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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

#261

Post by matheusmoreira »

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.

It's not bogus. It's actually the only thing that justifies the mere existence of patents. If it doesn't enable better products for us then what's the point? Deviations from this social contract should not be tolerared, especially net-negative activity such as rent seeking by trolling companies and individuals.

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

#262

Post by cycomanic »

vesinisa wrote: post #145
lelanthran wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact bogus patents help established companies even more, because the trolls at least have to defend those patents in court at times, a small new player who is threatened by a large established one over some bogus patent can't afford to defend themselves. At one point when Microsoft was still in the phone business, I recall an article pointing out that Microsoft made more money off android in a single year (unspe…

I think you might be referring to the patents from Nokia. These are licensed on FRAND terms. Nokia was one of the original inventors of GSM and owns a considerable patent portfolio especially on the network tech.

I don't think MS ever owned the Nokia communication patents. They only took over the phone and devices business. Nokia the telecom and information technology company still lives and bought (merged with) Alcatel who had previously bought Lucent.

Bell labs (who is doing a lot of telecom R&D) for example is owned by Nokia now (it's called Nokia Bell labs)

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

#263

Post by epc »

appleflaxen wrote: post #245
epc wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s absolutely hyperbole, in the same way the Vogons clearly published the development of the interstellar bypass In a closet behind a door labeled something like “tiger, do not enter”.

How, precisely, would you have determined that an online donation to a charity usinga web site in 1995 would violate a patent for an electronic offertory box written and granted before the web existed? Remember, you can only use Lexis/Nexis or the U.s. PTO offices, the patent corpus is not available to the public on the web.

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

#264

Post by AmericanChopper »

crispyambulance wrote: post #224
AmericanChopper wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/usag…

You’re really just restating the claim that we don’t need intellectual property protections, without making any attempt to explain why.

Your suggestion that the global economy could shift towards an isolationist model is frankly enough to dismiss your idea without much further scrutiny.

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

#265

Post by avsteele »

I'll give my opinion as someone who holds several patents, has filed for protection internationally under the PCT, and whose business is based on proprietary technology as well:

The entire system is useless and should be abolished.

1) You can get nonsense patented if you are patient enough and keep going back to the patent offices over and over. The people who are reviewing the patents aren't in any way expert enough in the subject matter to meaningfully judge whether something is new. They should just as well issue everything that comes in the door because they aren't a meaningful block to the issuance of garbage patents. When they send back objections they are usually non-sequiturs (>90% of the time)

2) "Holding the patent gives you the right to exclude". This is useless for a small fry anyway because patent litigation is so costly that unless you are in a huge industry it will never be worth it go to court anyway.

3) The patent doesn't meaningfully put any real ideas into the public domain. The info in the patent itself is the tiniest fraction of what you'd need to know to make a working product. The useful stuff is the trade secrets and know-how. I could see this being not the case in a few select fields like biotech.

4) The system is a net drain on the economy. Big corps have to keep filing their nonsense patents to protect themselves from each other. None of these filings are adding value.

Funders like to see patents. But I think this is because they don't appreciate the weaknesses of the system.

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

#266

Post by bawolff »

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.

That's still a restraint on innovation. Money going to licensing can't be spent on salaries.

If we assume free licensing then you might as well cut out the middle man and abolish patents.

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

#267

Post by gruez »

henvic wrote: post #242
nl wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Alas, there's no such thing as unbiased.

So basically, neutrality nihilism? ie. "every source is biased so it doesn't matter whether I'm getting my climate change facts from the IPCC or InfoWars".

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

#268

Post by anticensor »

andi999 wrote: post #149
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.

There is no extension (and even filing system) for copyright. Do you want to introduce that?

Yes, and unregistered copyright would be treated as public domain.

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

#269

Post by andi999 »

anticensor wrote: post #268
andi999 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no extension (and even filing system) for copyright. Do you want to introduce that?

Yes, and unregistered copyright would be treated as public domain.

So you write a letter and dont want it published by the recipient, you need to file? Or all software written in a company, file? What about confidential stuff, file?

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

#270

Post by anticensor »

andi999 wrote: post #269
anticensor wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and unregistered copyright would be treated as public domain.

So you write a letter and dont want it published by the recipient, you need to file? Or all software written in a company, file? What about confidential stuff, file?

Abolition of intellectual property does not mean abolition of privacy; original author will still have the right of initial publication, but once published, no privacy assumptions and no recirculation restrictions unless registered.
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