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Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

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Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#141

Post by webmaven »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #5

There needs to be anti-SLAPP style legislation for patent trolls. I honestly don't understand why there isn't: it seems like an easy PR win for legislators. Who would be against this (except patent trolls)?

> There needs to be anti-SLAPP style legislation for patent trolls. I honestly don't understand why there isn't: it seems like an easy PR win for legislators. Who would be against this (except patent trolls)?

The American Intellectual Property Law Association, for one.

It isn't too hard to look up who supported and opposed the Patent Reform Acts of 2005, 2007, and 2009. Wikipedia has pretty good summaries.

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#142

Post by rubyist5eva »

kstrauser wrote: post #122
rubyist5eva wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is insane, and we should just not tax property instead :)

If you're asking the government to protect your property from people encroaching on it, provide court systems to address disputes over it, or accept other government services to maintain it, you should be taxed on it.

I didn’t ask the government for anything.

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#143

Post by [deleted] »

PeterisP wrote: post #68
btrettel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What I'm reading in your description is that the process is designed to find cases where someone has patented the same thing before, but not designed to find things that should be fundamentally unpatentable ('obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art') and many other people are doing the similar thing in their products but not trying to patent it (b…

[deleted]

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#144

Post by mulmen »

webmaven wrote: post #139
chmod775 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's ridiculous. Having lots of such work is no excuse to do it worse. It is however an excuse to have a growing backlog. When it takes 10 years to have a patent granted governments will do something about it, but they won't if you "make do". Appointments for certain government offices in my municipality are booked for 3 months in advance right now. It made the news and the local government is increasing staff. Thi…

> Having lots of such work is no excuse to do it worse. It is however an excuse to have a growing backlog. Unfortunately, examiners are evaluated based upon the number of applications they process. Furthermore, when an examiner denies a patent or a claim, the patent application can be amended and refiled. Over and over again. Until the examiner grants the patent. Which still only counts as one patent toward the exami…

> Unfortunately, examiners are evaluated based upon the number of applications they process.

Well that sounds like it could be the entire problem.

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#145

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

Gigachad wrote: post #119
TimTheTinker wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patents have served society significantly. Without them, companies would develop new technology and keep it secret, forcing others to guess or reverse-engineer the process -- at which point they would likely keep it secret as well. So many governments give people a limited (usually If you look through the US patent archives, there are instructions for all sorts of manufacturing and construction technologies that woul…

They still keep it secret though. The patent system didn't allow us to work out how all the proprietary microcontrollers and SoCs work so we have projects like the one trying to reverse engineer the M1. And the publish this reverse engineering for free without the help of the patent system. Half of the patents are on absolutely trivial stuff that reverse engineering means looking at it for 1 minute.

This is basically the entire raison d'être for GPLv3.

It doesn't matter much if the source code is available, or if the specification is available, if you can't actually write code to use it.

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#146

Post by ncmncm »

robocat wrote: post #131
perihelions wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNOME did not pay in the original settlement. - "I can confirm that we have not paid RPI or Leigh Rothschild for this settlement." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23264806

> not paid RPI or Leigh Rothschild for this settlement That statement still leaves a lot of people that they could have paid for that settlement (or paid RPI/Leigh for a different settlement).

Probably paid the troll's lawyer, instead. Which is of course also the troll.

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#147

Post by btrettel »

car_analogy wrote: post #137
btrettel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

While I agree the USPTO should be better funded and examiners should have more time, what I find problematic is the attitude of the current approach, and of your solutions. That there is a torrent of bad patents, and the USPTO needs enough resources to fight them off, or they'll break through. No! The USPTO is not a defending army trying to keep out barbarians. It grants patents. If it does not have time, or resource…

> No! The USPTO is not a defending army trying to keep out barbarians. It grants patents. If it does not have time, or resources, then it does not grant patents. If the patent examiner feels they don't have enough time, the patent is denied - too bad. You can re-file, paying a fee for extended examination.

Rejections can not be arbitrary. If the examiner can't find prior art but wants to reject the application, what are they going to write in their office action, the response to the patent application? "I couldn't find anything, but I don't like your application, so I'm going to reject you." As a junior examiner, everything I did had to be approved by someone. There's no way that would get approved. I'd be told by my primary examiner to go back and find something if I want to reject, and by the way, I don't get any extra time.

I haven't heard of any examiner being fired for poor quality, but repeatedly writing rejections with no basis would probably get an examiner fired for poor quality eventually.

And the applicant can appeal. As far as I'm aware the examiner gets no time at all to respond to an appeal! (I didn't get any time for the one appeal that I had.) The examiner does get time to respond to an RCE or continuation. It doesn't take too many appeals to seriously impact an examiner's productivity metrics, and if the examiner falls below 95% of their target for too long, they're likely to be fired. [0]

A lot of attorneys complain that the USPTO is far too harsh. And I think they have some fair points. Only about half of patent applications are issued as patents within 3 years. The vast majority of applications (over 80% last I checked) are rejected in the first action. (I rejected every application I received in the first action.) The process needs to be fair. So there need to be mechanisms to prevent the USPTO from simply rejecting everything to be safe. If the USPTO rejects everything, why even bother having a patent system? (Note that I'm not defending the USPTO's current system, which I think is absurd to give the examiner no time for an appeal.)

> P.S.: I feel I should bring up non-obviousness - prior-art is not the only disqualifier.

I'm afraid that you don't know what you're talking about here. Obviousness is a prior art rejection, and it's the most common type of prior art rejection. An examiner could go on "official notice" and just declare something obvious or known without prior art, but as far as I'm aware that never works.

[0] The way these metrics work (roughly) is that certain actions get a time added to a counter. Then your "production" is calculated as the amount of time you earned (the counter) divided by the amount of time you spent in examination.

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#148

Post by mplewis »

codedokode wrote: post #81

This seems like a loss. Gnome and other companies had to pay money (as I understand) for an invalid patent, a patent lawyer had to pay for re-examination and a patent troll lost nothing except for a patent that was invalid anyway. Are vaguely worded patents legal? For example, if someone in the age of black-and-white TV would patent an idea that "colors can be transmitted wirelessly or by wire, decoded or not decoded…

What would make a vaguely worded patent illegal?

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#149

Post by webmaven »

mulmen wrote: post #144
webmaven wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having lots of such work is no excuse to do it worse. It is however an excuse to have a growing backlog. Unfortunately, examiners are evaluated based upon the number of applications they process. Furthermore, when an examiner denies a patent or a claim, the patent application can be amended and refiled. Over and over again. Until the examiner grants the patent. Which still only counts as one patent toward the exami…

> Unfortunately, examiners are evaluated based upon the number of applications they process. Well that sounds like it could be the entire problem.

Well, not the entire problem, but yeah, a major chunk of it.

The problem of how to evaluate examiners' productivity is pretty similar to evaluating software developers'.

Unfortunately, the measure that is being used is akin to counting PRs merged.

It isn't hard to see how the PTO arrived at this method of evaluation: patent examiner time is their most constrained resource and they aren't provided the funds to hire more examiners, so of course they are focused on making the most efficient use of examiners' time to evaluate as many patent applications as they can.

Even so, patents are examined pretty thoroughly (just not thoroughly enough to prevent any bogus ones from slipping through) and it takes almost two years for a patent to be granted.

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#150

Post by danamit »

ww520 wrote: post #63
karmanyaahm wrote: post #3

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

The claims basically say the system is a device with wireless input and wireless output (think a computer with WiFi in/out connections). The device receives a bunch of photos from the wireless input, filters the photo based on some criteria, and sends the filtered resulting photos to another mobile devices via the wireless output. Shotwell's feature kind of fits the description is that it downloads photos from a WiFi…

Why patents seem to thrive in some countries more than others?
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