The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by JamesBarney » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #74

JamesBarney wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The patent's purpose is to incentivize innovation. Some industries need this (medical) others don't (software). So if you got rid of patents innovation in some industries will be fine (software) and others will be wrecked (medical). Patents are not the only way to incentivize innovation, and I think it'd be great to experiment with some other ways. Socializing medicine is completely orthogonal to this issue. Unless y…

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.

It costs close to a billion dollars to being a drug to market. Who's going to spend that kind of money if there's no patent protection?

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

#232

Post by JamesBarney » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #55

JamesBarney wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still need patents. Healthcare is an obvious example, if we eliminated patents we'd have 0 new drugs pass FDA approval over the next decade. But software is very different from medical patents.

Funny. New drugs existed before patents were a thing.

How much did it cost to get FDA approval before patents existed vs now?

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

#233

Post by JamesBarney » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #124

JamesBarney wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still need patents. Healthcare is an obvious example, if we eliminated patents we'd have 0 new drugs pass FDA approval over the next decade. But software is very different from medical patents.

Actually, there is pretty strong evidence that patents are counterproductive for pharmaceuticals. Before the harmonization of IP laws, pharmaceuticals had different eligibility for patenting in the US, Europe and Switzerland. The US had the strongest, Europe somewhat weaker and in Switzerland it was inelligible. The Swiss companies invested the most money into R&D and were generally the most successful. The US ones w…

The patent laws where you do the research doesn't matter as much as the patent laws where you're recouping the cost of your investment. And I assume those companies made 100x more money in the u.s. than Switzerland.

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

#234

Post by varjag » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 3:03 PM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #229

happyjack wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cr…

That's not the rule, patents have to be reproducible by a man of the trade. Not disclosing crucial steps in the claims, even if overlooked by an examiner, is also a handicap: someone can circumvent your patent if the actual substance is missing.

Have a look at the original Gore membrane patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4194041A/en

It's very clear, detailed and reproducible.

And since we are on HN, here a bit on the software side: IBM original arithmetic coding patent.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US4905297A/en

Perhaps it something that should not have been patented, but it's fully disclosed and reproducible.

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

#235

Post by JamesBarney » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 3:06 PM UTC

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…

Drugs are much easier to copy than software programs (i.e. there's no copyright protection).

And it currently costs billions of dollars to get FDA approval.

Basically assume I find a new antidepressant. I spend 2 billion dollars proving it's safe and effective.

How do I get my money back when any drug manufacturer can now manufacture the same drug?

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

#236

Post by novaRom » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 3:12 PM UTC

rjzzleep wrote: post #207

happyjack wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. Patents protect only monopoly of large companies. Getting a patent in EU or in USA is very expensive ranging from tens of thousands and up to hundreds of thousands. Big part of this money goes to totally unproductive parasitic hands.

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

#237

Post by hctaw » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 3:13 PM UTC

epc wrote: post #190

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…

Is it really innovative if you do not implement it? I don't mean market it and make it successful, I mean just implement it. Because if the "inventor" can't implement the process described in the patent, it's not really a useful invention, is it? I was part of litigation in the 1990s where some guy had a patent on an “electronic offertory box” for use in churches. It had been granted in the 1980s. The claims made no…

ARM is a good example of innovation without implementation.

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

#238

Post by breck » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 3:15 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #126

breck wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All Opioid deaths between 1999 and 2017 were about 400k in the US. Well less than the Covid death toll in the US alone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_Unite...

Average expected years left to live for a Covid death is about 11, prior to having any information on pre-existing conditions. Divide that by 2-3x once you are given pre-existing conditions.

The average Opiod death is 3x that by years alone, and more when going by expected healthspan.

Hence "loss of life" and not "deaths".

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

#239

Post by breck » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 3:17 PM UTC

hi_im_miles wrote: post #134

anticensor wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But why have them at all, especially if we’re going to shoot for arbitrary amounts of time? I don’t buy that IP protections incentivize innovation anymore than they prevent it. The reality is that the gains from intellectual property are not distributed evenly, and corporate executives know this. If IP is making you millions of dollars, that is a very different situation from IP just “making you a living.” Even if yo…

Agree with you and well put.

One slight nit: it helps if you don't spread the big lie "intellectual property" (since it's an oxymoron). Someone here on HN told me about the term "imaginary property" which works great, because then you can still use the "IP" acronym.

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

#240

Post by ineedasername » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 3:25 PM UTC

lettergram wrote: post #205

ineedasername wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, I understand that companies no longer have much choice but to amass an arsenal of patents like this to deter suits being brought against them.

The issue I took up in my comment was that you seemed to be defending this process to some extent, so I appreciate you clarifying your point of view to mean you were only defending the necessity of companies to engage in this sort of stockpiling of patents. It's not, from a less subjective viewpoint, rational: It is a net drain on the economy and innovation. However, when you find yourself in a crazy situation that you can't significantly alter, the rational response is often something that is itself irrational.

I often think of war as the prime example of this... It's insane that the US dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. Heck, it's insane that such weapons were developed to begin with. And year the entire broader context was insane. Fighting a more conventional war against Japan would have been even more crazy, costing more lives and prolonging the war even longer. It's an appropriate metaphor to call the crazy patent situation "patent wars". (It's also part of why I like things like the study of optimal strategies in iterated prisoner dilemmas... it gives a framework for how to think about rational decision making under irrational conditions.)