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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

#201

Post by joefourier »

varjag wrote: post #153
mashpoe wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like to say that without patents there will be no incentive to advance technology, but if you're the one to come up with an idea then you already have a huge head start. If you don't make use of that head start, then you don't deserve it, and this applies to patents as well. Monopolies are bad, and competition is good. Everyone is already incentivized to come up with and implement ideas faster than their compe…

In practice you'll have a head start of maybe a year before a grifter in China replicates your three years of R&D and floods the market. And a copied product will always be cheaper as they don't have to amortise development costs. That's how technology worked before the patent systems, and the outcome was manufacturer secrecy - which generally sucked more than the patent system.

The Chinese cloning threat is largely overrated unless your product is very simple and you have 0 branding.

A perfect counter-example to patents is FDM printers, which were incredibly expensive and inaccessible to the average hobbyist until the Stratasys patents started to expire. Now while it’s true there’s a lot of Chinese printers on the market, that hasn’t killed western companies - Pruša might be 2x-3x pricier than a Creality, but the 3D printing farms I know still went with the former, due to higher reliability and the fact that they need less fiddling to produce high quality outputs.

Meanwhile Stratasys is still selling $100k machines, and I highly doubt any of their customers would rather buy a cheap Chinese 3D printer instead.

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

#202

Post by happyjack »

varjag wrote: post #177
vkou wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sucked in different ways, but its not clear that it sucked more. The point of the patent system is that you share your invention in the world, in exchange for monopolizing it for a few years. The problem is that most software patents share absolutely nothing of value with the world.

I'm with you on software patents, but they are only a fraction of patents landscape and really pertinent only to North America. But naturally it's overemphasized here on HN.

Way overemphasized here on HN. The USPTO is in a terrible spot right now. Your IP is not worth what it was before the AIA (America Invents Act). It essentially decimated the patent system. I won't go into specifics.

I think another misconception is the entire purpose of the USPTO. The USPTO wants EVERYTHING in the entire universe to be in the public domain. To achieve this, you give them your idea and in exchange they give you a monopoly for 20 years minus prosecution time. Even worse, anything you publish anywhere on earth after one year automatically gets in the public domain.

Anyways, enough ranting, but the system is very expensive and is actually not incentivizing the "inventor" anymore.

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

#203

Post by murbard2 »

cycomanic wrote: post #123

The issue I have with much of the patent trolling bashing is, that it somehow makes a distinction between practicing companies who make something and non practicing entities. I think this is a huge veil the industry pulled over people's eyes. Why is it OK for huge companies like apple, IBM, Google... to use the patent system to keep out any competitors or newcomers, but it is not ok for smaller inventors to sell thei…

The main difference is that those huge companies can potentially be kept at bay with defensive patents. They have at least some skin in the game in playing stupid games with stupid patents because they could find themselves on the receiving end of these frivolous lawsuits. There is no such defense against patent trolls, only court victory, legal reform, or extrajudicial penalties (e.g. reputational).

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

#204

Post by viraptor »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #122
viraptor wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had a look at the link. I do not really understand what it does (I work in IT, many years as a sysadmin) but it suspiciously looks like my code on a day I thought I had a revolutionary idea. Then a few weeks later I have to look at it again and try to rediscover that revolutionary idea while the family is waiting for the lights to work again.

> I do not really understand what it does

It's basically: query the database for the list of nodes, then tell the LB which of those nodes you want to send traffic to. Something you come up with in 5min if you ever need it.

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

#205

Post by lettergram »

ineedasername wrote: post #120
saagarjha wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

I think the legal terms may be throwing a bit of a loop. But what I can say is this is now deployed in several contexts by multiple companies (which weren’t when we submitted).

Is it “spam”, I guess you can call it what ever you want. But you’re missing the nuanced problem.

Say as a company A you never submit a patent. Companies B, C, D, E, etc... All patent a portion of your applications before they are deployed or even after their deployed (but the patent is public).

They can then sue you. Each company for the aspects you violated.

Look at Wells Fargo via usaa

https://www.expressnews.com/business/local/article/USAA-Well...

Imagine that ten fold. You need (if your a decent target), patents you can cross license. Do I think it’s good? No I don’t. Can I reasonably argue you need to patent as a corporation - yes. I also support patent and copyright reform, but I can still understand the need to protect ourselves in the meantime.

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

#206

Post by dennis_jeeves »

freedomben wrote: post #9

Every so often a patent troll story comes up on HN, and people like me bitch about how broken the system is and get group therapy from shouting into the wind on a web forum. What can we actually do . How do we start fixing this problem?

The patent problem is only the tip the iceberg, if you are unlucky or observant enough you will notice that several other things are broken like health care or housing. All this points to larger problem that many thinkers are in denial, that is of humans themself. Humans in general are terribly flawed and that cannot be fixed with laws.

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

#207

Post by rjzzleep »

happyjack wrote: post #202
varjag wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you on software patents, but they are only a fraction of patents landscape and really pertinent only to North America. But naturally it's overemphasized here on HN.

Way overemphasized here on HN. The USPTO is in a terrible spot right now. Your IP is not worth what it was before the AIA (America Invents Act). It essentially decimated the patent system. I won't go into specifics. I think another misconception is the entire purpose of the USPTO. The USPTO wants EVERYTHING in the entire universe to be in the public domain. To achieve this, you give them your idea and in exchange the…

I'd be very interested in a writeup. My gut feeling was always that it is in fact not incentivizing the "inventor" either. I do see people at big institution filing patent after patent, but it seems very inaccessible for a normal human being like me.

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

#208

Post by snarf21 »

cycomanic wrote: post #123

The issue I have with much of the patent trolling bashing is, that it somehow makes a distinction between practicing companies who make something and non practicing entities. I think this is a huge veil the industry pulled over people's eyes. Why is it OK for huge companies like apple, IBM, Google... to use the patent system to keep out any competitors or newcomers, but it is not ok for smaller inventors to sell thei…

We need some serious patent reform, especially in the software sphere.

I'd like to see: -- All software patents expire after 5 years -- All software patents must be actively used in a revenue producing product (yearly), if not the patent expires -- All software patents are NON-transferable only licensable -- All software patents must make their licensing rates public per patent with no special deals

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

#209

Post by dennis_jeeves »

freedomben wrote: post #9

Every so often a patent troll story comes up on HN, and people like me bitch about how broken the system is and get group therapy from shouting into the wind on a web forum. What can we actually do . How do we start fixing this problem?

The patent problem is only the tip the iceberg, if you are unlucky or observant enough you will notice that several other things are broken like health care or housing.

All this points to larger problem that many thinkers are in denial, that is of humans themself. Humans in general are terribly flawed and that problem can be only marginally alleviated with laws, activism etc.

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

#210

Post by dstick »

charcircuit wrote: post #179
bawolff wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really believe that software patents represent anything close to an original idea? From my perspective, Software patents are on such stupid things utterly divorced from anything that could be considered innovative, that none of it incentivizes inovation. The calculus also doesn't seem all that clear to me. A alternative calculus: Build something new on top of someone else's idea (stand on the shoulders of gian…

You are leaving out the option of just licensing the patent. If you are lucky they will license it to you for free.

Can the license holder set any price they want? Essentially blocking access with an absurdly high paywall? Or is there some kind of standard?
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