71–80 of 285 posts
Encourage everyone to check with your firm's General Counsel about this. If you use Latham, or Kirkland or Weil, encourage your GC to reach out and make your views heard. It's despicable that these lawyers are harassing their firms' former and potential clients.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say I invent something really useful but also very difficult for an individual to take advantage of, like a new kind of airplane nosecone that shaves 10% off fuel costs for very large airplanes. Now, I'm not in the airplane business, and getting into it would take many, many millions of dollars. Probably the only way for me to make money on this would be to go to Boeing or some similar company and license my pa…
You could still sell your patent to an actual airline, and it could then use that patent exclusively and prevent airlines from doing so. In a sufficiently competitive market that might be enough. Boeing might buy your patent to prevent Airbus from using that tech and therefore gaining an advantage. Or if Boeing ignores your patent and just builds that tech anyway then they would expose themselves to future liability…
>Ultimately I think it's much more useful to protect entities that actually make products
I've said this before but it keeps ringing true. Entrepreneurial types in software are against patents because its not what they're good at. There's never any more substance behind the opposition than that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software patents should have the same requirements as real patents: you have to provide the full knowledge required to create the concept that is patented in them. You want to patent sticky scrolling? Then put the entire source code required for it into the patent. You want to patent your AI tech? Then put the entire code into the patent. Additionally, we should make sure that trade secrets are not protected in any w…
> we should make sure that trade secrets are not protected in any way That's a little extreme. Trade secrets still need protection from outright theft (e.g. Waymo's allegations against Lewandowski) by those that get them as a part of their job. Similarly, trade secrets acquired through any other illegal act (breaking and entering, hacking, corporate espionage, etc) should also be protected. I agree that trade secrets…
If you protect trade secrets, companies will never release them to the public – as in the Waymo case.
It is all about finding a correct pressure point. Long time ago certain Philadelphia area law firms decided to represent vegan protesters that created a major mess in a couple of high end restaurants. A certain flamboyant owner of one the restaurants targeted decided to have a good time applying his version of asymmetric warfare. The next partners from those law firm showed up to wine and dine their clients in the es…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just so we're clear though, the disarmament that we should aim for is to change physics so that nuclear weapons don't work at all, right? Because that's an option, we could change how the patent system works.
Land mines are a much better metaphor for patents than nuclear weapons are. Say what you will about the evils of nuclear warfare, but we haven't seen any world wars lately, and nuclear weapons are to thank for that state of affairs. Patents (and land mines) are a lot less useful to society.
I've never heard a good argument against this so I'll say it here: Require that the plaintiff in this cases show demonstrable, actual , and quantifiable loss by the activity of the defendant. It seems like such a no-brainer that a business suing for damage to it's business prospects after someone stole their idea would have to actually show how it was damaged. Even allowing very flimsy evidence would do a lot to diss…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Land mines are a much better metaphor for patents than nuclear weapons are. Say what you will about the evils of nuclear warfare, but we haven't seen any world wars lately, and nuclear weapons are to thank for that state of affairs. Patents (and land mines) are a lot less useful to society.
I don't think it's fair to say that nuclear weapons are why we don't have world wars anymore. I believe it has a lot more to do with globalization and the fact that most countries now recognize that it's a lot more profitable to trade with other countries than to go to war with them.
Global trade back then was like our modern dot-com boom, but with real money and merchandise. People were sure it would change everything. Turned out not so much. As long as the lives of the old men who ran the world weren't personally at risk, they had no reason not to go to war with each other. Nukes, not trade, were what finally changed that calculation.
Picture in your mind the following two scenarios: 1) Underwear models wrestling in an inflatable pool of lube 2) A biker gang and some dudes from ISIS getting in a brawl at a Superfund site. The first represents a normal b2b lawsuits. The second represents cloudflare and a patent troll fighting it out in Massachusetts.
> So-called non-practicing entities — or holders of a patent for a process or product that they don’t plan to develop — often use them to sue companies that would sooner settle rather than pay what can add up to $1 million by the time a case reaches a courtroom. Why on earth aren't non-practicing entity patent lawsuits outlawed? Seems like a no-brainer, and I can't imagine these firms being big enough to have any ser…
Because there's a Grey area. As an inventor, you might develop something for the express purpose of licensing it to other companies, or sell it to a company that does that for a business for a nice up front sum. The problem is when patents last too long or thing are patented that are obvious and should have failed that criteria.
This. Particularly in software, if someone who doesn't know about the patent comes up with the idea independently, that should be prima facie evidence that the patent doesn't meet the criteria of not being obvious.
Of course, the lack of knowledge of the patent may be subject to challenge, but this would eliminate a lot of ridiculous patents.