61–70 of 197 posts
Abolish the patent system and see innovation leap ahead and prices precipitously drop.
When something like this happens, it should automatically reduce the burden for contesting the other patents owned by the same entity.
More like the judge ought to award damages in terms of the time and means required for setting up that fundraiser and all other extra-legal expenses on top of the lawyers whose pro bono work could have been better spent. If the troll, or its parent, has to pay that out of pocket, in addition to losing the patent, maybe that makes an impression.
Can someone ELI5 what this the RPI patent (US9936086B2) even tried to patent? Their claims look like the description of just any digital camera and a connected web service (Google Photos). [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US9936086B2/en
Shotwell's feature kind of fits the description is that it downloads photos from a WiFi connection, organizes the photos by theme/date/etc (filtering), and shares the photos to FB/Twitter/etc (sending via WiFi). Basically any network connected photo editing/organizing software is in dangerous.
The patent obviously lacks innovation and slipped through the approval process. The court agreed and invalidated the patent.
> Perhaps it's time for the law to adjust to the point where the stakes for the troll are high enough to make it less appealing as a business? No, that's just polishing the brass on the Titanic. Patents on software just shouldn't exist. At all. We already have established laws where you can't patent maths. An algorithm is just a function. It should be covered by the maths disqualifier. The fact that a smartphone coul…
Non-works-for-hire last for some fixed time, or until all the authors/inventors are dead, whichever comes first. A principal distinction between "works-for-hire" and "private works" is that a private owned work gives any of the authors/inventors unilateral rights to rescind contracts without contractual repercussion.
> “offers a number of ways to wirelessly share photos online such as through social media.” How was it possible to patent this in 2018? https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/01/50/f8/a8e7c12...
> How was it possible to patent this in 2018? Easy. I'm a former patent examiner and in my view, the root cause of most bad patents is obviously the lack of time patent examiners get. Most people here don't understand how patents are granted. Patent examiners don't get a lot of time. If I'm an examiner, and I can't find it in the time provided, and the application doesn't have some other issues (101, 112, etc.), the…
I doubt anyone criticises the workers at the bottom, if/once they're aware of said time constraints. Rather, the caring about the quality of the work is something the person who decides on the time constraints clearly doesn't do.
It is a matter of caring, but yeah of course it is decided by a higher-up, not every person working there being individually lax. (I don't expect google/malboro/shell/... employees to be individually evil either, for example, even if the companies clearly could be better-respected if they cared about doing their work in society well.)
> Perhaps it's time for the law to adjust to the point where the stakes for the troll are high Take that further. The stakes should be high against all adjacent patent holders. Ultimately if we want to keep a working patent system it's too much work to rely on piecemeal independent cases like this, albeit a great success. The system has to self-police to be fair, and perhaps the best people to keep trolls and mischie…
> Ultimately its probably better if we move to a world where a lot of "intellectual property" expires with it's holder and passes into the public domain. I fully agree with you (and it's one of the few strongly held opinions of mine), but I'm not really sure why you would bring this up within the context of patent trolls. Patents do run out, rather quickly even. It's other intellectual property -- namely copyright --…
Not to get off-topic with copyright despite being an "older author", notwithstanding the sibling comments, I'd agree it's too long.
Now, it's nice that patents time-out quite quickly, and indeed that motivates for useful development, but what I'm talking about is adding serial (AND) conditions that require they're capable of being used.
Alice has a fresh patent on a method for manufacturing a drug. She can sell it to Bob who also runs a pharmaceutical company and is in the process of expanding his portfolio of medicines. If Alice sells it to Charlie who runs a hair salon and fashion company, because Charlie, who is not in the business of making medicines, she cannot sue or leverage using that patent in any way or it's immediately null and void. Charlie doesn't have an "interest" in the patent and so loses the patent by misusing it, without any further need to prove the patent invalid. Crazy as that may sound to some, I think its a reasonable amendment to present law.
The heading is somewhat misleading, in that one might read it as "the troll lost all rights to any patents, ever." If you (correctly) didn't read it that way, you can ignore the rest of this. What they actually lost is that patent. It was reexamined and all its claims were cancelled. Reexamination is a standard tactic against a patent infringement suit, and we did it all the time at Google. A reexamination is a mini-…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where can patent examiners look for prior art?
Patent examiners can look basically anywhere a member of the public can and some other places. The internal search tools check a lot of patent databases and are quite good, but take time to learn. The USPTO has a lot of subscription databases as well, including fancy AI/ML-based ones. Many examiners will also search normal search engines like Google, though this can be tricky for legal reasons. If the application was…
Presuming that "ways to wirelessly share photos online such as through social media" has not been patented before, the best place to look for prior art would be the actual existing social media products which have ways to wirelessly share photos online instead of historical patent data; an effective search would have to be for actual prior art (i.e. products and solutions), not descriptions of prior art (patents and webpages).
> Perhaps it's time for the law to adjust to the point where the stakes for the troll are high enough to make it less appealing as a business? No, that's just polishing the brass on the Titanic. Patents on software just shouldn't exist. At all. We already have established laws where you can't patent maths. An algorithm is just a function. It should be covered by the maths disqualifier. The fact that a smartphone coul…
If IP is real property, it should be taxed. The tax system I like for IP works for hire is this: each year you owe 1/4% * N (where N is the age of the IP) in taxes on the IP. Whatever you pay, the "public" (anyone/everyone else) can pay the balance to the USPTO (or LoC) to move that IP in to the public domain. Non-works-for-hire last for some fixed time, or until all the authors/inventors are dead, whichever comes fi…
Software patents shouldn't exist. The concept is patently absurd.
> Perhaps it's time for the law to adjust to the point where the stakes for the troll are high enough to make it less appealing as a business? No, that's just polishing the brass on the Titanic. Patents on software just shouldn't exist. At all. We already have established laws where you can't patent maths. An algorithm is just a function. It should be covered by the maths disqualifier. The fact that a smartphone coul…