: a lawyer cum HN poster who believes there are infinite opportunities for your skills and that your skills are infinitely accretive. Odd.
Perhaps you are this magical being I can’t imagine exists. In the meantime, and regardless, irregardless even, facts are: a whole bunch of people submitted prior art that helped us defeat a patent troll that was a net drain on society. As if, mission matters more than money in some cases. Many cases? Most cases? All cases?
I wish you luck rationally optimizing your time. If you figure that out, being the market maker probably will prove more lucrative than being a participant. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Hope you find lots and lots of opportunities for you to… search Google? Good work if you can find it.
It’ll be back when we get sued by a troll again. We’ll get as many submissions. We’ll kill another troll. We’ll pay another round of bounties. We’ll not pay patent search agents like you. And life will go on.
Don’t worry. Your job is safe. Most firms are too scared to engage in our strategy.
I was a "technical advisor" in Google's patent lit dep't. Searching prior art was my favorite thing to do, but not the whole job by any means.
(If you're wondering: my least favorite task was finding the sections of code that supposedly infringed someone's patent, and then getting the PM's approval to turn it over to the other side. They can't actually say No, but they can be a PITA.)
after many, many people failed to find the prior art that I found. It's only easy once someone tells you.
Interestingly, now I can't find it! Maybe they took it down. It WAS the first result on scholar.google.com if you searched "client-server maps." This is the same project:
> Paying more will get more and better submissions, and it doesn't seem to be particularly expensive to me.
They might get more, but will they get better? The most passionate people I know are pretty insensitive to pay rate. Whereas the people I know who are most sensitive to $/hour tend to be more skilled at the business of the thing rather than the thing itself.
> Personally, I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate
Would you mind elaborating? Because I would argue that, by engaging daily with your employer in a trade of your time for money, you value your time exactly your job’s hourly rate.
Sure: My willingness to work more hours decreases as the number of hours I work increases. My marginal hourly rate could be viewed as the amount of money I require to work an additional hour. My employer pays an effective hourly rate. If I worked more hours, the effective hourly rate would be higher.
Think of this more of as public service than a job, with the cash prize being there to generate media excitement.
I'll still pick up litter when I'm walking through a rich neighborhood, even though those people have groundskeepers to take care of it for them. No one is doing this with the goal of a profit.
It's inductance from the particular (me) to the general case
Since I hate crab, all people hate crab and confronted by a crab meat liker I have no capacity to imagine why, since I hate it and therefore everybody should and therefore you're wrong.
In reality, it's the exception proving (testing) the case and showing it's flaw: all people do not hate crab therefore my generalisation is specious. Instead of doubting why anyone likes crab I should ask why I hate it.
Fair enough. Replace "I" with "someone" in my previous comment. I can see why people would do these patent searches, but I still think it's a bad idea for those folks do these patent searches for so little.
No amount of money can provide that satisfaction. Heck, I’m not even impacted and I’m gleefully happy. Whoever helped deserves a free beer. Patent trolls are a blight.
I don't think it's paying most of them to do a patent search.
It's a way to get media attention for people to glance at it. It's providing a nudge for them to tell you about something that they know off the top of their head.
Patent trolling is a big problem, and a lot of us view opposing it in a small way as a type of community of service.
That's like saying it's a bad idea to contribute to Open Source. It's a similar motivation: people want to do good in the world and don't necessarily need to be paid for it.
I think I see his point though, and it's not quite the same as working on FOSS. He made a sibling comment about helping a "multi-billion dollar" corporation (CloudFlare) for so little reward. So in his view, this volunteer effort didn't really help regular people that much, and instead benefited a huge company mostly.
People usually work on FOSS because they have a personal interest in a project, and want to share that with everyone. So we end up with stuff like device drivers for hardware where the mfgr couldn't be bothered to make a Linux driver, or various useful utilities, a whole OS (which everyone can use), etc. What we don't see much in FOSS is "enterprise software": stuff that's only really useful if you're a huge company. Where's the FOSS alternatives to proprietary human resource management systems, supply chain management systems, etc.? Generally, stuff like that doesn't exist, because no one wants to spend their free time working on things that they personally have no use for, and no one's found a good business case to make a company producing an open-source version.
Taking out patents is like FOSS, though, in that the effect is that, once the patent is gone, anyone can work in that area without worrying about infringing that patent. So, even if the occasion might be a threat to a multi-billion dollar company, this is a case where helping such companies is well-aligned with the needs of the FOSS movement.
It is the same with programmers who writes open source programs just for fun of it. And I remember in 2000x there were people who thought that it is a bad idea. There were even lawsuits filled by programmers who couldn't sell their programs because they were left without customers due to open source solutions.
Or the whole Wikipedia thing, that at first was dismissed by traditional publishers, whom then were bankrupted and buried by an army of free working amateurs.
from the viewpoint you've presented it's a bad idea to volunteer for basically anything.
even something like enlisting in a nation's armed forces is a bad idea since the risk is so high vs the monetary reward, and the only way people would become soldiers is to join mercenary armies where there is a price exacted that matches the performance.
for many people, they value the intangible more than the money.
Okay, I think appreciate your perspective and that of some others here more. If you all think it's a good use of your time, go ahead. Personally, I have more pressing concerns. And for what it's worth, (and I know this won't be popular here) the entire patent troll narrative is overblown, which seems to be the consensus opinion of people working in patent law. For example, see this blog post:
My first startup had 3 different firms with no real product try to shake us down using patents with obvious prior art at different times. It was a major distraction and costly in resources when we had limited capital.
We did manage to convince them all to go away, but it might have been cheaper to just pay them off. I'm guessing that all they really wanted was a long list of capitulations and licensees before litigating against the big guys.
I'm not surprised that the IPR industry which thrives upon resulting legal fees is less inclined to view things as trolling and any trolling that happens to be not too severe, though. ;)
> And for what it's worth, (and I know this won't be popular here) the entire patent troll narrative is overblown, which seems to be the consensus opinion of people working in patent law.
"People working in patent law" have a conflict of interest. The arguments being made in that link are practically in bad faith, e.g.:
> Google and Uber are locked in a patent battle over self-driving automobiles, so does that make Google and Uber patent trolls?
The ordinary definition of a patent troll is a firm that sues for patent infringement as its primary business. Say what you will about Google and Uber, they clearly derive the bulk of their revenue from offering products and services to the public.
> As we consider all of this it is also important to keep in mind that the U.S. tech sector spending on patent trolls is less than 1% of all IT spending.
If you compare a smaller number to a bigger number, the bigger number is bigger. But the thing that matters isn't the size of the problem relative to the size of the industry, it's whether the shakedowns are net positive or net negative.
For software patents in particular, it's the latter, because software is inherently and purposely abstract. Which is incompatible with the reasonable operation of the patent system, because it makes the two viable strategies to patent the abstraction or to patent some specific implementation which is required for compatibility, so that alternate implementations can't be used without disrupting interoperability. Otherwise the number of alternate software implementations of any given abstraction are so large that nobody would purposely use somebody else's software patent, they'd just create their own non-infringing implementation of the same abstraction.
But patenting the abstraction itself is not supposed to be allowed (even though these patents are all too often granted) and using a patent for the purposes of preventing interoperability should be an antitrust violation for the same reason as tying is illegal even when the original monopoly was lawfully obtained, because the value you're extracting isn't the value of the invention, it's the value of compatibility with the existing system. And then there's nothing of merit left.
> And for what it's worth, (and I know this won't be popular here) the entire patent troll narrative is overblown, which seems to be the consensus opinion of people working in patent law.
The consensus among lawyers who benefit from people unnecessarily having to hire lawyers is that the situation is not bad. Well, there's a shocker...
Of course the people deeply in the system don’t see a problem with. You might as well have linked a “smoking is good for you” study from Phillip Morris.
You apparently have difficulty understanding that other people have different experiences and priorities from you. This shows up in every aspect of your argument here.
You clearly don't understand how much people hate patent trolls and software patents in general. It's all a cruel joke, and getting paid some token sum of money to invalidate a bunch of worthless patents is just a nice bonus. You wouldn't do it for free because generating these patents is your job.
You are mistaken. I'm a former patent examiner as pointed out in the third word of my first comment here. So I have no conflict of interest. And I think I have a solid understanding of how much people hate patent trolls and software patents in general, which is why I added the qualifier about how I know my comment would be unpopular in some other comments here.
Conflicts of interest don't really work like that. You are a patent examiner even after you stop working as one, and for as long as your loyalties and ideas remain with your former job.
I don't know that it's a fallacy that has a name, but it could be considered an appeal to authority (person is claiming authority on what other should care about) or ignoratio elenchi (irrelevant conclusion) since the conclusion (nobody should care about this) obviously doesn't follow (I don't care about this).
To explain the thought process: most people doing this aren’t doing this to help CloudFlare. They’re doing this because they want to hurt patent trolls. Their time might be better spent forming a lobbying group and calling their representatives, but CloudFlare’s role in this is to provide them with a way to do what they wanted to do in the first place.
Not saying CloudFlare shouldn’t reward them better.
If the patent trolls were only harming CloudFlare then I would not be so concerned. But it is my impression that they mostly try to go after very small, independent companies because those can be guaranteed to not have enough funds to fight in court, so they will either pay up or go out of business.
I consider it a public service to try and drive these patent trolls out of business because the harm they do is done to the the entire industry, especially the most vulnerable companies in that industry.
Of course, I would much prefer to change the law so that patent trolling was not allowed or was not profitable.
For what it's worth, and I know this won't be popular here, the entire patent troll narrative is overblown. Patent trolls are not as big a problem as big tech companies want you to believe. See what people working in patent law actually think, for instance, I found this blog post in a minute or so:
I think it's good that Cloudflare didn't pay this particular troll, but even if they had, it's not that big a deal.
And the best way to stop patent trolls would be to prevent bad patents from being granted in the first place by giving examiners more time. The USPTO is funded solely by fees, not taxes, creating a perverse incentive to grant invalid patents. Fix that, increase patent fees, and give examiners more time.
> For what it's worth, and I know this won't be popular here, the entire patent troll narrative is overblown. Patent trolls are not as big a problem as big tech companies want you to believe. See what people working in patent law actually think, for instance, I found this blog post in a minute or so:
Nothing in the article you cited says patent trolls aren't a problem. It claims (without really supporting it) that modern patent trolling is the fault of the technology industry, which I can almost believe, but "the technology industry" is large, and non-practicing entities which are commonly identified as "trolls" are very different than entities that actually do R&D.
> Why should I do a "public service" for a company with a market cap measured in the tens of billions of dollars? They can pay for it.
It's right there in the name: public service. Yeah, it benefits cloudflare, but it also benefits nearly everyone else. Some people just want to improve the world, even if they're not fairly compensated for it. Some people see living in a world with one less patent troll as compensation enough.
The alternative is that Cloudflare pays a patent search firm to get the same result, albeit at a higher cost to Cloudflare. That would benefit everyone else too as the prior art would be on legal record. Why can't Cloudflare do a "public service" by paying a patent search firm like most other companies would?
>Why can't Cloudflare do a "public service" by paying a patent search firm like most other companies would?
I'm sure they did that too, like any other major company sued by a troll. This isn't an either/or situation.
Jengo draws from many, many people across the industry. They can surface all sorts of prior art, not just earlier patents, and they know where to look due to their experience.
As I said, every large company that gets sued by trolls pays patent search firms to find prior art. I can't imagine that Cloudflare didn't do the same. Why wouldn't they, there is a lot of money at stake? They added to that through the search program because the yield from patent search firms is often poor.
It isn't that uncommon to see patents were subject matter experts can easily point to unpatented prior art. I doubt such patents were filed without first paying experts to search for prior art. But such experts are experts in patents, not in the technology being patented, so they might not know the best places to look.
“You didn’t pay enough to my view of experts, but you won, but you could have won and paid more, and that’d be better.” That’s your argument? Just to be clear?
And, note, this strategy has worked pretty (cost) effectively for us before:
I do think that you all should have paid more. But I'm fine with the bounty program, as long as it's fairly compensated. I don't like the compensation of you all's program, but from the discussion I've had here, it's clear to me that many folks are fine with it. Fair enough, they can participate if they want to.
Also: I'm not saying that patent search firms are perfect. Albert Cory had a comment here about how the quality of search firms varies dramatically. But I do think that searching is a skill which can be developed. Many of the examiners I worked with at the USPTO were outstanding searchers who could find information in their area very quickly. It can be hard for someone looking to purchase patent search services to know who is good, unfortunately.
Why should a company that is doing a public service for the rest of us, at their own expense, pay more than it needs to to do that service?
If Cloudflare was to behave rationally, it would simply pay the troll to go away. Trolls are very good at making that the logical choice, which is why virtually everyone else just pays up. Cloudflare fights because the act of taking a stand fits with their values.
You're clearly not civic minded enough to appreciate why Cloudflare does what it does. And so you don't understand why other people, who share Cloudflare's values, would be motivated to help them accomplish their good deeds.
> If Cloudflare was to behave rationally, it would simply pay the troll to go away.
Well, maybe.
Cloudflare is a company that sells to developers. A lot of developers hate patent trolls. Fighting back against a patent troll is a good way to gain respect and goodwill from those developers. So it could effectively be an advertisement campaign, and for the target audience, probably a lot more effective than paying for banner ads. It could also benefit recruiting, and moral of developers who like seeing someone stand up to patent trolls.
Also, by setting a precedent of fighting back, they might deter future attempts at shakedowns from other patent trolls.
That's not to say that their motives are completely selfish. I'm sure there were altruistic motivations as well (and motivations no doubt varies among individuals involved in this). But it isn't irrational.
> Personally, I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate
I think it would be pretty tough for me to sell my marginal hours for more than my hourly rate.
I'm sure if I shopped around aggressively I could find a richer buyer for the 40-hour bundles I'm currently selling, but people aren't really beating down the door for a couple hours of C++ dev time here and there. Especially once you factor in time spent on lead generation, negotiation, dealing with collecting payment, etc, I think the market value of my free time is probably way less than my hourly rate.
It depends; we (small company/team) do emergency work, especially on legacy software including c++. We usually are at 300-500$/hr but $1000 has happened if the client is desperate and the work is hard. If a company is losing or not making the million$+/day they normally make, they don't care about the hourlies for the fix. We typically go in for a few hours to a few days; we don't take long term projects. Still we have pretty high utilisation.
For collecting the payments we use a factoring agency; it costs a % but whatever; we are always cashed up. And lead generation, well, people find us. I have been 'giving away' this 'business plan' for decades and no one is doing it. Probably because everyone wants to focus on something long term, not jump from php to c++ to cobol to java etc and because of the great resume driven dev strategy. I am for one looking forward to fixing the misery that is nextjs and its 'ecosystem' for the coming decades; please continue! I will have to up the hourlies to 1500+ for that miserable experience though; give me cobol or java any day.
I have not found an employer that values skills in multiple languages + quick at learning new ones. I assume these are the basic req for your type of work. Please share if you can how you got started .
At first we searched on twitter/linkedin for companies that seem to get into trouble more than once; hacked, downtime etc. Also down adsense links of big companies (click on the link -> they pay -> result page is 404, 500, or just dead); I have found these for Pepsi, Nike etc and then send them our proposal. When we started, the hourly was 150E/hr and one of the first we emailed (in London this was) came back and asked if we do entire projects as 150/hr was less than he paid the current people.
bug bounty programs always get you less money than what you could earn optimising for money... look how much bugs go for on bounty programs vs. selling them to companies who want the bugs for other purposes. (not talking illegal here, though maybe shady/gray area, kinda like patent trolls?). generally, working at a company as a fulltime dev will also net you more than working on bug bounties.
sure there's big bounty payouts, but its really rare for someone to consistently get such payouts. a lot of bugs filed to bounties are also found just working with thinga daily and stumbling upon them rather than specifically looking for them. I know a few old colleagues who worked on drivers for a security tool hit a lot of Microsoft kernel bugs. they got nice paydays and went up the list/hall of fame of prime bug finders not because of the bounty program but merely because their dayjob yielded them results to submit... i think this cloudflare program is in similar vein. people who already know or stumble upon prior art can submit it easily, and get a few bucks for it.... its imho not meant for people to scower all patents searching for it in their free time... though some might do that. (god what a tedious thing to do... "in one embodiment..." all day long :D)
I always thought of it as a way to get input from people who can see the patent application and say “hey that’s just the same as X” off the top of their head.
As someone who didn't participate (because I didn't have any prior art), I'd donate a few hours of my time (a few thousand dollars' value) to fight patent trolls.
I think the part of it being a contest is what makes the whole damn thing so much more exciting. As a person who has no prior experience in this area, I would love to submit a report on it and stake my claim as an expert if I was selected.
I reckon many of the submitters have the same vision. The name/fame is enough. The money is a show off and a legitimizer.
You're clearly not the target audience for this program, which is fine, but that's not in itself a problem with what they did.
Cloudflare found a model that successfully distributed the cost of killing a patent troll between many passionate volunteers who were in it for the pleasure of taking down a troll. They succeeded, and in the process put other patent trolls on notice that our collective hatred for them is enough to raise an army of volunteers that's cheap to motivate and extremely effective. The low budget is part of the success story here!
A patent troll's whole game is for it to be more expensive to fight back than to cave, and you're complaining that Cloudflare managed to flip the economics.
I'm skeptical this made that big a difference in terms of total cost. The biggest cost (maybe overwhelming majority) is probably the attorneys, which I'm confident Cloudflare didn't skimp on. Anyone from Cloudflare with hard data is welcome to correct me if I'm wrong.
That’s cool and all but don’t lowball people. This was the first thing Cloudflare has done in years that I didn’t associate with something shitty until I saw this.
Just for once do the right thing rather than what you think you can get away with because overall this is a genuinely something to be celebrated.
They clearly offered enough to be worth it to enough people to take out Sable. If being part of a successful effort to take down a patent troll is its own reward and Cloudflare successfully coordinated the work to make that happen, I'm really failing to see the problem.
They offered enough to get some activity happening which viewed strictly through the lens of capitalism and quarter to quarter balance sheets is +10 points no question.
This comment is an example of why people are hesitant to publicly do good things. If a company donates to open source and writes a blog post about it, but it's not "enough," then they get a bunch of hate. If they never donated to open source in the first place, then there'd be no hate. Likewise, I've never heard of a company paying random people on the Internet to help fight patent trolls, yet Cloudflare did, won, neutralized the patents, and it's still not enough.
The capitalistic view is that a company low-balled folks with knowledge to win a case.
Both views are valid. It mostly depends on the intent of the company and you can't know that for sure. As their interest in that program is quite obvious, it's understandable that some people interpret this in two ways.
Now it's not like they forced people into that program. You are free to not participate.
While I don’t disagree with any of your points, it seems like they are using a “platform/UGC/crowd” model to change the economics of the business model.
In the same way that TV networks find/vet/pay for the supply of shows and take on the risk per-show, YouTube (at its core) doesn’t do any of that and all of the content creators do those things with the hope it will take off and a share of the ad revenue, while YouTube’s risks are related to the opex cost of the incoming supply/demand.
Instead of cloudflare paying per examiner, they give a non-guaranteed slice to a bigger group of people.
Gene Quinn (in 2015) estimated that patent search with the attorney's opinion on patentability for software costs around $2500 to $3000 [1]. Obviously the cost is going to be higher now. Compare that alone against the $1000 ("at least") per winner that Cloudflare's offering.
But Cloudflare isn't asking for an opinion on a particular invention. A patent searcher could come back and say there is no prior art that reads on the invention in that case and still be paid. Instead, Cloudflare's asking for invalidating prior art, which I think sets the bar even higher and should increase the payout to account for the fact that much of the time there won't be invalidating prior art and thus won't be a payout.
If the platform is not taking on as much risk, the payouts should be higher.
I doubt the program’s aimed at patent lawyers. They’re probably casting a wide net hoping to reach people who happen to be close to invalidating prior art to begin with, skipping the search. Or maybe people who’s sued by the same patent troll, in which case the program serves to pool findings. If I can write up something I already know in less than an hour and possibly win $1k, why not.
At Google we did a comparison of many, many "patent search" firms: giving them all the same task. Unfortunately I couldn't tell you the results even if I remembered them (which I don't). Most were garbage but a couple were spot-on.
It's more than $3,000; I can tell you that.
Secondly, it's detective work; you might get the answer right away, and you might spend days searching fruitlessly. Making a claim chart is what take the time: you have to hit every single element.
But is there any potential disproportionate upside for any of the group of people who are searching? The sued company avoids paying $100 million in damages, and my upside as a searcher is $1000? Correct? Like, I don't have a potential super high upside like a YouTube content creator.
Agreed. I do think, however, that FOSS contributors may get some "social capital" from contributing (approval from the cool crowd, putting it on their resume and walking employers through what they did) that I doubt would go to some dude who spent 100 hours researching and finding an old patent or publication that kills a patent. Though I may be wrong.
You are being misguided for the same reason in both FOSS and this patent thing.
You just cannot see that for many people it's their genuine interest.
I know plenty of open source contributors and most of them do not give two damns about social capital or resume (some don't even work in software, but contribute to OS), they just like solving problems with code.
After I quit the USPTO, I tried using ChatGPT 3.5 for some basic patent examining activity out of curiosity, and I can say that it did an absolutely horrendous job. This wasn't prior art search, just analyzing the text to do a rejection based on the text alone (35 USC 112).
And the AI search technologies I used tended to not be particularly good. They typically find "background" documents that are related but can't be used in a rejection.
I don't anticipate LLMs being able to examine patents in general well. Many times a detailed understanding of things not in the text is necessary to examine. For the technologies I examined, often search was basically flipping through drawings. I'd love to see an AI search technology focus specifically on patent drawings. This can be quite difficult. Often I'd have to understand the topology of a circuit (electrical or flow) and find a specific combination of elements. Of course, each drawing could be laid out differently but be topologically equivalent... this surely can be handled with computers in some way, but it's going to require a big effort right now.
Similar to the way in which software developers are terrible at delivering quality software on-time and on-budget, so I suppose ChatGPT has already reached human level performance on this task!
As others have said, ChatGPT is great for writing fluff content that has no right or wrong answer. But it is still weak when a correct answer is needed, like in legal analysis. It can write a great 10 page summary of the history of the use of strawberries. But when it comes to telling how many r's are in the word strawberry, it's not very trustworthy.
I wonder if most people realize that your observation is a fundamental problem with LLMS. LLMs simply have no means to evaluate factuality. Keep asking ChatGPT "Are you sure?" and it will break eventually.
The inability to answer basic facts should be a dealbreaker.
Then you need to go over each item with just as much care as you would any probably-irrelevant item pulled from a keyword search, because the LLM is incapable of evaluating it in any way other than correlation.
Also, you don't necessarily have a real dataset to begin with: prior art doesn't need to be patented, it just needs to be published/public/invented sufficiently before the patent. Searching the existing patent database is insufficient.
> Also, you don't necessarily have a real dataset to begin with: prior art doesn't need to be patented, it just needs to be published/public/invented sufficiently before the patent. Searching the existing patent database is insufficient.
I would caution against making assumptions with regards to dataset access and size. I agree effectiveness of the effort I mention would be a function of not only gen AI engineering, but also dataset size and scope.
There is an aspect of collective contribution to a collective good here. Patent trolls impose costs on everyone, not just Cloudflare. Making life difficult, expensive and unprofitable for patent trolls benefits everyone, not just Cloudflare. I expect that many of these people didn't see themselves as helping Cloudflare, but the community of everyone who might be targeted by patent trolls.
Cloudflare is shrewdly calculating that there is a lot of latent, unexpressed hate toward patent trolls but that most people don't want to make a career out of it, but might very well make a little hobby out of it, and so they get to take advantage of people who are motivated by something other than money.
More deeply, the very idea of a "patent examiner" has never made sense to me. It requires being expert in all things, which is impossible. It makes more sense to take someone who is an expert in a field, and put a "patent examiner" hat on them for a little while. Ideally the patent system is not so complex that it itself requires as much or more study to be expert in than the actual subjects of the patents -- this would be a very bad sign.
Patent Examiners do specialize in their fields. It isn't something that is just a common pool subject to any patent that comes into the pipe.
From the USPTO[1]
What kind of degree do I need to apply, and which vacancy do I need to apply to?
The minimum degree required to be a utility patent examiner is a bachelor’s degree. There are dozens of STEM-related bachelor’s degree types that qualify, even if they are not the exact discipline listed in the title of the job vacancy.
For example, professionals with bachelor’s degrees ranging from engineering, mathematics, astronomy, space science, geophysics, oceanography, or hydrology could all apply to the "Patent Examiner (Physics)" vacancy when it is open. To see more details about which degrees best fit with which patent examiner vacancies, view this chart[1].
You can also attend one of our upcoming webinars or office hours to chat with a current patent examiner, or email us at [email protected] with your specific question.
> Cloudflare is shrewdly calculating that there is a lot of latent, unexpressed hate toward patent trolls but that most people don't want to make a career out of it, but might very well make a little hobby out of it, and so they get to take advantage of people who are motivated by something other than money.
I don't think this is a good strategy. These folks tend to have a poor understanding of patent law in my experience, and you need to understand the basics to do this right. (You fortunately don't need to know too much law to handle 90% of cases.) And these folks probably aren't very effective at patent searching even if they understand the legal parts. I think most people overestimate their own search abilities. I certainly did. Examining patents didn't level me up as much as humble me in that regard.
> More deeply, the very idea of a "patent examiner" has never made sense to me. It require being expert in all things, which is impossible. [...]
As saratogacx pointed out, at the USPTO, the vast majority of examiners have a specific technology they are assigned to. While the matching of examiners to their "art unit" is often pretty bad (I could go on a rant...), the situation is not as bad as you described. There are some generalist examiners, but as I understand it, they are in (basically) QA roles and don't need to know the technologies as much. Unfortunately, USPTO upper management seems to want to make examiners into generalists, which I doubt will work out as they want.
I agree that periodic rotations of industry folks into patent examiner positions is a great idea. It would help the patent system and give the industry folks some appreciation for what examiners do.
If you're worried about lack of expertise, you should be more worried about the courts. Judges and juries almost never have a background in the technology of the case they are working on.
Proof is in the pudding, as they say. I've been astonished by the quality of the submissions we've received the times we've fired up Project Jengo. And it's helped us successfully beat — and literally put out of business — the two patent trolls that have come after us.
Did you all pay for a normal invalidation search as well? I'm glad it worked for you all, but I think "spray and pray" is typically not a good strategy. I suppose you all had enough scale to reach the right people.
I’m sorry we’ve shown that going to law school is less valuable than some may have thought. My parents had that angst too when I decided not to practice law after going to law school myself. It worked out.
>It would help the patent system and give the industry folks some appreciation for what examiners do.
The examiners regularly approve absolute bullshit patents in my field that either obviously have prior work, and shouldn't be patentable anyway such as game mechanics. They clearly don't understand the work they're meant to be doing. Either patent law is horribly designed and needs to be razed to the ground, or it's being horribly applied.
If you go to a hospital that lacks the resources to provide proper treatment, should you be surprised to receive poor treatment even if your doctor was highly competent? That's basically the situation the USPTO is in. Examiners are on a quota system and they don't get enough time to do a good quality job.
With that being said, the majority of the time, the examiner made the right decision. You should check whether a patent was actually granted, for instance. Often when people are complaining about a dumb patent they're actually complaining about a dumb patent application that the USPTO rightly rejected. You should be complaining about the people writing such applications, not the USPTO.
Further, the USPTO is funded purely by fees, not taxes. Applicants want patents. That creates a perverse incentive to reduce patent quality to make it easier to get patents.
The parent clearly said that approved parents were bullshit, and I agree. I have several patents, and have seen how nonsense the process is. When lawyers obfuscate the text enough to confuse the patent examiner, the patent gets approved. I can't tell if an individual patent examiner is competent or knowledgeable, but patent decisions have nothing to do with factuality or novelty.
I do remember your comments from past threads too. It really interesting to hear the perspective from the patent office's side, but the idea that the patent office had some secret and specialized method of evaluating novelty is ridiculous. Any expert can read a sample of granted patents and tell you that. I'd estimate maybe 5% of patents in my field have any novelty, and that's being generous.
I'm sure this has more to do with incentives and the overall system, and that individual patent examiners would prefer to do a good job. But you have to admit that the results are atrocious.
> The parent clearly said that approved parents were bullshit, and I agree.
Just because they said it was granted, doesn't mean that it was. A lot of people here don't seem able to distinguish between a granted patent and a rejected patent application. Here are two examples that I bothered to reply to in the past:
> the idea that the patent office had some secret and specialized method of evaluating novelty is ridiculous
I don't think they do and I never said they do. The USPTO follows some legal standard that I personally don't agree with. I agree with you that too few granted patents have genuine novelty.
> But you have to admit that the results are atrocious.
No, I don't. You've seen a small selection of what the USPTO outputs. Only the bad cases appear in the news. In contrast, I've seen a far larger and unbiased selection and know that the majority is fine. Most applications are rejected. I probably rejected over 75% myself.
I have seen the results from searches of patents in my field, and the patents that my colleagues get granted. It's hard to find even a single good patent in the bunch.
Is there a way to sample 5 random ML patents? I'd be surprised if half were any good.
I think the quality of examination and search is excellent given how little time examiners have. But mistakes still happen too frequently, and the mistakes can be highly costly. Better to stop problems upstream in my opinion by giving examiners more time.
Patent quality is related but different. I agree that patent quality is awful, but there's only so much an examiner can do to influence that. Attorneys have basically gamed the system to write vague legalese that's patentable but basically useless. And to paraphase a supervisor I knew at the USPTO, "Just because it's stupid doesn't mean that it's not patentable". I can't reject them if it meets the legal standards but is stupid.
Look for "Notice of Allowance and Fees Due (PTOL-85)" and click on "PDF" on the right. Scroll to page 10 and look for the "Reasons for Allowance" section where the examiner describes in detail why it differs from the prior art.
I was more looking for your opinion on the patent in general.
While there are minor technical differences in exactly how rANS has been encoded/decoded before, and how Microsoft does it, the fact that Microsoft was granted this means they now have a weapon with which they can cause fear, uncertainty and doubt around ANS, much to the chagrin of the ANS's actual inventor, Jarek Duda, who wanted it to be public domain and implementable by anyone.
It seems to me like Microsoft got a patent on "doing ANS a little bit different" - they didn't have to, they could just do it the normal way, but this little bit of difference lets them secure a patent, and now they can pursue anyone who implements ANS to intimidate them with "how sure are you don't do ANS like we do? Let's get our multi-billion legal team, and your legal team, and find out. You have a legal team, don't you?"
In particular, this patent already had a final rejection in 2020. But Microsoft then took advantage of the "After Final Consideration Pilot" program, which sounds more like the USPTO trying to drum up trade, to get it re-re-re-examined.
> Microsoft was granted this means they now have a weapon with which they can cause fear, uncertainty and doubt around ANS
This is due more to people not understanding what the patent covers. The right response in my view is to educate people. Just because someone has a patent on a particular variation of X, doesn't mean that working on X is risky or what not. Just don't infringe their variation. When I was at the USPTO, I examined a lot of little variations of common things in my area (water heaters and car air vents, mostly) and I never worried that it would stop innovation as usually the point of novelty was not particularly groundbreaking, or even necessarily of interest to anyone aside from the applicant.
I'm wonder now if people working in patent offices actually think they're doing something good and are just overworked, while being completely unaware of the evil they're supporting. It sure sounds like you think there's value in it.
The patent office can be sued for not granting but not for granting. So they bias towards granting things they shouldn't and let the courts deal with the mess later.
> Ideally the patent system is not so complex that it itself requires as much or more study to be expert in than the actual subjects of the patents
Unfortunately, "patent law" is a complex body of laws, legal decisions, and specialized procedures large enough to be its own distinct specialization for lawyers. While it's not impossible to become an expert in it without years of study, it is definitely not possible to be excellent at it.
Just to put it in perspective, the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure alone weighs in at over 4K pages of text.
The fascinating thing for me about this comment, and why I find myself weirdly obsessing over it, is how wrong it is about human nature and why we do things. There’s a small set of things we get paid for. There are a lot of other things we do, and even derive value from, that we don’t get paid anything for. Does that mean they have no value? Absolutely not. Every job I’ve taken is not the one that, on paper, I’d make the most from. Every term sheet I’ve accepted didn’t have the highest implied market cap. Am I an idiot? Perhaps. But it’s worked out. Lots of reasons people do things. Sometimes it’s about money. But those tend to be the most boring. Certainly in the short/medium term. I used to think missions were bullshit. Now I can’t imagine how you could ever possibly run a company without one.
PS - we killed a patent troll. A bunch of you helped. How cool is that??! Thank you.
I think you're extrapolating a lot from my comment that wasn't intended.
You should try searching for prior art some time to get an idea about why I'm not happy about the payment being low. Patent examining's a real grind, and by far the hardest job I've ever done. It's boring and extremely time consuming. I doubt many people do it for pleasure or a higher calling.
If some people want to volunteer to find invalidating prior art, more power to them. I won't be joining them, though.
I have this stubborn cognitive bias that CloudFlare is a good thing, I think it’s because OG hackers from HN started it: jgrahamc and that lot are the real deal.
Time and time again it’s like: “CloydFlare discovers way to be evil that even Google didn’t figure out! News at 10.”
Dear Jesus, all I want for Hanukah is that fly.io doesn’t end up like that.
"I could contribute to open source project that benefits millions, but I'm better off writing Java for a one mid sized company. I'm struck how corporate funded bounties for OS contributions are."
Valid stance to take but not exactly unique. That's just the world we are living in.
Yeah, hats off to them. That was a great read, and I certainly appreciate their efforts to give these kinds of "businesses" the absolute kicking they deserve.
Somebody or some organisation had to start standing up to patent trolls for the situation to change and kudos to Cloudflare for choosing to be that organisation. Hopefully it will encourage others to do likewise.
This is great. I do worry that a future more sinister malicious patent troll could read all the wonderful strategy Cloudflare used and work around them. Hopefully Cloudflare legal team got stronger!
Kudos to the likes of Cloudflare and (yesteryears’) Newegg that fought these trolls.
I shudder at the thought of how many of the existing legacy industries outside the computer space are still riddled with these patent portfolio companies :(
> I do worry that a future more sinister malicious patent troll could read all the wonderful strategy
The "good" news is that patent trolling is, more or less by definition, a get-rich-quick scheme - they want to make a lot of money by sending a few dozen letters every year. It does not attract people who are interested in anything approaching due diligence.
But also, the whole point of all of this is to get the trolls to leave Cloudflare alone, right? This is a very deliberate strategy; this announcement says "don't try that stuff here ... but feel free to try Cisco or Juniper instead."
I was wondering if Cisco or Juniper payed them anything to back off or just threaten them the same thing that Cloudflare actually did to them.
The fact that they thought they had a winnable case again Cloudflare makes me think that others actually paid up ... or that the troll was just getting desperate to finally earn anything.
Hopefully the powers that be will look at it from a national security perspective, in that other countries do not respect US copyright law and may be pulling ahead
Patents are explicitly open for anyone to see. I don't know that we need more help there: you can get a product banned from import if someone uses your patent without recompense.
As someone in a place without pure software patents (algorithms can't be patented, but software/hardware combination systems can be), I'm willing to let US users use an overseas hosted instance instead of locally running it.
Though keeping US entities from importing copies against US patents isn't really something I could stop.
Do you think China is still an underdog compared to the US?
I suspect the only thing that would ever convince China to take IP seriously is if China's own companies would profit more from stronger IP protection.
China takes IP very seriously domestically when big corporations need protection. A bit of topic but I always found that the only "communist" country is the biggest infringer of copyleft licenses and has neglible open source culture. Shouldn't code be "for the people".
Why should they respect it? Software patents are and have always been a bad idea, blatant parasitism. They should never have been established, must never be taken seriously, and ought to be abolished.
I've read the article but I'm not sure I understand :
1. Why / how did sable give up its patent portfolio? It's handwaved as "lots of post trial stuff" but what's the nutshell of it? Is it because they're marked invalid? Is it punitive ruling? Something else?
2. There were 4 patents brought up against cloud flare, but sable gave up "its entire portfolio". Does that mean these 4 were their entire portfolio? Or did they have to give up patents outside of suit itself? If so, how and why? Did sable hang up the hat as a business?
Reading between the lines, my uneducated guess is that Sable knew they were going out of business either way and had to chose between paying ALL of Cloudflare's legal fees (possibly in the millions) or paying a token amount and giving up their (now or soon-to-be worthless) patents. The latter results in fewer financial loses for Sable and makes for excellent Cloudflare PR.
Edit: Also, it's entirely likely that Sable still made a tidy profit overall when it settled with the other big networking companies and decided to quit while they were ahead.
There's a picture of the "Dedication to the Public and Royalty Free License Agreement between Sable and Cloudflare" at the end of the article. [1]
Not a lawyer, but it seems to be part of the court ruling. Maybe CF didn't see a chance to get their costs back and made a deal so Sable needed to only pay a part, but also release the patents?
Sable's patents are from a company that stopped operations in 2006, so most patents are probably from well before then, and likely either expired or will very soon.
Did Sable give up ALL its patents, or only the patents involved in the Cloudflare case? The picture of the document refers to the "Sable Patents", which I would suspect are defined in the context of the court case and therefore are only the ones relevant to that case?
I read it as “giving up the patents in the portfolio that they acquired from that other company in 2006”.
Still not very clear to me either. Probably intentional, since CF seems to want to send the message that “mess with us and in the end you’ll give up all your patents somehow”
Take a look at the legal doctrine of collateral estoppel. Once a party gets its day in court on a specific issue of fact, it can't keep relitigating that issue in later legal actions. It's possible that Cloudflare was the first to take Sable's claims all the way to a verdict (versus settling early), so Sable might have finally gotten its day in court.
The excerpts from the Borchers testimony are a riot.
> The responsible business people in this business actually sit down and talk to folks before they sue them, fair?
> Fair.
> And you don't do that, do you, sir?
> No.
I'm not a fan of Cloudflare in general. I think "Browser Integrity Check" is banal malware, the McAfee of the Web 2.0 era. But this? I love this. Settling with a patent troll out of court is cowardly.
But in the settlement they got to ask for something the court can't grant them. Cloudflare could have settled in court and got more money but this is better, no?
I think parent comment is referring to the other companies before Cloudflare who settled out of court with Sable, not Cloudflare who just destroyed them in court.
It used to be the Eastern District of Texas, with Justice Rodney Gilstrap. I never went to Marshall or Tyler, but I knew a lot of people who did. They're small towns.
I don't know when it shifted to the Western District. Waco is not nearly as rural as East Texas; it's halfway between Dallas and Austin.
Why are patent trolls allowed to exist? A company that only holds patents and does no productive job with them (research, production, ...) should not be allowed to exist. It stifles development and innovation for the short-lived monetary gain of a few people.
The naive explanation is that it helps inventors, because speculative investors (the trolls!) buy up patents.
One analogy is pharma research. Rights for a promising candidate molecule are purchased by "big pharma" and they will do the grunt work to validate it and extract the big money from its therapeutic value.
Substitute "FDA market authorization after successful clinical trials" with "that infamous East Texas court district and picking the right targets" (picking a too big target might backfire, picking a too small doesn't really worth the costs, etc.)
Of course the questions are: does this really help inventors? do inventors need help? is it good for society that inventors get help? is the cost of helping inventors this way not unreasonable to the economy? and even if the cost is "low", how fucking fair is it that a lot of businesses are using a given invention but only a lucky few get dragged to court? can we do better? what kind of people patent trolls are? what do they do with the money?
I worked at a small biotech company whose business model was (in part) to do early stage drug discovery research and then sell promising leads to bigger companies, who would take the leads through the FDA approval process. Actually taking a drug through to approval is a $1 billion+ endeavor (with a high probability that it just won't work; e.g. stage 3 trials just fail). Small companies cannot do this.
So a naive solution like "don't allow patents to be sold" actually restricts a bunch of reasonable businesses.
There's an actionable difference between pharma and most other things. Property rights should "give notice" of the boundaries of a property, most obviously you lose certain rights if you fail to mark the edge of real property with a fence or something.
But for most patents there's no realistic way to find patents you might be infringing (for software this is impossible in the general case as a corollary of Fines theorem). That's why we hate patents so much: you only find out if there is a patent if you get sued.
But for pharma there is a way; chemicals are "indexable": because a standard mapping from chemical structure to names exists, if you are using a chemical and want to find whether anyone patented it, you can do so easily.
In an ideal world, the law would recognise this and patents would only be valid in areas where there is a natural way of indexing - which is pretty much only pharma AFAICT
The patent laws does not require such thing. If it were, there may be some unforseen consequences.
For example, during the late 1800s, a number of companies bandied together to pool their patents together for a commercially viable sewing machine. No single company had been able to develop and file patents that resulted in a working sewing machine. As such, they pooled the patents and negotiated a portion of royalties for everyone who contributed. That would probably have been set up as its own legal entity. With a requirement to be an operating company, such a legal vehicle would not have worked.
You could argue that such an entity is considered “productive”, but then you would have to define what that means and write it into the law. Any lawsuit involving patents would require demonstrating that.
Another example is trademarks. In order to have a registered trademark, you must show that it is in active use, and it is distinct. That means that in order to keep a registered trademark, you must sue anyone who is infringing upon it.
There is an indie author who came up on a litrpg genre concept combining it with a post-apocalypse setting. His book exploded upon the niche, progressive fantasy scene. People loved the idea and other authors wrote books for it. The original author tried to brand it and protect it with a registered trademark. Because the term had rapidly genericized, that author started sending cease & desist letters to other authors, because he was required to in order to keep the registered trademark.
I don’t know if he knew he had do that when he registered it, but doing so drained the goodwill he had in the community. Progressive fantasy is a small indie community, and the authors who can, gather at Dragoncon to talk, exchange ideas. This is similar to sending cease and desist to your neighbors. You will quickly find yourself locked out of the community.
I am thinking of the inventor of the bear suit. Making something to protect yourself from a grizzly bear seems like it has low value for society. It is also this off the wall perspective that allowed him to invent a gel that can absorb heat (probably a non-Newtonian fluid). If we’re trying to protect the livelihood of an indie inventor like that, would a requirement to demonstrate productivity help the Bear Suit inventor? Or would it have a chilling effect?
Its a pure failure of the Patent office issuing dubious patents.
The patent office is financially encouraged to keep issuing patents no matter the quality because it keeps the patent fees and those are payed by the applicants. The patent office seems to be protected financially from issuing bad patents as well (I can't find any record of them being sued by companies that have licensed patents that have been invalidated).
It’s an unfortunate byproduct of allowing patents to be bought and sold. Let’s say you had a patent: you worked hard on your invention and you deserve to reap the financial benefits of it. But you do not have the legal resources to protect your right as the inventor. It feels fair and reasonable to me that you can sell your patent to a third party to license and protect as they see fit, so you can reap some financial reward.
Now, how do you make sure that these companies buying patents don’t become trolls? I don’t think it’s fair to require them to use the patent, because that limits who the inventor can sell to. Personally I think the way IP lawsuits are filed and considered needs significant reform.
Submarine patents is a different issue, effectively ended by changes in 2000 that require (most) patent applications to be published, and changes in 1995 that changed the term of patents to start from date of filing rather than date of issuance. There could possibly be a few unpublished patent applications from before 1995 that are still in the examination process; but case law from 2005 [1][2] makes it difficult to enforce patents if there has been 'unreasonable and unjustified' delay in the claims, and I'd suspect it would be hard to justify a delay of 30 years.
Then you get will into issues of what use actually is. What is a reasonable timeline for filing a patent, and getting it to market? What is a slow and methodical development program vs. footdragging? What if the market for your product doesn't support profitable operation for your company, but someone else claims they can do it?
IMO patents should not be transferable. And maybe they shouldn't be assignable to corporate entities, only to people. Multiple people at once if they all contributed to the invention.
This would massively disenfranchise small inventors, and force all inventive work into large companies. There is no reason that the person who does the inventing should also be the person developing and selling a product.
It is weird and unfortunate that the longstanding deficiencies with patent law (chiefly: issuing patents for things that are too obvious or numerous) are being blamed on transferability of property rights. It’s the same broken intuition as over regulating housing construction and then blaming high housing costs on ownership by Chinese nationals.
In a perfect world this is arbitrage. Arbitrage helps making markets more efficient. However we don't live in a perfect world. Judgment is too expensive and risky. If it were quick, cheap and safe then patent trolls won't have the chance to do extortion. They would be limited to ... um... arbitrage!
Exactly, patents used to be for inventors. Now they're for "idea men" MBAs that spitball some bullshit idea with the half-listened-to assistance of a couple tech people.
I feel like there are so many patents in the pool that are just companies waiting for a technology to be actually invented by a clever engineer - but bc the company had the "idea" they have the rights to it. At that point we may as well automate it by having an LLM spit out ideas en masse.
While noble, the immediate strategy with that is that prototypes can be overwhelming expensive in time and money to produce. Patents are supposed to protect inventors, but if that's the bar then right out the gate you are favoring the corporate behemoths who have the resources and can then just snatch the idea and weasle out the not-so-resource laden inventor. This is the type of thing where there seems like there should be easy solutions to the problems but a little nuance reveals that these things are very lucrative and some level of corporate apparatus will find a way to abuse the system and reap potentially hefty winning at the expense of the actual people coming up with stuff.
No, inventions that are never produced have no value and do not need protection. For most things prototypes are cheap and production is expensive. The patent system already gives you a provisional year if you're not quite ready but want to stake a claim.
From my perspective it is you that is the extremist. Patent office requires perpetual motion machines to come with a prototype, why not everything else as well.
I get why it doesn't immediately need a prototype (I feel like there's a pretty obvious situation where someone has an idea and needs funding but wouldn't get funding without a patent). I don't get what the benefit is of never requiring one
People with ideas should be allowed to obstruct others that also have ideas but also the means to implement them. The world is improved by new inventions, not new theoretical inventions. The intent of the patent system is increase commerce and benefit the public.
Would a better approach be to limit the amount of damages that can be claimed to some multiple of whatever the patent generates in revenue?
A patent that’s only sitting in a war chest and not being used to actually enrich the owner would be able to claim damages of zero if somebody else was found to be infringing
You know, something far less intensive would be if any patent was used in an official lawsuit, it would have to be added to the record of the patent.
This way the corp suing first and asking questions later would have disclose everyone it has sued. It would also open the door for many many disputes and ripples.
I really wish this settlement included disclosing what the other trolled parties ("including Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, SonicWall, and Juniper Networks") paid.
I consider this a victory for creativity, freedom and technological progress. Let the entrepreneurs innovate and execute without fear of legal suffocation!
With the verdict in-hand, Sable was probably voluntold by Cloudflare.
If Cloudflare thought they had a shot at recovering costs, $225k and a patent-portfolio could be substantially less than whatever Cloudflare (or their insurance) had paid in defense-costs.
They had those patents only to sue other companies and get money, now some of those patents were invalidated by prior art and to Sable are essentially toilet paper.
The action is unlikely to be goodwill, more likely admitting defeat and closing the patent troll company.
Could a part of the motivation perhaps be quick, clean liquidation, before any of the companies who settled before cloudflare chose resistance might try to claw back some of the settlement?
Cloudflare has negotiating power. They would prefer to give up some of the legal cost recoup in exchange for the public crucifixion of the trolling firm. It's intentionally painting a very scary picture of what happens when you sue Cloudflare, as a deterrent.
As I read this, all but one of Sable's patent claims got invalidated in an IPR (a patent proceeding), and the last one got invalidated by a jury at trial. When your patents have no claims left, you aren't doing anything by releasing the patents to the public. It's been defanged anyway.
In a sane law system, the existence of a company as a mere "box of patents" without any real product currently or previously on the market would be illegal, and these patent trolls won't exist...
Where would you draw a line for "any real product" ? ARM for example doesn't actually produce any "real" (physical) product, but they certainly do research and produce technology for other companies to build products on.
There's a lot of "on paper" companies around the world who actually do produce novel technologies even if they don't themselves create the end product, but instead sell their inventions to other parties.
Why did everybody just accept the idea that what makes a troll is them having no product when the problem is clear the high costs of litigation and low quality of the patents (and the patents selection)?
IBM is the largest and most destructive patent troll around. And all of that is just propaganda designed to make it and other companies like it rich.
I don't think they should be illegal... companies that don't "produce" anything are useful for lots of different legitimate reasons. But the bar for suing for damages should be a lot higher than just, "we happen to own the patents."
Lotta proposed solutions to the patent troll problem in this comment section, and they all have bad unintended consequences. So here's mine:
Institute a new tax on rent-seeking. Tax rent-seekers for close to 100% of the value they extract (basically a version of Georgism generalized to everything, instead of just real estate).
This would require basically a second IRS, and they would occasionally get things wrong and stifle value-producing businesses, but if it was at all effective it would be a net benefit to the economy instead of a net drag on it, and it could easily pull in enough revenue to let us eliminate income tax.
Wikipedia: growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.
Obviously, we have to also tax people who are free-riding on the social or political manipulations of others--not every real estate owner profiting from a 5x increase in property value was actually involved in NIMBY political actions, and not every patent troll worked toward creating judicial conditions conducive to their trolling.
No, you misunderstood. What do you define as rent-seeking, in a way that can be enforced? Clearly everyone hates patent trolls. But even here it is hard to come up with rules that affect them but not "legitimate investors" or whatever. Yes, everyone wants the evil to be punished. But how are you to decide who they are?
Yes, that's why we need a new 80,000 person agency to work out the details of enforcement.
It's not like it's hard to pick out many, many instances of this. Licensing requirement for hairdressers? Rent-seeking. Blocking the demolition of an abandoned gas station for high-rise construction? Rent-seeking. Longshoremen prohibiting automation of ports? You'd better believe that's a rent-seeking.
Will there be edge cases and mistakes? Of course. But there'll be an incredible economic surplus from which to compensate any such victims, with all the progress enabled by removing the rent-seekers.
So Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, SonicWall, and Juniper Networks paid millions to Sable. Sable paid $225k to Cloudflare, and won't use them again against anyone.
Sounds like they don't need to. Well played Sable. Enjoy your money.
I really wish we could publicly shame the people behind these abuses or provide some other incentive to correct bad behavior other than speeding-ticket sized fines.
In other news, as an investor, this tells me Cloudflare is technologically ahead of the other older companies who apparently were not sure they could defend against the claims.
> I really wish we could publicly shame the people behind these abuses or provide some other incentive to correct bad behavior other than speeding-ticket sized fines.
>In other news, as an investor, this tells me Cloudflare is technologically ahead of the other older companies who apparently were not sure they could defend against the claims.
That feels like a highly specious takeaway from this court case. Companies settle against trolls because litigation isn't free to fight. It can make very good financial sense (and even be encouraged by investors who don't want to see a company in the courts for years, as Cloudflare was.)
I would be highly interested to see the breakdown of what it cost in manhours, fees, prizes to Project Jengo, etc. versus the payout from Sable to fight this particular case for Cloudflare, and whether they even came close to breaking even just on this case alone. Likely their decision somewhat hinged on an estimate of what it might cost to settle all other patent disputes in the future, and the belief that fighting this case is actually saving them much more money down the line (but how much?).
On the flip side, there's some napkin math to be done about the costs saved by any future patent trolls who are averted by going all scorched earth this time around...
Sable probably spent a lot of money on fighting Cloudflare. It seems to me like they nearly bankrupted themselves doing it, and $225K was all they had left to pay Cloudflare's legal fees.
> In other news, as an investor, this tells me Cloudflare is technologically ahead of the other older companies who apparently were not sure they could defend against the claims.
This is the wrong takeaway. Litigation is expensive and uncertain, especially in the Western District of Texas. It's a troll friendly district with a troll friendly judge. These other companies paid up because it's a rational choice to do so. Cloudflare chose to fight, but it probably would have been cheaper to settle.
> I really wish we could publicly shame the people behind these abuses or provide some other incentive to correct bad behavior other than speeding-ticket sized fines.
They are beyond shame, believe me. There have already been TV news segments about how their "place of business" in West Texas is just a PO Box.
Good news! There should be a rule that you have to use a patent in X years (much less than the lifetime) so its harder to do this behavior of hoarding a patent.
There is a rule that you have to build the thing that you patent. Most of the time this sort of trolling happens, a company that built the thing went bankrupt, possibly due to the infringement (but not in this case).
I would love more details on how the case transitioned to the counter-suit. I feel like going from Cloudflare owing millions to dissolving all the troll's patents was more complex than the article implies.
Would love to see results of all such prior-art research work going to EFF and patent offices to build a database for troll-crushing by anybody who needs it. Once refutation is made much easier and far less expensive then is much harder for trolls to operate.
From TFA: "Sable has agreed to dedicate its entire patent portfolio to the public. This means that Sable will tell the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that it gives up all of its legal rights to its patent portfolio. Sable can never again use these patents to sue for infringement; they can never again use these patents to try to make a quick buck."
I'm confused that CF says they also were granted royalty free rights to the patents...how can they cloudflare have specific rights yet all the patents are public?
> Are they going to an open source patent pool or something?
All patents are "open for public access" [1]. And once they age past their "expiration date" (currently twenty years from earliest date of filing) they become "public property".
What Sable is doing is giving up the ability to restrict others based on the patents content's before those patents would normally have expired anyway. So in effect they are having the patents "expire early" -- which makes the contents of each become "public property".
A lot of patent trolls have no assets, and don't own anything except the patents they're currently milking. Then they go out of business, and there's nothing to sue. Sable apparently made the mistake of building up a portfolio and living on.
> Proving invalidity to a jury is hard. The burden on the defendant is high: Cloudflare needed to prove by clear and convincing evidence that claim 25 is invalid. And, proving it by describing how the claim is obvious in light of the prior art is complicated.
You're not kidding.
> Sable’s damages expert, Stephen Dell, told the jury that Sable was owed somewhere between $25 million and $94.2 million in damages.
"damages experts" == nice work if you can get it. The damage expert in the Apple v. Samsung trial that I went to was paid $2 million. "How much are you getting paid?" is always one of the first things they get asked on cross-examination.
> Sable has agreed to dedicate its entire patent portfolio to the public. This means that Sable will tell the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that it gives up all of its legal rights to its patent portfolio
Left unsaid is whether this includes anything other than the patents that they already lost on.
Heard an interesting counterpoint to this from a patent attorney. In the IP ecosystem patent trolls serve as a sort of check on the big companies - the apex predators - to stop them from willfully infringing on your patents and then bankrupting you in litigation.
While you as a startup may not have the resources to go after them in court; your IP assets in the hands of a competent and aggressive patent troll could be a very big problem for Big Co.
So in that sense they are also kind of like a parasite that infects the apex predators who eat tainted meat.
Aren't patent trolls called trolls because they litigate on broad patents, for which prior art exists in many case? If so, they can't protect a startup in any way unless you create broad and invalid patents.
Your IP assets can be used to litigate by companies that aren't patent trolls.
Don't think I've ever worked for a startup that had any patents whatsoever. I think I consulted with one IIRC, and they folded largely due to their hyperfocus on tech to the detriment of building something people actually wanted to pay for. Filing a patent was probably a symptom of that problem.
Its more like smaller public companies trying to keep bigger public companies in check.
Well I think it depends on the industry. Patents tend to be less relevant in software. But in other capital intensive industries where there is some manufacture of physical matter - like biotech or hardware - IP is a big deal.
This isn't an interesting counterpoint. This is the de facto narrative regarding patent lawyers and patent trolls masquerading as firms that act as though they somehow contribute.
Nice idea, except no one you mentioned spends their time doing patents. It's just big companies who are told by consultants to beef up their patent portfolio, and when they fail like Caspian, the remains are snatched up by bottom feeders who go around harassing others, preferably of course startups and others with no real resources.
The big companies beefing up their portfolios is more of a defensive measure from what I have been told. The threat of a countersuit makes IP litigation among peers a game of mutually assured destruction. Funny quote from a VC friend “patents are a sport of kings.”
But defensive portfolios are not a concern for patent trolls. They can’t be countered for infringement because they don’t make anything!
But you are not wrong that they can be like gnats that suck the blood from startups. In one car I heard of some a patent troll engaged in behavior bordering on criminal extortion - threatening mom and pops businesses for using printers and fax machines. All I am saying is that they play a role in balancing and maintaining the health of the IP ecosystem.
it's what they don't do. a troll doesn't play any role in developing the tech they hold patents for, they just extract rent when someone stumbles into a similar solution
if a company doesn't develop products, but they actively license their patents to those that do, that's still patents working as intended, and not trolling. they're still helping to get the tech developed, rather than stifling it
(i think there are a lot of problems with software patents even when used as intended by real companies. mainly, they last too long)
I dunno, this line of reasoning doesn’t feel right to me. A company making products did develop the technology. They were awarded a patent. That patent was an asset. That asset was sold presumably for the benefit of the people behind the original company. That the resulting asset owner wasn’t the originator doesn’t feel like it should make any difference here?
Software patents are a scourge, I’m just not sure the reasoning there holds.
The reason is because they aren't being used as they were intended: patents are _supposed_ to be a way to give inventors/entrepreneurs a window to build a market with their idea. Let's say that you have some truly amazing invention that frobnicates foos 50x faster than anyone else, and you plan to take it to market. What would prevent the likes of Amazon from copying your idea with all the resources at their disposal? Patents.
Patents as an asset is exactly the problem. Your entire first paragraph is built on this faulted perspective - the assumption that how we actually use patents is aligned with how they were designed to be used. They are supposed to foster small businesses, not destroy them.
Software patents are a scourge only because patents as a whole have become a scourge.
> The reason is because they aren't being used as they were intended: patents are _supposed_ to be a way to give inventors/entrepreneurs a window to build a market with their idea.
If I invent something, I should surely be able to license its production if I don’t want to be in the production game myself. The alternative reduces to the absurd very quickly. If I invent a better system for making ball bearings, it’s not reasonable to say I should only benefit from it if I then personally raise the capital and experience to start a ball bearing manufacturing plant.
If you invent a better system for making ball bearings and patent it, you could bring your system to existing manufacturers and say "I've invented a better system, would you like to license my patent and start using it to bring your costs down and productivity up?" That's fine and most people would be on board.
But a patent troll is different. They're entirely reactive. They wait for someone else to start doing something that is vaguely similar to what you patented, and then they pounce. The troll threatens legal action if they don't license the patent instead.
The issue is widespread bad behavior from patent trolls, given that the cost of mass filing patent infringement claims that barely apply is so much lower than the expected settlement, and the cost of a successful defense is likely higher than the request settlement. The incentive is to get a portfolio of overly broad patents and then shake down almost entirely unrelated companies.
if a company sells the patent to a "troll", but retains a license as part of the deal, i would consider that to be working as intended. it's basically a way to outsource the legal protection
if a company sells it to a broker, and it eventually gets traded or licensed to a company that develops it, i'd also consider that working as intended
if patents keep finding their way to companies that have no intention to either develop it themselves, or license it to others, and keep suing companies that do develop things, i'd consider it a failure of the system
pharma patents get traded to non-developers all the time, but pharma patents mostly do their job of incentivizing innovation. there's still flaws, but the troll problem isn't a big issue in that space
the issue is that there's no knowledge transfer from the patent holder to the developer, in these cases. there's no causal link from the patent to the development
the (forced) licensing deal comes after the development, and hinders it. and it's not to protect development of a related idea, either
That line of thinking is the problem. A patent is intended as a protection to spur development, not an asset to be traded.
The spirit of a patent is to protect a novel solution while a company develops and monetizes their innovation. It keeps bigger fish with deeper pockets from quickly copying your invention and monetizing it before you.
What's happened however is that Large companies with deep pockets are filing patents for anything and everything they can. These patents generally come from their R&D efforts but are not necessarily linked to any product specifically. They're also usually unenforceable junk that wouldn't hold up in court.
The value of these junk patents isn't in the viability to be developed into a product, rather their value is that it will take time and money to invalidate them in court.
When these companies are hit with a lawsuit for violating someone else's patent, their defense is to counter sue with as many junk patents as possible. The purpose of the counter suit is to make a settlement preferable to the protracted legal fight necessary to invalidate all of the junk patents. It's the path of least expense. You could argue this allows large companies to steal innovations from smaller players by forcing cross licensing agreements.
Often these patent portfolios are transferred to companies with no interest in developing products or protecting their business. These companies sole purpose are to weaponize the patents, they're Patent Trolls.
Using the same strategy as companies with defensive patent portfolios, Patent Trolls seek to extract settlements (extort money) from companies by suing them with all the junk patents they can. The patent trolls are immune to counter suit because they produce nothing. Thus companies must either invalidate each junk patent or settle. Often settling is the path of least expense.
1. Patent trolls don't actually produce anything. They just extract rent from other companies.
2. The patents they choose tend to be extremely bad -- overly broad, should never have been granted, had prior art, the tech never existed, .... They use the fact that they're able to sue cheaply to bully people into settling on bogus claims.
Point (1) doesn't seem bad to me. It's kind of like how truck driving is separate from truck insurance. Having specialists capable of monetizing patents allows, in theory, inventors to invent and immediately sell for estimated lifetime patent value, minus a discount associated with the troll's costs and desired profits. Without trolls, in theory, you'd have fewer inventors because they'd also need to be/hire experts in marketing, litigation, ....
Point (2) is the one that bothers me the most, and my impression is that it's a very common problem.
Oh, and to your question, most companies use patents for mutually assured destruction and as a form of signalling that important people should want to work there, not to directly monetize. Monetizing patents is less common.
The argument against your argument in (1) is that if the incentive is to patent and sell to someone who will not market the patented invention either, it still isn't promoting the development of the product. It is actually _hindering_ the development of the product, because now whoever does develop the product has to pay an additional tax. Its literally antithetical to the concept of patents (I am _assuming_ they exist to spur R&D development primarily).
Another argument against your argument in (1), is to allow the scenario to exist only where the purchaser of the patent can prove they are marketing and selling it. That is still not ideal imho, but at least it eliminates outright patent trolls.
HN is I think particularly sensitive because it has a lot of programmers and product development folks, who know that a good idea or even plan on its own isn't very valuable. I'd guess most of us have more good ideas floating around than we'll ever have the time or money to develop on our own. Its the execution and delivery of good ideas that is valuable; patents in our eyes make the easy part easier and the hard part harder.
Except, if it really serves just to hinder development and as an additional tax then it wasn't a valid patent to begin with and falls under point (2).
Valid patents have to work (couldn't patent transistors in 1820), be new (which, as you mention, isn't the hard part in turning ideas into value), _be non-obvious_ (this is the point that pushes your idea from (1) to (2); if somebody else were likely to spontaneously have the idea then it wasn't a valid patent to begin with, and if they weren't then the "additional tax" is a tax on a product they otherwise could never have made), and include clear instructions (from the patent, reasonable competitors ought to be able to instantiate the idea -- if they can't, it's yet again invalid).
I do like what you're getting at though; the goal is to encourage actual inventions to actually be used. The patent mechanism attempts to do so by granting temporary monopolies (even with no real value via trolls), then guaranteeing that the invention is available for use afterward. You might be able to come up with another legislative mechanism encouraging real use of the patent before its expiry, and if it actually worked that'd probably be a good thing.
>Are these patent trolls doing anything that normal companies with patents that try to monetize them don't do?
The important distinction here, in my opinion, is that investors bought a dead company along with it's IP for the explicit purpose of suing companies as that was their profit motive.
Had there been an existing company that was actively building/selling routers, then yes they would have been using the patents as intended - to protect their business. In this case the company who owns the patents, was using them in a weaponized fashion.
You would hope companies have patents based on something actually innovative. For software this is never the case. I think all software patents are bs.
Patents should have a triviality clause in them, so if you can prove that they're trivial to create and implement and be thus invalid if they are.
On one hand, you have patents where someone needed to do thousands of experiments, often costly, years of research to invent some kind of procedure to do X and thus should have some protections from others just taking the implementation and doing it cheaper, because they don't have the development costs. On the other, you can patent "Page down button on the keyboard moves the screen down one full page (A4) instead of one screen size"
> A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains.
The problem is that unless the USPTO can find the requisite publications to prove the "obvious" part above from the statute, that then knocking down the resulting issued patent in a court case can be a very expensive effort.
> On the other, you can patent "Page down button on the keyboard moves the screen down one full page (A4) instead of one screen size"
Applicant's get patents because the USPTO can't find the publications necessary to prove they do not deserve to get the patent (there's also lack of time problems that I'm ignoring at the moment).
For your premise, often the reason why "Page Down moves by 'printed page'" might get patented is the lack of any findable publication of anything stating such. The USPTO examiner's don't have the ability to just say "but this is the way it works....", they have to find some publication, somewhere, that said "this is the way it works...".
For things like "how much movement 'PageDown' means", finding publications that state "how much" is extremely difficult.
Exactly. But to "prove" it in the USPTO process, they need that "written down" item. And if it is never "written down" because it is too trivial to write down, then the USPTO' examiner's hand are very much tied.
USPTO has broadened "obvious" recently, partly because of a court ruling that held "A person of ordinary skill is also a person of ordinary creativity, not an automaton" (meaning that the total prior art doesn't need to connect every dot).
> Sable agreed to pay Cloudflare $225,000, ... and to dedicate its patents to the public, ensuring that Sable can never again assert them against another company.
Makes me wonder if Cloudflare could have sued to "life the corporate veil" and go after the people who owned / operated the company. (IE, sue them so they loose their homes.)
Also makes me wonder if this is in the playbook the next time a patent troll comes sniffing around.
Somewhat related: In MA, to fight NIMBY-ism, we passed a law that people suing new housing developments can be forced to put up a deposit, without requiring proof that the case has merit. I wonder if a similar law could help with patent trolls: IE, making it easier that the plantiff put up a deposit when suing for violating their patent.
That payout to Cloudflare seems really, really low, considering the claims postulated by sable ip. I think $225M would be a more convincing way of de-incentivizing patent trolls.
It's amazing that they got them to admit, "yup, we are patent trolls, nothing we do is reasonable, suing people is our entire business, you got us, we are giving our patents so we can't do this again".
The patent troll buys patents from inventors and then spend money enforcing it. Not much different from Cloudfare paying salaries to the inventors to become the patent holders and then enforcing it against third-parties.
Tech patents exist because companies like Clouldflare want to because they make money with them (suing people). If companies like Cloudfare did want all tech patents to be gone, they would be gone and no patent troll would be able to do anything about.
And they try lure you with $5.000 to do the work to get them off the hook? They are cheap and bunch hypocrites.
Do you have any evidence of Cloudflare suing people for violating their patents. Seems like you'd be able to back up this claim since it's a core component of your argument.
Also, your reasoning seems to leave out a world of possibilities for why someone would hold a patent - its worth looking up the thinking around defensive patent portfolios.
These exist for a few reasons.... patents might be strategically filed to:
* have prior art on the record to keep a market open... e.g. preventing a competitor from monopolizing a space.
* have patents available for counter-suit against competitors suing over patent violation of some bit of tech that uses both.
* impress investors
* provide recognition to employees. At least in the US patents are filed by individuals, and the rights of the patent are then assigned to the company. Granted patents usually come with bonuses, as well as a nice resume padding that helps the engineers involved get higher salaries in the future.
Looks like it. Not all patents are the same - sometimes a patent is erroneously granted for something that is not a novel invention. The judge and jury ruled that the patents involved in this case were in that category... and therefore invalid patents.
There is no hypocrisy in holding patents (presumably ones you believe are valid) while pointing out that some other patents are invalid. I don't understand how this could equate to hypocrisy in any scenario short of the patent holder declaring all patents except theirs must be invalid on the principle that all patents are bad.
> Don't they enforce them?
Feel free to prove me wrong, but I've never seen anything about Cloudflare going after people for patent violations. I believe they subscribe to the modern tech patent strategy of having a big patent portfolio that only really gets used as part of a counter-suit if someone sues them for patent infringement.
Additionally, I presume Cloudflare's patents are related to the tech they develop and sell, which is categorically and qualitatively different than a law firm that does literally nothing of value buying up old patents and suing everyone who has ever used a word that also is present in the patent.
Given that the usage, purpose, and means of obtaining a patent are different between cloudflare and the troll - I don't understand how a hypocrisy claim can be leveled here... it defies all reason and logic to do so.
Well, it's nice to know that Sable's entire portfolio is going into the public domain, it's a shame that the likely 50-100 other shell companies owned by this troll still have an arsenal of useless, but incredibly complicated, patents to use to extort money.
A just world would involve piercing the corporate veil and imposing personal consequences on the owner of this company.
Thank you cloudflare! Fighting patents is god's^god work.
Patents are poison. Patenting your invention is like poisoning your children. Never do it.
We need to abolish these things.
They were a great way to build a centralized public library of all new inventions in the early days of the Union at no cost to the government, but now are purely a drag on innovation and society and create horrible incentives that lead to things like the Opioid crisis.
^god feel free to find/replace this with nature/universe/humanity etc.
You can see why, though. Even in this case where they thoroughly won, and got damages, the damages were just $225K, and they probably spent millions on legal fees, employee/founder time, etc.
Ultimately, the American legal system is pretty broken. If someone brings a frivolous lawsuit against you, and you defend yourself in court, nearly 100% of the time you’ll be losing money, often a lot of money. This is the core reason why patent trolls exist, why companies normally settle out of court - it’s cheaper to do so.
How much does it cost to argue in court that a particular entity is an abuser though? Someone has to be willing to cover those costs up front, otherwise people will just keep settling if they don't want to go through that process.
It's not just cost, it's cost x uncertainty of outcome. A settlement is very tempting from cost x uncertainty alone. But it also has other merits: when the rich, powerful incumbent gives in and settles, the fragile thrifty upstart won't see the slightest chance of winning and either beg the troll for an affordable licence (but they won't get a good offer) or look for a completely different line of business. To the incumbent, the settlement is a fee paid for moat-as-a-service provided by the troll.
If more companies let patent trolls go to court their repeated losses would fall under the first part of California's definition, but since they settle, trolls are technically not even litigants.
Most patent trolls file in the Western District of Texas; it's a troll friendly district with a troll friendly judge. They sometimes win with garbage patents.
Agreed, it’s a lose-lose situation really. But the reason most companies just settle is that going to trial is so expensive, and the American legal system allows these frivolous lawsuits while generally awarding either no compensatory damages, or damages far below the cost of the defence.
I couldn't tell from the article but it seems the $225k was a settlement, and the release of all patents was additionally part of the settlement - I doubt the court could have awarded that directly. So they took $225k + the release of the patents, and I assume that the trolls would only have agreed to that if they felt the court awarded cash value would have been significantly higher.
If they're serious about their prior art bounty program, they're going to need to increase the bounties. Actual patent search firms charge a lot more money, and even lowly paid bureaucrats make a lot more.
Personally, I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate, so I would expect to be paid more, not less, in the situation you describe. I suspect the same is true for many others as well.
> most of the people who submit the prior art as part of Project Jengo would do so even if there were no payout
I'd say this is due to selection bias. People who wanted a bigger payout didn't participate.
You all's program is basically over now, but I think anyone considering a prior art bounty program in the future should check best practices for bug bounty programs. The two seem similar to me. Paying more will get more and better submissions, and it doesn't seem to be particularly expensive to me.
The reason they are succesful is because they signal to people that the person on the other side actually cares about the report somewhat. If they are paying for it, even just a little, they are unlikely to immediately throw your report in the garbage or threaten to sue you. Its not really about the money.
Paying more doesn't always motivate people more or get more (quality) people to do a thing. Compensation and associated psychology is complicated, because people are complicated.
e.g. I am willingly working very hard at a job where I could make 10x or perhaps even 100x elsewhere with equal or less effort. And I often spend my time on things that are completely irrational by your types of economic measures or even "pay to work."
[1] "Stupid patents" is a technical term here -- or it has been since Mark Cuban funded an EFF staffer to challenge bad patents on the condition that the position was titled the "Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents".
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/staff-attorney-daniel-naz...
(I spent a couple months between gigs building a bicycle from parts, and sourcing the parts was the biggest timesink.)
I've saved about $162/hour on various home projects when compared to quotes I've been given. Considering I'm a relative noob when it comes to this stuff I've gotta imagine they're charging much higher hourly rates than this.
This $162/hour is way more than what my salary as an hourly wage would be and it's also tax free to boot.
(At the same time, people DIYing tend to underestimate their real opportunity costs).
The best outcome is that you end up liking tinkering and have pride in your work. That's a very high discount to the real cost.
Pride in work is a big thing. As someone who works at a desk, some manual labor on the weekend is a nice change of pace. It's also not pointless exercise. And in my experience the best way to get something done right is to get free advice from the pros and do it yourself. Because the people the pros hire to do it won't care as much as you.
Having your car or house fixed by someone else isn't that easy. Unless you have a personal butler, it's not like you just tell some person "fix this" in 5 minutes or less and walk away, then pay them when it's over. If it's a car repair, you have to transport your car to the repair place, then either sit there while they fix it or find some alternate transportation, then you have to come back after it's done. If it's a 1-hour job, how much time will you waste just traveling to and from the repair shop, plus potentially waiting around for it to be done? You probably could have done it yourself in less time. For a house repair, you don't have to travel there, but you probably want to stay at home while the work is being done unless the house is empty, or you really trust the contractors and sub-contractors. So in either scenario, there's a lot of your own time that's not being accounted for.
And this all assumes that the professional will actually do the job correctly, and you won't have to deal with issues from them doing it poorly. This could easily end up taking FAR more time than the original job. And in my experience, the so-called "professionals" frequently do a shoddy job or are completely incompetent (so now you need to spend a lot of time trying to figure out who to hire so you don't get screwed).
So in my view, if you mostly know how to do something yourself, it doesn't need a whole team of people to do, doesn't require expensive specialty equipment, and isn't highly dangerous, it's quite likely a better deal to just DIY.
Surely no one should expect to comment for free for some intangible benefit like "human communication".
Perhaps you are this magical being I can’t imagine exists. In the meantime, and regardless, irregardless even, facts are: a whole bunch of people submitted prior art that helped us defeat a patent troll that was a net drain on society. As if, mission matters more than money in some cases. Many cases? Most cases? All cases?
I wish you luck rationally optimizing your time. If you figure that out, being the market maker probably will prove more lucrative than being a participant. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Hope you find lots and lots of opportunities for you to… search Google? Good work if you can find it.
Don’t worry. Your job is safe. Most firms are too scared to engage in our strategy.
(If you're wondering: my least favorite task was finding the sections of code that supposedly infringed someone's patent, and then getting the PM's approval to turn it over to the other side. They can't actually say No, but they can be a PITA.)
I killed this patent:
https://searchengineland.com/google-maps-might-be-banned-in-...
after many, many people failed to find the prior art that I found. It's only easy once someone tells you.
Interestingly, now I can't find it! Maybe they took it down. It WAS the first result on scholar.google.com if you searched "client-server maps." This is the same project:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20040006300/downloads/20...
And for what it's worth, I'm not an attorney, and I haven't worked in patents since leaving the USPTO.
They might get more, but will they get better? The most passionate people I know are pretty insensitive to pay rate. Whereas the people I know who are most sensitive to $/hour tend to be more skilled at the business of the thing rather than the thing itself.
Would you mind elaborating? Because I would argue that, by engaging daily with your employer in a trade of your time for money, you value your time exactly your job’s hourly rate.
I'll still pick up litter when I'm walking through a rich neighborhood, even though those people have groundskeepers to take care of it for them. No one is doing this with the goal of a profit.
And this is a much bigger ask than picking up litter.
Is there a name for the fallacy "I don't see why people do X", "they do it because Y", "but I don't care about Y!" ?
Since I hate crab, all people hate crab and confronted by a crab meat liker I have no capacity to imagine why, since I hate it and therefore everybody should and therefore you're wrong.
In reality, it's the exception proving (testing) the case and showing it's flaw: all people do not hate crab therefore my generalisation is specious. Instead of doubting why anyone likes crab I should ask why I hate it.
Screwing over a patent troll? That’s priceless.
No amount of money can provide that satisfaction. Heck, I’m not even impacted and I’m gleefully happy. Whoever helped deserves a free beer. Patent trolls are a blight.
This battle took 2 years, I think ?
If you do the numbers, yes it can. There are a lot of people who could do this searching.
It's a way to get media attention for people to glance at it. It's providing a nudge for them to tell you about something that they know off the top of their head.
Patent trolling is a big problem, and a lot of us view opposing it in a small way as a type of community of service.
People usually work on FOSS because they have a personal interest in a project, and want to share that with everyone. So we end up with stuff like device drivers for hardware where the mfgr couldn't be bothered to make a Linux driver, or various useful utilities, a whole OS (which everyone can use), etc. What we don't see much in FOSS is "enterprise software": stuff that's only really useful if you're a huge company. Where's the FOSS alternatives to proprietary human resource management systems, supply chain management systems, etc.? Generally, stuff like that doesn't exist, because no one wants to spend their free time working on things that they personally have no use for, and no one's found a good business case to make a company producing an open-source version.
I agree, and that's a great point I think the patent examiner person was missing. These patents are a hazard for everyone, big or small.
from the viewpoint you've presented it's a bad idea to volunteer for basically anything.
even something like enlisting in a nation's armed forces is a bad idea since the risk is so high vs the monetary reward, and the only way people would become soldiers is to join mercenary armies where there is a price exacted that matches the performance.
for many people, they value the intangible more than the money.
https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/06/22/myths-patent-trolls-preven...
Given that I think the narrative is overblown, I don't really see this as a "public service". It's a problem, sure, but it's not a major one.
We did manage to convince them all to go away, but it might have been cheaper to just pay them off. I'm guessing that all they really wanted was a long list of capitulations and licensees before litigating against the big guys.
I'm not surprised that the IPR industry which thrives upon resulting legal fees is less inclined to view things as trolling and any trolling that happens to be not too severe, though. ;)
"People working in patent law" have a conflict of interest. The arguments being made in that link are practically in bad faith, e.g.:
> Google and Uber are locked in a patent battle over self-driving automobiles, so does that make Google and Uber patent trolls?
The ordinary definition of a patent troll is a firm that sues for patent infringement as its primary business. Say what you will about Google and Uber, they clearly derive the bulk of their revenue from offering products and services to the public.
> As we consider all of this it is also important to keep in mind that the U.S. tech sector spending on patent trolls is less than 1% of all IT spending.
If you compare a smaller number to a bigger number, the bigger number is bigger. But the thing that matters isn't the size of the problem relative to the size of the industry, it's whether the shakedowns are net positive or net negative.
For software patents in particular, it's the latter, because software is inherently and purposely abstract. Which is incompatible with the reasonable operation of the patent system, because it makes the two viable strategies to patent the abstraction or to patent some specific implementation which is required for compatibility, so that alternate implementations can't be used without disrupting interoperability. Otherwise the number of alternate software implementations of any given abstraction are so large that nobody would purposely use somebody else's software patent, they'd just create their own non-infringing implementation of the same abstraction.
But patenting the abstraction itself is not supposed to be allowed (even though these patents are all too often granted) and using a patent for the purposes of preventing interoperability should be an antitrust violation for the same reason as tying is illegal even when the original monopoly was lawfully obtained, because the value you're extracting isn't the value of the invention, it's the value of compatibility with the existing system. And then there's nothing of merit left.
The consensus among lawyers who benefit from people unnecessarily having to hire lawyers is that the situation is not bad. Well, there's a shocker...
I love the fact that you exist.
> Says something we hate
"Why do you hate what I said?"
Not saying CloudFlare shouldn’t reward them better.
I consider it a public service to try and drive these patent trolls out of business because the harm they do is done to the the entire industry, especially the most vulnerable companies in that industry.
Of course, I would much prefer to change the law so that patent trolling was not allowed or was not profitable.
https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/06/22/myths-patent-trolls-preven...
I think it's good that Cloudflare didn't pay this particular troll, but even if they had, it's not that big a deal.
And the best way to stop patent trolls would be to prevent bad patents from being granted in the first place by giving examiners more time. The USPTO is funded solely by fees, not taxes, creating a perverse incentive to grant invalid patents. Fix that, increase patent fees, and give examiners more time.
Nothing in the article you cited says patent trolls aren't a problem. It claims (without really supporting it) that modern patent trolling is the fault of the technology industry, which I can almost believe, but "the technology industry" is large, and non-practicing entities which are commonly identified as "trolls" are very different than entities that actually do R&D.
It's right there in the name: public service. Yeah, it benefits cloudflare, but it also benefits nearly everyone else. Some people just want to improve the world, even if they're not fairly compensated for it. Some people see living in a world with one less patent troll as compensation enough.
I'm sure they did that too, like any other major company sued by a troll. This isn't an either/or situation.
Jengo draws from many, many people across the industry. They can surface all sorts of prior art, not just earlier patents, and they know where to look due to their experience.
As I said, every large company that gets sued by trolls pays patent search firms to find prior art. I can't imagine that Cloudflare didn't do the same. Why wouldn't they, there is a lot of money at stake? They added to that through the search program because the yield from patent search firms is often poor.
And, note, this strategy has worked pretty (cost) effectively for us before:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/winning-the-blackbird-battle/
But you’d suggest we do what everyone else does and hire expensive “experts”? K. Good luck with that.
Oh, forgot, that’s your profession… expensive expert. Carry on.
Also: I'm not saying that patent search firms are perfect. Albert Cory had a comment here about how the quality of search firms varies dramatically. But I do think that searching is a skill which can be developed. Many of the examiners I worked with at the USPTO were outstanding searchers who could find information in their area very quickly. It can be hard for someone looking to purchase patent search services to know who is good, unfortunately.
If Cloudflare was to behave rationally, it would simply pay the troll to go away. Trolls are very good at making that the logical choice, which is why virtually everyone else just pays up. Cloudflare fights because the act of taking a stand fits with their values.
You're clearly not civic minded enough to appreciate why Cloudflare does what it does. And so you don't understand why other people, who share Cloudflare's values, would be motivated to help them accomplish their good deeds.
Well, maybe.
Cloudflare is a company that sells to developers. A lot of developers hate patent trolls. Fighting back against a patent troll is a good way to gain respect and goodwill from those developers. So it could effectively be an advertisement campaign, and for the target audience, probably a lot more effective than paying for banner ads. It could also benefit recruiting, and moral of developers who like seeing someone stand up to patent trolls.
Also, by setting a precedent of fighting back, they might deter future attempts at shakedowns from other patent trolls.
That's not to say that their motives are completely selfish. I'm sure there were altruistic motivations as well (and motivations no doubt varies among individuals involved in this). But it isn't irrational.
I think it would be pretty tough for me to sell my marginal hours for more than my hourly rate.
I'm sure if I shopped around aggressively I could find a richer buyer for the 40-hour bundles I'm currently selling, but people aren't really beating down the door for a couple hours of C++ dev time here and there. Especially once you factor in time spent on lead generation, negotiation, dealing with collecting payment, etc, I think the market value of my free time is probably way less than my hourly rate.
For collecting the payments we use a factoring agency; it costs a % but whatever; we are always cashed up. And lead generation, well, people find us. I have been 'giving away' this 'business plan' for decades and no one is doing it. Probably because everyone wants to focus on something long term, not jump from php to c++ to cobol to java etc and because of the great resume driven dev strategy. I am for one looking forward to fixing the misery that is nextjs and its 'ecosystem' for the coming decades; please continue! I will have to up the hourlies to 1500+ for that miserable experience though; give me cobol or java any day.
GP’s comment was about how they value their own free time, not the market value of that time.
And you can do with your own time whatever you want.
If you want to go to the beach, you go the beach, and you wouldn't expect the beach to pay you for the privilege.
If you want to fight patent trolls...
I reckon many of the submitters have the same vision. The name/fame is enough. The money is a show off and a legitimizer.
Cloudflare found a model that successfully distributed the cost of killing a patent troll between many passionate volunteers who were in it for the pleasure of taking down a troll. They succeeded, and in the process put other patent trolls on notice that our collective hatred for them is enough to raise an army of volunteers that's cheap to motivate and extremely effective. The low budget is part of the success story here!
A patent troll's whole game is for it to be more expensive to fight back than to cave, and you're complaining that Cloudflare managed to flip the economics.
Just for once do the right thing rather than what you think you can get away with because overall this is a genuinely something to be celebrated.
That’s not what I’m talking about here though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41734018
Both views are valid. It mostly depends on the intent of the company and you can't know that for sure. As their interest in that program is quite obvious, it's understandable that some people interpret this in two ways.
Now it's not like they forced people into that program. You are free to not participate.
In the same way that TV networks find/vet/pay for the supply of shows and take on the risk per-show, YouTube (at its core) doesn’t do any of that and all of the content creators do those things with the hope it will take off and a share of the ad revenue, while YouTube’s risks are related to the opex cost of the incoming supply/demand.
Instead of cloudflare paying per examiner, they give a non-guaranteed slice to a bigger group of people.
But Cloudflare isn't asking for an opinion on a particular invention. A patent searcher could come back and say there is no prior art that reads on the invention in that case and still be paid. Instead, Cloudflare's asking for invalidating prior art, which I think sets the bar even higher and should increase the payout to account for the fact that much of the time there won't be invalidating prior art and thus won't be a payout.
If the platform is not taking on as much risk, the payouts should be higher.
[1] https://ipwatchdog.com/2015/04/04/the-cost-of-obtaining-a-pa...
It's more than $3,000; I can tell you that.
Secondly, it's detective work; you might get the answer right away, and you might spend days searching fruitlessly. Making a claim chart is what take the time: you have to hit every single element.
You just cannot see that for many people it's their genuine interest.
I know plenty of open source contributors and most of them do not give two damns about social capital or resume (some don't even work in software, but contribute to OS), they just like solving problems with code.
Edit: Found this with a search, so it can be done: https://xlscout.ai/novelty-checker-llm/
(also, thanks Cloudflare! Keep on grinding patent trolls!)
And the AI search technologies I used tended to not be particularly good. They typically find "background" documents that are related but can't be used in a rejection.
I don't anticipate LLMs being able to examine patents in general well. Many times a detailed understanding of things not in the text is necessary to examine. For the technologies I examined, often search was basically flipping through drawings. I'd love to see an AI search technology focus specifically on patent drawings. This can be quite difficult. Often I'd have to understand the topology of a circuit (electrical or flow) and find a specific combination of elements. Of course, each drawing could be laid out differently but be topologically equivalent... this surely can be handled with computers in some way, but it's going to require a big effort right now.
The inability to answer basic facts should be a dealbreaker.
Also, you don't necessarily have a real dataset to begin with: prior art doesn't need to be patented, it just needs to be published/public/invented sufficiently before the patent. Searching the existing patent database is insufficient.
I would caution against making assumptions with regards to dataset access and size. I agree effectiveness of the effort I mention would be a function of not only gen AI engineering, but also dataset size and scope.
Let’s not pretend that “correlation” isn’t very powerful
I don't know if they're tackling this issue, though.
The market sets the price, regardless of what we personally think is "fair".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41734018
More deeply, the very idea of a "patent examiner" has never made sense to me. It requires being expert in all things, which is impossible. It makes more sense to take someone who is an expert in a field, and put a "patent examiner" hat on them for a little while. Ideally the patent system is not so complex that it itself requires as much or more study to be expert in than the actual subjects of the patents -- this would be a very bad sign.
From the USPTO[1]
What kind of degree do I need to apply, and which vacancy do I need to apply to? The minimum degree required to be a utility patent examiner is a bachelor’s degree. There are dozens of STEM-related bachelor’s degree types that qualify, even if they are not the exact discipline listed in the title of the job vacancy.
For example, professionals with bachelor’s degrees ranging from engineering, mathematics, astronomy, space science, geophysics, oceanography, or hydrology could all apply to the "Patent Examiner (Physics)" vacancy when it is open. To see more details about which degrees best fit with which patent examiner vacancies, view this chart[1]. You can also attend one of our upcoming webinars or office hours to chat with a current patent examiner, or email us at [email protected] with your specific question.
[1] https://www.uspto.gov/jobs/become-patent-examiner [2] https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/patent-e...
Patent examiner shouldn't be a civil servant's job.
Rather, it should be a "bond" process given to private, accredited individuals / organizations.
If your issued patents are found invalid, your bond (which would be in the millions) is raided to pay back damages.
I don't think this is a good strategy. These folks tend to have a poor understanding of patent law in my experience, and you need to understand the basics to do this right. (You fortunately don't need to know too much law to handle 90% of cases.) And these folks probably aren't very effective at patent searching even if they understand the legal parts. I think most people overestimate their own search abilities. I certainly did. Examining patents didn't level me up as much as humble me in that regard.
> More deeply, the very idea of a "patent examiner" has never made sense to me. It require being expert in all things, which is impossible. [...]
As saratogacx pointed out, at the USPTO, the vast majority of examiners have a specific technology they are assigned to. While the matching of examiners to their "art unit" is often pretty bad (I could go on a rant...), the situation is not as bad as you described. There are some generalist examiners, but as I understand it, they are in (basically) QA roles and don't need to know the technologies as much. Unfortunately, USPTO upper management seems to want to make examiners into generalists, which I doubt will work out as they want.
I agree that periodic rotations of industry folks into patent examiner positions is a great idea. It would help the patent system and give the industry folks some appreciation for what examiners do.
If you're worried about lack of expertise, you should be more worried about the courts. Judges and juries almost never have a background in the technology of the case they are working on.
The examiners regularly approve absolute bullshit patents in my field that either obviously have prior work, and shouldn't be patentable anyway such as game mechanics. They clearly don't understand the work they're meant to be doing. Either patent law is horribly designed and needs to be razed to the ground, or it's being horribly applied.
With that being said, the majority of the time, the examiner made the right decision. You should check whether a patent was actually granted, for instance. Often when people are complaining about a dumb patent they're actually complaining about a dumb patent application that the USPTO rightly rejected. You should be complaining about the people writing such applications, not the USPTO.
Further, the USPTO is funded purely by fees, not taxes. Applicants want patents. That creates a perverse incentive to reduce patent quality to make it easier to get patents.
I've elaborated on these issues at length on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36563611
I do remember your comments from past threads too. It really interesting to hear the perspective from the patent office's side, but the idea that the patent office had some secret and specialized method of evaluating novelty is ridiculous. Any expert can read a sample of granted patents and tell you that. I'd estimate maybe 5% of patents in my field have any novelty, and that's being generous.
I'm sure this has more to do with incentives and the overall system, and that individual patent examiners would prefer to do a good job. But you have to admit that the results are atrocious.
Just because they said it was granted, doesn't mean that it was. A lot of people here don't seem able to distinguish between a granted patent and a rejected patent application. Here are two examples that I bothered to reply to in the past:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38766101
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36563425
> the idea that the patent office had some secret and specialized method of evaluating novelty is ridiculous
I don't think they do and I never said they do. The USPTO follows some legal standard that I personally don't agree with. I agree with you that too few granted patents have genuine novelty.
> But you have to admit that the results are atrocious.
No, I don't. You've seen a small selection of what the USPTO outputs. Only the bad cases appear in the news. In contrast, I've seen a far larger and unbiased selection and know that the majority is fine. Most applications are rejected. I probably rejected over 75% myself.
Is there a way to sample 5 random ML patents? I'd be surprised if half were any good.
I think the quality of examination and search is excellent given how little time examiners have. But mistakes still happen too frequently, and the mistakes can be highly costly. Better to stop problems upstream in my opinion by giving examiners more time.
Patent quality is related but different. I agree that patent quality is awful, but there's only so much an examiner can do to influence that. Attorneys have basically gamed the system to write vague legalese that's patentable but basically useless. And to paraphase a supervisor I knew at the USPTO, "Just because it's stupid doesn't mean that it's not patentable". I can't reject them if it meets the legal standards but is stupid.
Anyhow, I think there might be a random sort feature that can do what you want in the USPTO's public search (no time to check, though): https://www.uspto.gov/patents/search/patent-public-search
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_numeral_systems#Pat...
https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/13/microsoft_ans_patent/
https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/applications/16456602/ifw/doc...
Look for "Notice of Allowance and Fees Due (PTOL-85)" and click on "PDF" on the right. Scroll to page 10 and look for the "Reasons for Allowance" section where the examiner describes in detail why it differs from the prior art.
While there are minor technical differences in exactly how rANS has been encoded/decoded before, and how Microsoft does it, the fact that Microsoft was granted this means they now have a weapon with which they can cause fear, uncertainty and doubt around ANS, much to the chagrin of the ANS's actual inventor, Jarek Duda, who wanted it to be public domain and implementable by anyone.
I'm not an expert but Duda and fellow compression experts looked at the claims themselves: https://encode.su/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-Stor...
It seems to me like Microsoft got a patent on "doing ANS a little bit different" - they didn't have to, they could just do it the normal way, but this little bit of difference lets them secure a patent, and now they can pursue anyone who implements ANS to intimidate them with "how sure are you don't do ANS like we do? Let's get our multi-billion legal team, and your legal team, and find out. You have a legal team, don't you?"
In particular, this patent already had a final rejection in 2020. But Microsoft then took advantage of the "After Final Consideration Pilot" program, which sounds more like the USPTO trying to drum up trade, to get it re-re-re-examined.
This is due more to people not understanding what the patent covers. The right response in my view is to educate people. Just because someone has a patent on a particular variation of X, doesn't mean that working on X is risky or what not. Just don't infringe their variation. When I was at the USPTO, I examined a lot of little variations of common things in my area (water heaters and car air vents, mostly) and I never worried that it would stop innovation as usually the point of novelty was not particularly groundbreaking, or even necessarily of interest to anyone aside from the applicant.
Do you feel qualified to discuss patents related to software? If so, why?
I don't have the energy to diffuse false analogies. We're not talking about a hospital.
Unfortunately, "patent law" is a complex body of laws, legal decisions, and specialized procedures large enough to be its own distinct specialization for lawyers. While it's not impossible to become an expert in it without years of study, it is definitely not possible to be excellent at it.
Just to put it in perspective, the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure alone weighs in at over 4K pages of text.
https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/index.html
PS - we killed a patent troll. A bunch of you helped. How cool is that??! Thank you.
You should try searching for prior art some time to get an idea about why I'm not happy about the payment being low. Patent examining's a real grind, and by far the hardest job I've ever done. It's boring and extremely time consuming. I doubt many people do it for pleasure or a higher calling.
If some people want to volunteer to find invalidating prior art, more power to them. I won't be joining them, though.
Time and time again it’s like: “CloydFlare discovers way to be evil that even Google didn’t figure out! News at 10.”
Dear Jesus, all I want for Hanukah is that fly.io doesn’t end up like that.
Valid stance to take but not exactly unique. That's just the world we are living in.
Somebody or some organisation had to start standing up to patent trolls for the situation to change and kudos to Cloudflare for choosing to be that organisation. Hopefully it will encourage others to do likewise.
Kudos to the likes of Cloudflare and (yesteryears’) Newegg that fought these trolls.
I shudder at the thought of how many of the existing legacy industries outside the computer space are still riddled with these patent portfolio companies :(
The "good" news is that patent trolling is, more or less by definition, a get-rich-quick scheme - they want to make a lot of money by sending a few dozen letters every year. It does not attract people who are interested in anything approaching due diligence.
But also, the whole point of all of this is to get the trolls to leave Cloudflare alone, right? This is a very deliberate strategy; this announcement says "don't try that stuff here ... but feel free to try Cisco or Juniper instead."
The fact that they thought they had a winnable case again Cloudflare makes me think that others actually paid up ... or that the troll was just getting desperate to finally earn anything.
Though keeping US entities from importing copies against US patents isn't really something I could stop.
I suspect the only thing that would ever convince China to take IP seriously is if China's own companies would profit more from stronger IP protection.
1. Why / how did sable give up its patent portfolio? It's handwaved as "lots of post trial stuff" but what's the nutshell of it? Is it because they're marked invalid? Is it punitive ruling? Something else?
2. There were 4 patents brought up against cloud flare, but sable gave up "its entire portfolio". Does that mean these 4 were their entire portfolio? Or did they have to give up patents outside of suit itself? If so, how and why? Did sable hang up the hat as a business?
Edit: Also, it's entirely likely that Sable still made a tidy profit overall when it settled with the other big networking companies and decided to quit while they were ahead.
In the worst case, a bankruptcy could end up clawing back any "tidy profits" that were previously paid out to company owners.
Not a lawyer, but it seems to be part of the court ruling. Maybe CF didn't see a chance to get their costs back and made a deal so Sable needed to only pay a part, but also release the patents?
[1] https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/slt3lc6tev37/4rpPZkNJBZ...
Still not very clear to me either. Probably intentional, since CF seems to want to send the message that “mess with us and in the end you’ll give up all your patents somehow”
And so this portfolio of patents has lost most of its value because of that?
Maybe Cloudflare agreed to reduced damages in exchange for this?
I agree it's unclear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_estoppel
> The responsible business people in this business actually sit down and talk to folks before they sue them, fair?
> Fair.
> And you don't do that, do you, sir?
> No.
I'm not a fan of Cloudflare in general. I think "Browser Integrity Check" is banal malware, the McAfee of the Web 2.0 era. But this? I love this. Settling with a patent troll out of court is cowardly.
> the Western District of Texas against patent trolls
That means they had really good lawyers.
I had a friend that lived in that area, many moons ago.
He showed me a few of their local newspapers. They were filled with stories about "plucky innovators," fighting against "corporate vested interests."
It seems they have a fairly well-prepped jury pool, thereabouts.
I don't know when it shifted to the Western District. Waco is not nearly as rural as East Texas; it's halfway between Dallas and Austin.
Those papers were a hoot, though…
One analogy is pharma research. Rights for a promising candidate molecule are purchased by "big pharma" and they will do the grunt work to validate it and extract the big money from its therapeutic value.
Substitute "FDA market authorization after successful clinical trials" with "that infamous East Texas court district and picking the right targets" (picking a too big target might backfire, picking a too small doesn't really worth the costs, etc.)
Of course the questions are: does this really help inventors? do inventors need help? is it good for society that inventors get help? is the cost of helping inventors this way not unreasonable to the economy? and even if the cost is "low", how fucking fair is it that a lot of businesses are using a given invention but only a lucky few get dragged to court? can we do better? what kind of people patent trolls are? what do they do with the money?
I worked at a small biotech company whose business model was (in part) to do early stage drug discovery research and then sell promising leads to bigger companies, who would take the leads through the FDA approval process. Actually taking a drug through to approval is a $1 billion+ endeavor (with a high probability that it just won't work; e.g. stage 3 trials just fail). Small companies cannot do this.
So a naive solution like "don't allow patents to be sold" actually restricts a bunch of reasonable businesses.
But for most patents there's no realistic way to find patents you might be infringing (for software this is impossible in the general case as a corollary of Fines theorem). That's why we hate patents so much: you only find out if there is a patent if you get sued.
But for pharma there is a way; chemicals are "indexable": because a standard mapping from chemical structure to names exists, if you are using a chemical and want to find whether anyone patented it, you can do so easily.
In an ideal world, the law would recognise this and patents would only be valid in areas where there is a natural way of indexing - which is pretty much only pharma AFAICT
For example, during the late 1800s, a number of companies bandied together to pool their patents together for a commercially viable sewing machine. No single company had been able to develop and file patents that resulted in a working sewing machine. As such, they pooled the patents and negotiated a portion of royalties for everyone who contributed. That would probably have been set up as its own legal entity. With a requirement to be an operating company, such a legal vehicle would not have worked.
You could argue that such an entity is considered “productive”, but then you would have to define what that means and write it into the law. Any lawsuit involving patents would require demonstrating that.
Another example is trademarks. In order to have a registered trademark, you must show that it is in active use, and it is distinct. That means that in order to keep a registered trademark, you must sue anyone who is infringing upon it.
There is an indie author who came up on a litrpg genre concept combining it with a post-apocalypse setting. His book exploded upon the niche, progressive fantasy scene. People loved the idea and other authors wrote books for it. The original author tried to brand it and protect it with a registered trademark. Because the term had rapidly genericized, that author started sending cease & desist letters to other authors, because he was required to in order to keep the registered trademark.
I don’t know if he knew he had do that when he registered it, but doing so drained the goodwill he had in the community. Progressive fantasy is a small indie community, and the authors who can, gather at Dragoncon to talk, exchange ideas. This is similar to sending cease and desist to your neighbors. You will quickly find yourself locked out of the community.
I am thinking of the inventor of the bear suit. Making something to protect yourself from a grizzly bear seems like it has low value for society. It is also this off the wall perspective that allowed him to invent a gel that can absorb heat (probably a non-Newtonian fluid). If we’re trying to protect the livelihood of an indie inventor like that, would a requirement to demonstrate productivity help the Bear Suit inventor? Or would it have a chilling effect?
The patent office is financially encouraged to keep issuing patents no matter the quality because it keeps the patent fees and those are payed by the applicants. The patent office seems to be protected financially from issuing bad patents as well (I can't find any record of them being sued by companies that have licensed patents that have been invalidated).
Its gotten a little better with the Alice ruling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Intern...
Now, how do you make sure that these companies buying patents don’t become trolls? I don’t think it’s fair to require them to use the patent, because that limits who the inventor can sell to. Personally I think the way IP lawsuits are filed and considered needs significant reform.
[1] http://cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/04-1451.pdf
[2] https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/appeals-court-con...
It is weird and unfortunate that the longstanding deficiencies with patent law (chiefly: issuing patents for things that are too obvious or numerous) are being blamed on transferability of property rights. It’s the same broken intuition as over regulating housing construction and then blaming high housing costs on ownership by Chinese nationals.
I feel like there are so many patents in the pool that are just companies waiting for a technology to be actually invented by a clever engineer - but bc the company had the "idea" they have the rights to it. At that point we may as well automate it by having an LLM spit out ideas en masse.
A patent that’s only sitting in a war chest and not being used to actually enrich the owner would be able to claim damages of zero if somebody else was found to be infringing
This way the corp suing first and asking questions later would have disclose everyone it has sued. It would also open the door for many many disputes and ripples.
If Cloudflare thought they had a shot at recovering costs, $225k and a patent-portfolio could be substantially less than whatever Cloudflare (or their insurance) had paid in defense-costs.
Cloud flare wanted to send a message to other potential patent trolls that they would not go for money damage but into invalidating their patents too.
There's a lot of "on paper" companies around the world who actually do produce novel technologies even if they don't themselves create the end product, but instead sell their inventions to other parties.
Why did everybody just accept the idea that what makes a troll is them having no product when the problem is clear the high costs of litigation and low quality of the patents (and the patents selection)?
IBM is the largest and most destructive patent troll around. And all of that is just propaganda designed to make it and other companies like it rich.
Institute a new tax on rent-seeking. Tax rent-seekers for close to 100% of the value they extract (basically a version of Georgism generalized to everything, instead of just real estate).
This would require basically a second IRS, and they would occasionally get things wrong and stifle value-producing businesses, but if it was at all effective it would be a net benefit to the economy instead of a net drag on it, and it could easily pull in enough revenue to let us eliminate income tax.
Obviously, we have to also tax people who are free-riding on the social or political manipulations of others--not every real estate owner profiting from a 5x increase in property value was actually involved in NIMBY political actions, and not every patent troll worked toward creating judicial conditions conducive to their trolling.
It's not like it's hard to pick out many, many instances of this. Licensing requirement for hairdressers? Rent-seeking. Blocking the demolition of an abandoned gas station for high-rise construction? Rent-seeking. Longshoremen prohibiting automation of ports? You'd better believe that's a rent-seeking.
Will there be edge cases and mistakes? Of course. But there'll be an incredible economic surplus from which to compensate any such victims, with all the progress enabled by removing the rent-seekers.
Thank you!
Sounds like they don't need to. Well played Sable. Enjoy your money.
I really wish we could publicly shame the people behind these abuses or provide some other incentive to correct bad behavior other than speeding-ticket sized fines.
In other news, as an investor, this tells me Cloudflare is technologically ahead of the other older companies who apparently were not sure they could defend against the claims.
Right? This seems like out-and-out fraud to me.
That feels like a highly specious takeaway from this court case. Companies settle against trolls because litigation isn't free to fight. It can make very good financial sense (and even be encouraged by investors who don't want to see a company in the courts for years, as Cloudflare was.)
I would be highly interested to see the breakdown of what it cost in manhours, fees, prizes to Project Jengo, etc. versus the payout from Sable to fight this particular case for Cloudflare, and whether they even came close to breaking even just on this case alone. Likely their decision somewhat hinged on an estimate of what it might cost to settle all other patent disputes in the future, and the belief that fighting this case is actually saving them much more money down the line (but how much?).
Thus, a company like that is likely limited to have just budget for legal and little less.
This is also done in order so if they lose a trial and have to pay damages they can't.
This is the wrong takeaway. Litigation is expensive and uncertain, especially in the Western District of Texas. It's a troll friendly district with a troll friendly judge. These other companies paid up because it's a rational choice to do so. Cloudflare chose to fight, but it probably would have been cheaper to settle.
They are beyond shame, believe me. There have already been TV news segments about how their "place of business" in West Texas is just a PO Box.
If you don't mind the language, the first minute of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLLt9bnRdlE comes to mind for how to deal with incompetent trolls. Comedy gold.
I don't recall any famous European patent trolling cases.
All patents are "open for public access" [1]. And once they age past their "expiration date" (currently twenty years from earliest date of filing) they become "public property".
What Sable is doing is giving up the ability to restrict others based on the patents content's before those patents would normally have expired anyway. So in effect they are having the patents "expire early" -- which makes the contents of each become "public property".
[1] https://www.uspto.gov/patents/search
A lot of patent trolls have no assets, and don't own anything except the patents they're currently milking. Then they go out of business, and there's nothing to sue. Sable apparently made the mistake of building up a portfolio and living on.
> Proving invalidity to a jury is hard. The burden on the defendant is high: Cloudflare needed to prove by clear and convincing evidence that claim 25 is invalid. And, proving it by describing how the claim is obvious in light of the prior art is complicated.
You're not kidding.
> Sable’s damages expert, Stephen Dell, told the jury that Sable was owed somewhere between $25 million and $94.2 million in damages.
"damages experts" == nice work if you can get it. The damage expert in the Apple v. Samsung trial that I went to was paid $2 million. "How much are you getting paid?" is always one of the first things they get asked on cross-examination.
> Sable has agreed to dedicate its entire patent portfolio to the public. This means that Sable will tell the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that it gives up all of its legal rights to its patent portfolio
Left unsaid is whether this includes anything other than the patents that they already lost on.
Anyhow: great work, Cloudflare.
So next time another law firm knows how much to ask and raise?
Fuck. Them. Excellent work to the entire litigation team at Cloudflare.
While you as a startup may not have the resources to go after them in court; your IP assets in the hands of a competent and aggressive patent troll could be a very big problem for Big Co.
So in that sense they are also kind of like a parasite that infects the apex predators who eat tainted meat.
Your IP assets can be used to litigate by companies that aren't patent trolls.
Its more like smaller public companies trying to keep bigger public companies in check.
This isn't an interesting counterpoint. This is the de facto narrative regarding patent lawyers and patent trolls masquerading as firms that act as though they somehow contribute.
But defensive portfolios are not a concern for patent trolls. They can’t be countered for infringement because they don’t make anything!
But you are not wrong that they can be like gnats that suck the blood from startups. In one car I heard of some a patent troll engaged in behavior bordering on criminal extortion - threatening mom and pops businesses for using printers and fax machines. All I am saying is that they play a role in balancing and maintaining the health of the IP ecosystem.
if a company doesn't develop products, but they actively license their patents to those that do, that's still patents working as intended, and not trolling. they're still helping to get the tech developed, rather than stifling it
(i think there are a lot of problems with software patents even when used as intended by real companies. mainly, they last too long)
Software patents are a scourge, I’m just not sure the reasoning there holds.
The reason is because they aren't being used as they were intended: patents are _supposed_ to be a way to give inventors/entrepreneurs a window to build a market with their idea. Let's say that you have some truly amazing invention that frobnicates foos 50x faster than anyone else, and you plan to take it to market. What would prevent the likes of Amazon from copying your idea with all the resources at their disposal? Patents.
Patents as an asset is exactly the problem. Your entire first paragraph is built on this faulted perspective - the assumption that how we actually use patents is aligned with how they were designed to be used. They are supposed to foster small businesses, not destroy them.
Software patents are a scourge only because patents as a whole have become a scourge.
If I invent something, I should surely be able to license its production if I don’t want to be in the production game myself. The alternative reduces to the absurd very quickly. If I invent a better system for making ball bearings, it’s not reasonable to say I should only benefit from it if I then personally raise the capital and experience to start a ball bearing manufacturing plant.
If you invent a better system for making ball bearings and patent it, you could bring your system to existing manufacturers and say "I've invented a better system, would you like to license my patent and start using it to bring your costs down and productivity up?" That's fine and most people would be on board.
But a patent troll is different. They're entirely reactive. They wait for someone else to start doing something that is vaguely similar to what you patented, and then they pounce. The troll threatens legal action if they don't license the patent instead.
What patent trolls do is effectively extortion.
The issue is widespread bad behavior from patent trolls, given that the cost of mass filing patent infringement claims that barely apply is so much lower than the expected settlement, and the cost of a successful defense is likely higher than the request settlement. The incentive is to get a portfolio of overly broad patents and then shake down almost entirely unrelated companies.
if a company sells it to a broker, and it eventually gets traded or licensed to a company that develops it, i'd also consider that working as intended
if patents keep finding their way to companies that have no intention to either develop it themselves, or license it to others, and keep suing companies that do develop things, i'd consider it a failure of the system
pharma patents get traded to non-developers all the time, but pharma patents mostly do their job of incentivizing innovation. there's still flaws, but the troll problem isn't a big issue in that space
The companies that are doing the suing here are — as I understand it here — are suing to force a licensing deal.
the (forced) licensing deal comes after the development, and hinders it. and it's not to protect development of a related idea, either
That line of thinking is the problem. A patent is intended as a protection to spur development, not an asset to be traded.
The spirit of a patent is to protect a novel solution while a company develops and monetizes their innovation. It keeps bigger fish with deeper pockets from quickly copying your invention and monetizing it before you.
What's happened however is that Large companies with deep pockets are filing patents for anything and everything they can. These patents generally come from their R&D efforts but are not necessarily linked to any product specifically. They're also usually unenforceable junk that wouldn't hold up in court.
The value of these junk patents isn't in the viability to be developed into a product, rather their value is that it will take time and money to invalidate them in court.
When these companies are hit with a lawsuit for violating someone else's patent, their defense is to counter sue with as many junk patents as possible. The purpose of the counter suit is to make a settlement preferable to the protracted legal fight necessary to invalidate all of the junk patents. It's the path of least expense. You could argue this allows large companies to steal innovations from smaller players by forcing cross licensing agreements.
Often these patent portfolios are transferred to companies with no interest in developing products or protecting their business. These companies sole purpose are to weaponize the patents, they're Patent Trolls.
Using the same strategy as companies with defensive patent portfolios, Patent Trolls seek to extract settlements (extort money) from companies by suing them with all the junk patents they can. The patent trolls are immune to counter suit because they produce nothing. Thus companies must either invalidate each junk patent or settle. Often settling is the path of least expense.
1. Patent trolls don't actually produce anything. They just extract rent from other companies.
2. The patents they choose tend to be extremely bad -- overly broad, should never have been granted, had prior art, the tech never existed, .... They use the fact that they're able to sue cheaply to bully people into settling on bogus claims.
Point (1) doesn't seem bad to me. It's kind of like how truck driving is separate from truck insurance. Having specialists capable of monetizing patents allows, in theory, inventors to invent and immediately sell for estimated lifetime patent value, minus a discount associated with the troll's costs and desired profits. Without trolls, in theory, you'd have fewer inventors because they'd also need to be/hire experts in marketing, litigation, ....
Point (2) is the one that bothers me the most, and my impression is that it's a very common problem.
Oh, and to your question, most companies use patents for mutually assured destruction and as a form of signalling that important people should want to work there, not to directly monetize. Monetizing patents is less common.
Another argument against your argument in (1), is to allow the scenario to exist only where the purchaser of the patent can prove they are marketing and selling it. That is still not ideal imho, but at least it eliminates outright patent trolls.
HN is I think particularly sensitive because it has a lot of programmers and product development folks, who know that a good idea or even plan on its own isn't very valuable. I'd guess most of us have more good ideas floating around than we'll ever have the time or money to develop on our own. Its the execution and delivery of good ideas that is valuable; patents in our eyes make the easy part easier and the hard part harder.
Valid patents have to work (couldn't patent transistors in 1820), be new (which, as you mention, isn't the hard part in turning ideas into value), _be non-obvious_ (this is the point that pushes your idea from (1) to (2); if somebody else were likely to spontaneously have the idea then it wasn't a valid patent to begin with, and if they weren't then the "additional tax" is a tax on a product they otherwise could never have made), and include clear instructions (from the patent, reasonable competitors ought to be able to instantiate the idea -- if they can't, it's yet again invalid).
I do like what you're getting at though; the goal is to encourage actual inventions to actually be used. The patent mechanism attempts to do so by granting temporary monopolies (even with no real value via trolls), then guaranteeing that the invention is available for use afterward. You might be able to come up with another legislative mechanism encouraging real use of the patent before its expiry, and if it actually worked that'd probably be a good thing.
The important distinction here, in my opinion, is that investors bought a dead company along with it's IP for the explicit purpose of suing companies as that was their profit motive.
Had there been an existing company that was actively building/selling routers, then yes they would have been using the patents as intended - to protect their business. In this case the company who owns the patents, was using them in a weaponized fashion.
On one hand, you have patents where someone needed to do thousands of experiments, often costly, years of research to invent some kind of procedure to do X and thus should have some protections from others just taking the implementation and doing it cheaper, because they don't have the development costs. On the other, you can patent "Page down button on the keyboard moves the screen down one full page (A4) instead of one screen size"
That's already there (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/103)
> A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains.
The problem is that unless the USPTO can find the requisite publications to prove the "obvious" part above from the statute, that then knocking down the resulting issued patent in a court case can be a very expensive effort.
> On the other, you can patent "Page down button on the keyboard moves the screen down one full page (A4) instead of one screen size"
Applicant's get patents because the USPTO can't find the publications necessary to prove they do not deserve to get the patent (there's also lack of time problems that I'm ignoring at the moment).
For your premise, often the reason why "Page Down moves by 'printed page'" might get patented is the lack of any findable publication of anything stating such. The USPTO examiner's don't have the ability to just say "but this is the way it works....", they have to find some publication, somewhere, that said "this is the way it works...".
For things like "how much movement 'PageDown' means", finding publications that state "how much" is extremely difficult.
Yes .. because it's too trivial to write down.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/02/27/2024-03...
Makes me wonder if Cloudflare could have sued to "life the corporate veil" and go after the people who owned / operated the company. (IE, sue them so they loose their homes.)
Also makes me wonder if this is in the playbook the next time a patent troll comes sniffing around.
Somewhat related: In MA, to fight NIMBY-ism, we passed a law that people suing new housing developments can be forced to put up a deposit, without requiring proof that the case has merit. I wonder if a similar law could help with patent trolls: IE, making it easier that the plantiff put up a deposit when suing for violating their patent.
There's an important difference between patenting something that you've invented and built, and a patent troll which has done neither.
Tech patents exist because companies like Clouldflare want to because they make money with them (suing people). If companies like Cloudfare did want all tech patents to be gone, they would be gone and no patent troll would be able to do anything about.
And they try lure you with $5.000 to do the work to get them off the hook? They are cheap and bunch hypocrites.
Also, your reasoning seems to leave out a world of possibilities for why someone would hold a patent - its worth looking up the thinking around defensive patent portfolios.
These exist for a few reasons.... patents might be strategically filed to:
* have prior art on the record to keep a market open... e.g. preventing a competitor from monopolizing a space.
* have patents available for counter-suit against competitors suing over patent violation of some bit of tech that uses both.
* impress investors
* provide recognition to employees. At least in the US patents are filed by individuals, and the rights of the patent are then assigned to the company. Granted patents usually come with bonuses, as well as a nice resume padding that helps the engineers involved get higher salaries in the future.
Looks like it. Not all patents are the same - sometimes a patent is erroneously granted for something that is not a novel invention. The judge and jury ruled that the patents involved in this case were in that category... and therefore invalid patents.
There is no hypocrisy in holding patents (presumably ones you believe are valid) while pointing out that some other patents are invalid. I don't understand how this could equate to hypocrisy in any scenario short of the patent holder declaring all patents except theirs must be invalid on the principle that all patents are bad.
> Don't they enforce them?
Feel free to prove me wrong, but I've never seen anything about Cloudflare going after people for patent violations. I believe they subscribe to the modern tech patent strategy of having a big patent portfolio that only really gets used as part of a counter-suit if someone sues them for patent infringement.
Additionally, I presume Cloudflare's patents are related to the tech they develop and sell, which is categorically and qualitatively different than a law firm that does literally nothing of value buying up old patents and suing everyone who has ever used a word that also is present in the patent.
Given that the usage, purpose, and means of obtaining a patent are different between cloudflare and the troll - I don't understand how a hypocrisy claim can be leveled here... it defies all reason and logic to do so.
Patents most important goal is to protect entrepreneurs and the resources they spend in R&D and to promote entrepreneurship and innovation.
Imagine spending millions on developing, say, a new method to produce something at 1/10th a cost.
Now imagine a world without patents, where competitors can just copy your process.
Who's gonna invest and innovate?
Apply that to everything from batteries to telecom from anything healthcare to car engines, etc.
Without patents we would not have the same technological evolution.
A just world would involve piercing the corporate veil and imposing personal consequences on the owner of this company.
Patents are poison. Patenting your invention is like poisoning your children. Never do it.
We need to abolish these things.
They were a great way to build a centralized public library of all new inventions in the early days of the Union at no cost to the government, but now are purely a drag on innovation and society and create horrible incentives that lead to things like the Opioid crisis.
^god feel free to find/replace this with nature/universe/humanity etc.
Ultimately, the American legal system is pretty broken. If someone brings a frivolous lawsuit against you, and you defend yourself in court, nearly 100% of the time you’ll be losing money, often a lot of money. This is the core reason why patent trolls exist, why companies normally settle out of court - it’s cheaper to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation#United_St...
"Better" would mean you don't get sued as much in the future, because you're a hard target and not easy money.
They haven't released this study, AFAIK.