291–300 of 321 posts
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> will just ghost a one man operation or small business I didn't understand this phrase. Does that mean the "good" lawyer is just a false front and the real business is handled by somebody else?
Ghosting means to avoid or stop responding to someone. So he's implying that lawyers may just not even respond since such a small company isn't worth their time, or possibly even just take their money and then "ghost" them after that.
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It's more than that. The fee to request the IPR is $19,000, plus $375 for each claim in excess of 20. If the USPTO decides to institute the IPR, the post-institution fee is $22,500, plus $750 for each claim in excess of 20. [0] Attorney's fees will be far more than these amounts. [0] https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?n=37y1.0.1.3.12#se...
Funny how Obama pushed this as a good thing for small inventors.
(*) Edit: An IPR may seem expensive (~$500k is average), but if successful it is much cheaper than winning a patent infringement lawsuit ($millions).
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But don't you believe it encourages innovation ? That's the main argument in favor of patents
I think it stalls more innovation than it encourages, and generally prevents new entry into a technology space, because the existing players have all the patents that a new player would need to get started. The fewer players you have in a technology space, the less innovation there will be, because “necessity is the mother of invention” and people don’t generally start working on an idea unless they are exposed to th…
As soon as any technological idea becomes well-known, say some research idea getting hyped in the media (e.g., quantum, VR, some new kind of laser, 3D displays, etc.), then people everywhere run out and patent all possible imagined ideas of how this new tool might be used to make products.
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But don't you believe it encourages innovation ? That's the main argument in favor of patents
I think it stalls more innovation than it encourages, and generally prevents new entry into a technology space, because the existing players have all the patents that a new player would need to get started. The fewer players you have in a technology space, the less innovation there will be, because “necessity is the mother of invention” and people don’t generally start working on an idea unless they are exposed to th…
This seems an arbitrary assumption. Products don't make it to market for myriads of reasons. Seems like a poor example to use to target patents - especially as with patents you know that within ~20 years that idea will be freely available to everyone.
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Funny how Obama pushed this as a good thing for small inventors.
Right? The AIA made it easier and cheaper (*) for big companies to invalidate the patents of small inventors who try to assert their patents against them. It reduced the amount of money that big companies will pay to license a patent because the threat of an infringement lawsuit became less valuable. It literally took value from small inventors and handed it to big business. (*) Edit: An IPR may seem expensive (~$500…
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Are trade secrets really worse? My (uninformed, anecdotal, unsubstantiated) intuition is that reverse engineering, or even just the knowledge that something is possible, ensures that trade secrets are no barrier to progress. While patents definitely seem like a barrier.
If company is providing a service instead of selling products then reverse engineering is much much harder or not possible at all. Example: Are you going to reverse self-driving code from a vehicle giving you are ride? Or a server behind an API?
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As I've noted in other comments many people see business as war. There are good examples in business but the history of war has even better examples. Time and time again "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" can work until one enemy is vanquished. In WW2 Stalin initially made a pact with Hitler while all the while knowing Hitler would violate it and invade anyway. Stalin just used it to buy time to ramp up the Soviet…
> In WW2 Stalin initially made a pact with Hitler while all the while knowing Hitler would violate it and invade anyway. Stalin just used it to buy time to ramp up the Soviet military. From what I recall it's likely Hitler assumed this as well and used the pact to delay dealing with the Soviets militarily and focus on his Western front to snatch up as much of Europe as possible. Not true at all. 1) Stalin was caught…
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I hope the entire patent system is simply dissolved. Patents are an artificial restriction on free trade that prevents competition and put profits in the pockets of the greedy undeserving.
But don't you believe it encourages innovation ? That's the main argument in favor of patents
And a novel high performance x86 CPU design. x86 is patented thoroughly, although now it ought to be ok to ship one that has the features from about 20 years ago. I would still recommend to be cautious!
And an ARM one. ARM is known to some in the field as a company with an army of lawyers after all.
A lot of innovation happens when patents expire.
Other people's open source FPGA designs are shipping now (and kudos to the designers - they are really well implemented!), in part thanks to many of the basic patents on FPGAs expiring about now.
I would be quite surprised if RISC-V implementations aren't dependent on a number of key patents having expired by now.
FDM 3D printing (where hot plastic is squirted through a moving nozzle) became popular when the patents on it expired. Some people into open source 3D printing think it happened because that's when people innovated. They did innovate at making it low cost, but the expiry of the patents was a factor too.
At the moment I'm building a specialised high-performance database engine, and I have to explicitly avoid some of the obvious on-disk data layouts because they turn out to be patented. It's annoying having to come up with some "clever" alternative, but I'll find a way.
I don't know if patents encourage innovation on balance, but they've definitely prevented me from shipping some fairly advanced things I've worked on in the past.
I don't begrudge the companies or the system, but I will argue that there is plenty of innovation impeded by it, and in my experience I have never worked anywhere that patents helped, only places where they hindered. It could happen but it hasn't yet.
When I discussed this with a patent attorney once, there was a fascinating gulf between people who dream up patentable (or already patented) solutions almost casually on demand when faced with a problem, and people who think this is impossible and such insights are precious gems that rarely occur. I'm sure it differs between fields, and I know there are some very clever patents. But in software and to an extent hardware, the two fields I'm most familiar with, most patents seem to cover natural solutions to a problem which would occur to anyone skilled in the area when faced with that particular problem.