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The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple

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Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple

#111

Post by anticensor »

breck wrote: post #101
monocasa wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, I've heard from biomed engineers that it's clear to them that patents don't work in the medical field, unlike how they're effective in the software field. It feels like every field knows that they're a cash grab without a lot of benefits, but assumes there's some industry that they don't work in where they're needed.

Exactly this. I worked for a few years in big tech, and it was crystal clear that patents and copyrights were awful in tech. But I believed the lie that maybe in medicine, they were needed. I spent a few years in medical research and realized that ohhhh shit, even worse in this industry. The whole thing is a big lie. End copyrights. End patents. The ideal length is zero. There is no case to be made to support them. W…

Not zero, but 3½ years for patents and 21 years (7+3½ per extension) for copyright is enough.

Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple

#112

Post by viraptor »

saagarjha wrote: post #105
opportune wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you actually inventing things or just filing a bunch of patents?

I guess you can decide for yourself: https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Austin+Walters

I can't judge a lot of them, but a few from familiar territory are basically spam - shower thoughts turned into long technical descriptions. For example https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200137020A1/en is a joke which should've never been granted.

Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple

#113

Post by literallyWTF »

saagarjha wrote: post #105
opportune wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you actually inventing things or just filing a bunch of patents?

I guess you can decide for yourself: https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Austin+Walters

Wow. So anyone with a half baked idea can make and own a patent??

Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple

#115

Post by breck »

anticensor wrote: post #111
breck wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. I worked for a few years in big tech, and it was crystal clear that patents and copyrights were awful in tech. But I believed the lie that maybe in medicine, they were needed. I spent a few years in medical research and realized that ohhhh shit, even worse in this industry. The whole thing is a big lie. End copyrights. End patents. The ideal length is zero. There is no case to be made to support them. W…

Not zero, but 3½ years for patents and 21 years (7+3½ per extension) for copyright is enough.

Tesla does not make hybrids. Ab initio.

Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple

#116

Post by linspace »

As an european I find the american legal system baffling. I do wonder if the sentiment is reciprocal. In particular everytime I see a movie about lawyers I think that something must be broken if there is a subgenre about "how the system works in the end". That and incarceration rate. Trials suck everywhere, even if you win, but it seems it's much easier to end having one in USA.

Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple

#117

Post by dt3ft »

literallyWTF wrote: post #113
saagarjha wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you can decide for yourself: https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Austin+Walters

Wow. So anyone with a half baked idea can make and own a patent??

Pretty much. It's appalling.

Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple

#118

Post by dt3ft »

DecoPerson wrote: post #100
lettergram wrote: post #87

I’ll give a contrary view point to most “patent trolls”. I’m an inventor (100+ Issued patents), I develop POCs and concepts well beyond my ability to productionize. That’s not to say I couldnt create a product, just that I don’t have the resources. However, I do have the resources to develop novel techniques. Does that mean I didn’t invent the process- no, I did invent a new process. I just didn’t build them into a p…

Every software company in the world violates dozens to thousands of patents. If we all properly “played by the rules,” we’d be paralyzed by patents. No software could exist without a patent licensing team (internal or external), the overheads of which would make many ventures not worthwhile to pursue. Often you’d need to pay twice or more for the same concept, because most patents are vague and overlap with others. T…

Fully agree. It's a total mess and it needs a major reform.

It's also a by-design unfair system only for the rich - as those with ideas (especially in 3rd world countries) don't have the resources to file for patents. It really makes my blood boil.

Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple

#119

Post by EdwardDiego »

breck wrote: post #98
dev_tty01 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Name some. The patent system started in 1790. The FDA didn't exist, thus no expensive trials and safety validation. Medicine was just a bunch of trial and error with no controls.

Penicillin and ether were not covered by patents. Pretty sure those were two of the greatest of all time. On the patent side you have such modern marvels as OxyContin, which has arguably caused more loss of life than COVID-19. Patented drugs are generally awful. The idea that it costs $1B to make a game changing drug is a lie. It costs $1T. The US taxpayer pays 99.9%, and the big pharma company spends a billion to ge…

Iirc the inventor of the Polio vaccine could've patented it, but chose not to.

Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple

#120

Post by ineedasername »

saagarjha wrote: post #105
opportune wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you actually inventing things or just filing a bunch of patents?

I guess you can decide for yourself: https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Austin+Walters

A lot look like typical patent spam along the lines of "like X but in the cloud" or "like X but with AI"

"Automatically scaling neural networks based on load" [0] is one such example. Load balancing and scaling is nothing new. Doing it when there's a neural network as the application involved doesn't seem novel. Every flavor of software application shouldn't warrant its own patent for scaling out the computational resources involved, at least not when the supposedly novel method is so basic, but dressed up in neural network jargon. It doesn't even do that in all places. From the patent: "Allocate Processors -> receive load information from the processors -> adjust the number of processors based on the load information."

This is exactly the sort of patent I would expect a patent troll to buy up and then go after anyone (as long as they have money) that does any sort of automatic load balancing or resource scaling. Awful.

Then this one [1] is, quite literally, authenticating a user... but at an ATM machine. Ridiculous.

They aren't all this bad, but a lot of them are. However I'll note one that seems to have a least a little merit: [2] Using IR or temperature changes in keypads to obfuscate ATM pin input. (stealing PINs via thermal imagine is aparantly a real thing)

[0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10614360B2/en?inventor=A...

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200012778A1/en?invento...

[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200202015A1/en?invento...

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