121–130 of 285 posts
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Has Cloudflare ever initiated patent litigation against anyone? No, we have not.
Have you ever threatened to, or alluded to your ability to do so, to obtain commercial negotiating leverage in a context other than defending the company from the threat of a patent suit?
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…
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?
Then the grind of law school, where they all obsess over class rank, who gets the best internship, who gets the best job. It's a very reputation based industry, where even trying to switch to another firm could get you blackballed if done improperly and without tact.
If a lot of tech people make a big stink about this to the partners, it will quickly make this path dangerous for employees and it will stop fast.
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I agree. Even "hardware" patents are too hard to defend to really be worth it most of the time (ex: fidget cube and other chinese kickstarter clones). You can't rely on patents to ensure defensibility to your business model, so they really just end up being money-sinks.
Not sure about how the Chinese patent system works but isn't it the case that these companies having U.S. patents doesn't really matter in China?
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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.
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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.
Copyright of literary characters is one of the harder ones to define, and perhaps a system more like patents would be more appropriate for them, but that's neither here nor there.
Let's stick to computer science for a while. Imagine I have come up with a sorting algorithm for integers with significantly better time complexity than existing options. I can describe that in any number of programming languages, in natural language, in pictographs, etc. It's a skill that people can learn, or a tool that could be embedded in silicon and used for financial gain. Doesn't that sound more like an invention than a creative work? Shouldn't patents be the best fit?
Don't get me wrong, copyright and patent systems the world over hace significant class, but for us as software engineers to declare that patents shouldn't apply to our work because it is somehow fundamentally different to the other science and engineering disciplines is just arrogance.
> “[Is Blackbird] doing anything thing that is illegal or unethical?” continues Cheng. “For the most part, it’s unethical. But it’s probably not illegal.” If it's not illegal, more work needs to be done to make it illegal. Inventors always have avenues, moreso today than ever before.
While I agree it should likely be illegal, the solution to bad laws isn't more laws. A better solution would be to * do better examination of patents so that BS ones don't get issued * allow third-parties to invalidate patents by showing prior art to the patent office for a nominal fee * punish patent applicants who know about, or should have known about prior art * if a patent is invalidated, force them to return al…
The patent in this case is 18 years old. Some claim things are stricter now, others don't.
> allow third-parties to invalidate patents by showing prior art to the patent office for a nominal fee
This is possible[1] and the article mentions cloudflare is doing it.
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Frankly, if it weren't for the stupidity of the patent system, I don't know that Cloudflare would even have the patents. Has Cloudflare ever initiated patent litigation against anyone? The fact is that most patents for things that are "invented" but entirely virtually don't really deserve patent protection. Rarely is there significant research, expense or tooling to implement. Patents on software, processes and most…
Even if the companies only hoard these to defend themselves when they go under their patents get picked up by NPEs. It's like nuclear weapons, MAD kinda works but then a state fails and now you have terrorists with nukes. The answer is disarmament. If you want to enlist the help of the community you should have to pull a Tesla and open your patents or at the very least advocate for the abolishment of software and pro…
But I agree that it probably sounds cheaper to settle. The same is true with terrorists when it involves hostages, or kidnapping, though. These patent trolls are just corporate terrorists.
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>The real solution is to either make sure prior art and non-obviousness requirements are properly enforced or just dismantle the whole thing as unworkable. Obviousness is the key issue for me. I suspect most people, even those who work in the technology fields, are not aware that it is considered essentially impossible to prove obviousness (source: I have worked as a consultant on several patent litigation cases). So…
Perhaps we need to establish some sort of obvious-evidence protocol? Some kind of common sense argument that can be presented in the court of law and weighed against other evidence? Example: Someone steals an apple to feed their hungry child. Yes, it's a crime, but sending the parent to prison isn't a solution; the child is still hungry, and now both of them will to varying extents have to be cared for by the state,…
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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.
Yet, the waymo case exists, and waymo hasn’t patented or published anything, and probably won’t ever publish it.
https://www.google.com/patents/US8836922