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

#241

Post by hctaw » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 3:29 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #159

hutzlibu wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Like....who ever thought that having 12 random people decide if you're guilty or not is a good idea?" Probably people, who experienced their share of professional, but corrupt judges, who live worlds apart from the common people they judge over. If a verdict is supposed to represent the peoples will - doesn't it make sense to involve actual common people?

>>If a verdict is supposed to represent the peoples will - doesn't it make sense to involve actual common people? No, because the law should be followed to the letter and "common people" are not qualified to pass judgement. Jury trials in the US just seem to be about how 12 people feel about someone, not whether law was actually broken or not. Every time I hear a case where there was no hard evidence against somebody…

Alexander Hamilton lays out some discussion of this in Federalist 83 [1]

> The friends and adversaries of the plan of the convention, if they agree in nothing else, concur at least in the value they set upon the trial by jury; or if there is any difference between them it consists in this: the former regard it as a valuable safeguard to liberty; the latter represent it as the very palladium of free government. For my own part, the more the operation of the institution has fallen under my observation, the more reason I have discovered for holding it in high estimation; and it would be altogether superfluous to examine to what extent it deserves to be esteemed useful or essential in a representative republic, or how much more merit it may be entitled to, as a defense against the oppressions of an hereditary monarch, than as a barrier to the tyranny of popular magistrates in a popular government. Discussions of this kind would be more curious than beneficial, as all are satisfied of the utility of the institution, and of its friendly aspect to liberty. But I must acknowledge that I cannot readily discern the inseparable connection between the existence of liberty, and the trial by jury in civil cases. Arbitrary impeachments, arbitrary methods of prosecuting pretended offenses, and arbitrary punishments upon arbitrary convictions, have ever appeared to me to be the great engines of judicial despotism; and these have all relation to criminal proceedings. The trial by jury in criminal cases, aided by the habeas-corpus act, seems therefore to be alone concerned in the question. And both of these are provided for, in the most ample manner, in the plan of the convention.

[1] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed83.asp

In case you're not American or familiar with American history/government, the Federalist Papers were written following the Constitutional Convention by Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison to argue for its ratification and address much of the reasoning and arguments for/against the structure of our government (including the judiciary) as laid out in the Constitution.

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

#242

Post by henvic » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 3:35 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #127

mitchdoogle wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your general sentiment. The people here reading these comments may be on the fence. Maybe they're leaning one way or another. Maybe they need some more convincing. Someone who wants to learn more can benefit greatly from a documentary or a good article on the subject. And these comments don't just exist in this moment. They will be available in search for a long time to come.

I'm not sure a movie called "The patent scam" is going to be seen as an unbiased, convincing source by any fence sitter.

Why does it has to be unbiased?

Alas, there's no such thing as unbiased.

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

#243

Post by dwild » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

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 whole notion that patents are only legitimate if you build something is completely bogus. Either the patent system is about encouraging and rewarding innovation and then it should apply to anyone equally, or it is not and we should abolish it.

That's a sophism, it's not either theses possibilities.

For me patents protect someone building something innovative, to later on profit from what he builds. It's not to reward innovation, it's to protect your capacity to build that innovation and sell it. It's not how patent troll use it, thus I disagree with their use.

> but it is not ok for smaller inventors to sell their patents to some of these "trolls" who then sue the big companies for violating the patents?

Why would it be? How is that beneficial to innovation?

Nobody here said either that it was right to use the patent system to keep out any competitors or newcomers either... it's right to keep competitors out while you build it/sell it at first, but it's not right to use it purely to keep competitors out.

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

#244

Post by joefourier » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 3:55 PM UTC

user3939382 wrote: post #227

joefourier wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

Any examples of that where the product isn't commodity-grade? The AmazonBasics examples I see are things like household appliances, cables, cheap accessories, lightbulbs and batteries. If you're a small-to-medium sized business in the West, you should try to target market segments where the quality, branding and support of the product matters, as obviously you will lose in a race-to-the-bottom of undifferentiated low-quality commodities.

Look at how Raspberry Pi still manages to maintain a huge market presence despite the prevalence of cheap Chinese clones - even if the latter occasionally have superior specs on-paper, in practice I have yet to find one that isn't vastly inferior in terms of ecosystem and software.

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

#245

Post by appleflaxen » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 4:07 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…

> There literally was no way for me to have found the patent

If it is patented, there is a way to find it. It certainly isn't a useful way of spreading information, but it exists, and its existence makes your claim sound hyperbolic.

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

#246

Post by unishark » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

novaRom wrote: post #236

rjzzleep wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fees are half for small businesses, and 1/4 for "micro entities". If you only want a US patent it isn't very expensive. Investors want to see patents which implies they have value, even if it's an uphill battle to take on a big company.

Though I do agree lawyers and govts have basically colluded to create a system to suck money out of business in return for being allowed to function.

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

#247

Post by unishark » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 4:31 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…

> Can we do away with this myth that patenting something will somehow put knowledge into the open.

They said it's the purpose of the patent system, not the real-world effect. It's very important to remind people of this purpose. Because people (especially lawyers) keep pushing this concept that ownership on a patented idea is some kind of natural right being protected by law. Which is completely opposite to reality, and part of what leads to the system being warped in the way you complain about.

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

#248

Post by JamesBarney » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

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…

> 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 generate some shitty subpar derivative that they can then get monopoly protection on and create an artificial racket supported by false marketing.

This number is impossibly wrong. There were 48 new drugs brought to market in 2019. At an average cost of 1 trillion dollar per drug would mean the entire economy of both the U.S. and Europe were devoted to drug research which just isn't true.

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

#249

Post by ineedasername » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 4:35 PM UTC

DecoPerson wrote: post #172

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…

> Using IR or temperature changes in keypads to obfuscate ATM pin input. A friend of mine described to me this exact idea over four years ago — well before the linked patent was issued. Does he have grounds to overturn that patent!?

It wouldn't count as prior art for the purpose of invalidating the patent unless his idea was in some way identifiable during a reasonable search for prior art. From a legal perspective, prior art is usually interpreted as the available information about the thing being patented. If your friend told you about it over drinks at a bar, that's not prior art. For that matter, trade secrets for even very old things aren't prior art either because the information is not available. If your friend wrote a blog post that hit the mainstream media, or at least the front page of HN, it gets to be a bit of a grey area.

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

#250

Post by joemullin » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

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…

I agree that patent abuse and IP abuse extends beyond trolls. That's one of the reasons I started Letters Patent -- and that's why I linked to Cory Doctorow's piece outlining Apple's long history of IP abuse.