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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

#221

Post by varjag »

conjectures wrote: post #198
varjag wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. So, not much different then?

It's different in that you can prevent the imports of copies into the mature markets by suing the importers.

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

#222

Post by varjag »

joefourier wrote: post #201
varjag wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The cloning threat is very real on high end systems. Things like electric train propulsion, water purification systems, tons of various industrial designs with enormous upfront R&D were copied wholesale.

Branding is completely irrelevant to the issue, you could well come up with say explosion-safe proportional valve design that is sold OEM worldwide and that an average consumer might not even know exists as a category.

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

#223

Post by Ygg2 »

yossarian1408 wrote: post #187
lemagedurage wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideas can explicitly not be patented. "A patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion. The patent is granted upon the new machine, manufacture, etc., as has been said, and not upon the idea or suggestion of the new machine. A complete description of the actual machine or other subject matter for which a patent is sought is required." https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics

He means idea in the broader sense of nonphysical concept. For example, the patent for a drug is not private property in the same way that a plot of land is. One is a physical entity which can only be owned/utilised by one person or group at a time, and another has no physical properties and can be utilised by literally every single person alive had they the inclination. Patents/IP/etc only have 'scarcity' because th…

Just because it's not physically present doesn't mean it's not real. Patent represents compensation for time spent researching and developing it.

Without it, you would resort to greater degrees of secrecy.

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

#224

Post by crispyambulance »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #155
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…

Just because the patent system has some problems doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any value. These troll patents might contain a high number of ideas you might just casually come up with, but the actually valuable ones tend to be comprised of innovative ideas that usually require significant R&D investment to come up with. Without patents there’s very little incentive to invest in coming up with those ideas. A lot of the…

  > The temporary monopoly is awarded in return for publicly disclosing your invention.
Reading patents is perhaps one of the WORST and most inefficient ways to discover "new ideas". Even ignoring the turgid legal language, the actual central ideas of the patents are either so vague they're useless or they apply to utterly obsolete scenarios or they just poorly describe something that has already been in existence/usage before, during, and after the patent's existence.

We could do just fine WITHOUT the patent system. Maybe if instead of fretting about diligent Chinese copycats, the USA and its corporations actually built stuff instead of outsourcing everything, we would not need to worry so much about patent infringement.

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

#225

Post by Ygg2 »

vasco wrote: post #136
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…

Patents are a monopoly on an idea. And ideas shouldn't be owned by anyone. One shouldn't be forced to share their ideas, but the concept of coming up with something, and then going to your community and saying: "Hey everyone, I thought of this and wrote it down, none of you wrote it down before so now it's my idea for the next 30 years" Is just ridiculous.

Patents are a way to encourage sharing ideas.

You can always monopolize an unknown idea. Don't share it.

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

#226

Post by Angostura »

vasco wrote: post #136
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…

Patents are a monopoly on an idea. And ideas shouldn't be owned by anyone. One shouldn't be forced to share their ideas, but the concept of coming up with something, and then going to your community and saying: "Hey everyone, I thought of this and wrote it down, none of you wrote it down before so now it's my idea for the next 30 years" Is just ridiculous.

> One shouldn't be forced to share their ideas.

Patents were designed as a way of allowing people to share their ideas, while retaining the ability to profit from their ideas for a limited period.

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

#227

Post by user3939382 »

joefourier wrote: post #201
varjag wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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

This is proven false by the amount of top-selling products that Amazon has ripped off, produced for less (sometimes by striking a deal with the original factory), and then labeled “Amazon Basics”

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

#228

Post by cletus »

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…

> Why is it OK for huge companies like apple, IBM, Google... to use the patent system to keep out any competitors or newcomers

[citation needed]

Specifically, Oracle notwithstanding, big tech companies have used patent portfolios defensively. Take Google as one example. When has Google filed a patent infringement lawsuit against any company (other than as a countersuit after getting sued eg Sonos)?

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

#229

Post by cycomanic »

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…

Can we do away with this myth that patenting something will somehow put knowledge into the open. Has anyone here actually read a patent? They absolutely will not tell you how to do something. In particular I know for fact that, the things that are actually valuable are either never patented or specifically omitted from the patents so that no one can actually reproduce a method technology from a patent because some crucial steps are missing.

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

#230

Post by cycomanic »

toxik wrote: post #171
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…

The fact of the matter is that countries with weak IP laws and/or enforcement see less innovation. It makes sense too, the calculus is easy: rip someone’s tested idea off for free, or invest huge piles of money just to get your foot in the door?

Citation needed. Historically this has not been true (I pointed to a famous example with pharmaceuticals further up) and it is also not true for companies, i.e. companies that patent a lot do usually not have the highest R&D budgets relatively.
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