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Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

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Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#91

Post by Karunamon »

patrickmay wrote: post #82
gozur88 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has always bothered me. The standard is supposed to be "non-obvious to an expert in the field" and yet they hand out patents like candy for things that are obvious to the most casual observer. My solution is to cap the number of patents granted every year to, say, 1000. Patents would be ranked from least to most obvious and actual prior art investigation would take place (because the number is manageable). The o…

As I said in response to a comment upthread, the existence of an implementation by someone who had no knowledge of the patent should be prima facie evidence that the idea is obvious to an expert in the field. That should get the patent invalidated.

The problem there is that you're trying to prove a negative, which is probably even harder than proving a patent is obvious.

Say Johnny Evilguy digs up your widget from the USPTO database from a Tor connection and then re-implements it. Poof, your patent is dead, and you can't prove he read it.

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#92

Post by curun1r »

kuschku wrote: post #73
curun1r wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I disagree with that. Because then companies just keep new developments as trade secrets – I want to push them to patenting everything, which would require them to open up the entire technology to the public a few years later. If you protect trade secrets, companies will never release them to the public – as in the Waymo case.

If you don't patent, you lose the ability to go after others if they independently create the same invention or reverse engineer your product. And if you fail to properly document your use and someone else patents it, you could lose the rights to your invention altogether.

Keeping something important as a trade secret has enough risk already.

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#93

Post by cortesoft »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71

I've used Latham & Watkins. Just made a call to let a partner there know what I think about his firm's alumna and how it colors my opinion of him and his firm. 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 client…

What exactly are they supposed to do about that, though? They left the firm?

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#94

Post by Bartweiss »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71

I've used Latham & Watkins. Just made a call to let a partner there know what I think about his firm's alumna and how it colors my opinion of him and his firm. 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 client…

This is an interesting point.

Obviously these firms don't have much power over their ex-attorneys, but a culture that opposed this sort of thing might be a disincentive to strike out as a troll (what if you want to go back to respectable practice some day?). And, more dramatically, a firm that wanted to clear its name could easily volunteer some hours to fighting trolls - that's the sort of thing that could make an immediate difference.

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#95

Post by Bartweiss »

cortesoft wrote: post #93
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71

I've used Latham & Watkins. Just made a call to let a partner there know what I think about his firm's alumna and how it colors my opinion of him and his firm. 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 client…

What exactly are they supposed to do about that, though? They left the firm?

Well, law firms commonly do some amount of pro bono work as a public service and reputation builder. I'd be interested to see a firm or two donate legal support to smaller companies fighting trolls - it'd be a show of good faith and might immediately knock out low-powered trolls.

Newegg has showed what happens when these cases actually get fought, and that's something a firm could offer to build popularity and support.

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#96

Post by Bartweiss »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #86
learc83 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a large firm, a lawyer isn't going to go through the active cases for every partner in the firm when choosing where to take clients for dinner.

It seems a bit naive, then, to assume that the people you're litigating against will civilly keep their anger in Lawyer-Land and never hold a grudge in real life.

There seems to be a lot of that at play in white-shoe firms. Perhaps less so now than when those positions were guaranteed for life, but some of the highest-powered lawyers I've known didn't have much intuitive sense that they were actually affecting people.

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#97

Post by Terr_ »

k__ wrote: post #63
rictic wrote: post #58

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.

Wat?

They're critiquing the analogy to nuclear weapons. Patent-weapons can be voided by altering the underlying legal framework, but nuclear-weapons can't be voided by changing the underlying rules of physics.

...Or at least, not yet.

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#98

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Bartweiss wrote: post #94
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71

I've used Latham & Watkins. Just made a call to let a partner there know what I think about his firm's alumna and how it colors my opinion of him and his firm. 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 client…

This is an interesting point. Obviously these firms don't have much power over their ex-attorneys, but a culture that opposed this sort of thing might be a disincentive to strike out as a troll (what if you want to go back to respectable practice some day?). And, more dramatically, a firm that wanted to clear its name could easily volunteer some hours to fighting trolls - that's the sort of thing that could make an i…

There's also the plain-and-simple risk that lawyers at a firm I've handed the keys to know a lot about my company. That they may use this to profit against me, in a personal capacity, is all kinds of wrong. It's akin to an investment firm, doing confidential diligence on Company X, having an employee, who may or may not have been on the diligence team, run out and start a hedge fund that shorts Company X.

It's not, by itself, necessarily unethical. But it smells fishy and deserves to be dug into.

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#99

Post by Hermel »

MatthewWilkes wrote: post #85
mjevans wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software is already covered by /copyright/ law. It does not need patents.

Copyright covers implementations, not ideas. I have no moral objection to truly novel inventions in computer science being protected by patents. An innovative search algorithm, a compression scheme, etc. Its shit when MP3s and GIFs were encumbered, but they were genuine inventions whose sharing publicly genuinely advanced the public good. The kind the patent trolls use are not innovative in the same way. We need a st…

I'm pretty sure that if you rewrote Harry Potter from scratch with new names and wording (redoing the implementation) and published that, you would still get in trouble. So copyright is somewhat broader than you think.

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#100

Post by JumpCrisscross »

cortesoft wrote: post #93
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71

I've used Latham & Watkins. Just made a call to let a partner there know what I think about his firm's alumna and how it colors my opinion of him and his firm. 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 client…

What exactly are they supposed to do about that, though? They left the firm?

It's less about them doing something ex post facto and more that this reflects on the type of people Latham hires and retains. If a bunch of people leaving an investment bank run out and commit fraud, the bank doesn't (necessarily) look bad for failing to stop it. It looks bad by association. We assume, rightly or wrongly, likeness in peoples' voluntary associations.
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