How many of these examples do we need to see before something is done with the US patent system?
What incentive is there for someone in the U.S. government to change the patent system?
Twitter Gets Sued For Letting Famous People Interact Online
41–50 of 59 posts
Re: Twitter Gets Sued For Letting Famous People Interact Online
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I saw the headline my first thought was "more TechCrunch hyperbole." But it's true. The patent's title really is "Method and system for creating an interactive virtual community of famous people”. Anyhow, that's how I read it too: all the independent claims seem to start with (a) selecting a field of endeavor and (b) compiling a list before doing stuff creating the community, which is not how Twitter works. If t…
When I saw this comment my first thought was "more TechCrunch bashing". But it's not. Rare these days :)
to be honest the when I followed the link I expected to find another opportunity for TechCrunch bashing. i was pleasantly surprised to discover it was just a great headline on a well-reported article.
Re: Twitter Gets Sued For Letting Famous People Interact Online
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so?
They're basically saying they have exclusive rights to people disclosing biographical information about themselves in an online community.
I would go with prior art versus first amendment issues.
I am not aware of constitutional amendments being used to invalidate patents. Although, if anyone has any links to such, I would be quite interested.
Re: Twitter Gets Sued For Letting Famous People Interact Online
#44is the concept of "Using legal action to enforce nonsensical patents" patentable ?
Re: Twitter Gets Sued For Letting Famous People Interact Online
#45Invalidated by newsgroups and Jeffrey Dahmers posts.
Another example of prior art would be the Electric Minds community, which was an offshoot of the Well in the mid-90s, and took the best and brightest people in certain fields to moderate online communities within that topic area. The people were "famous" in a certain space (although not to the average person-in-the-street).
Re: Twitter Gets Sued For Letting Famous People Interact Online
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe give the judge the option of ruling that the patent holder is abusing the patent system, the penalty for which would be releasing their patent portfolio into the public domain.
I approve of this idea. It would need a good way to hunt down real owners behind shell companies and such though to make sure they aren't just cheating.
Yeah, because if the judge could do that, they'd just set up shell companies that only own one patent, but which funnel the rewards of litigation back to their masters.
Re: Twitter Gets Sued For Letting Famous People Interact Online
#47is the concept of "Using legal action to enforce nonsensical patents" patentable ?
See: Halliburton's Patent Trolling Patent
Re: Twitter Gets Sued For Letting Famous People Interact Online
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
It costs quite a bit, even to deal with trivial cases. Six figures at a minimum for show up at the courthouse, mostly in attorney's fees.
Not if you get a lawyer to take your case for a % of the eventual settlement/suit. Which I think is a relatively common practice. Not sure how it works and I am not an expert, but I imagine a lot of enterprising lawyers would be willing to take that deal. Twitter will likely settle to end it, and they can take a good percentage.
Contingency counsel is usually only found on the plaintiff side. Twitter will use a big, reputable, and expensive defense firm.
Re: Twitter Gets Sued For Letting Famous People Interact Online
#49How many of these examples do we need to see before something is done with the US patent system?
What incentive is there for someone in the U.S. government to change the patent system?
Currently, none.
As expensive as the patent system may be, the largest companies who deal with it are still in a position to treat it like a basic cost of doing business; one that happens to be so high that it can protect them from the truly disruptive innovations that are unlikely to come from their peers in the field.
As long as elections are privately financed cartels that depend on trolls to scare off potentially competitive startups, the patent system is going to stay broken. If and when we manage to reduce lobbyists to mere lobbyists, and not lobbyist/financiers, then sanity may prevail.
Re: Twitter Gets Sued For Letting Famous People Interact Online
#50How many of these examples do we need to see before something is done with the US patent system?
I was hoping the BlackBerry patent issues from a few years ago would prompt our lawmakers to finally fix the problems, but even then they ignored it.