Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

It takes about 30 seconds to realize that the above patent has zero novelty.

I'm not going to disagree with the patent office being underfunded, but the fact is that whoever granted this patent had a complete lack of critical reasoning skills, and no amount of time was going to help that.

I see this all the time with the patent office. They'll approve any madlib-style patent without thinking about it at all. Any patent of the form "______ wirelessly" gets approved. "________ with a computer" is the other offender. Sure, maybe they reject it on the first pass, but it always makes it through the second pass.

Want to know the truth about how patent approval works? Talk to a patent attorney who files them. Here's some true things about getting your patent accepted:

1. Novelty doesn't matter at all.

2. The lawyer doesn't need to understand anything about the technology to write up the patent. They do need a few of your buzzwords, but that's it.

3. Patents always get rejected the first time, and then if your lawyer is any good they always get accepted the first time.

I've got a fistful of patents myself, and the acceptance of the patent application had no relationship with the inventiveness of the invention.

I disagree. I think the most effective way to eliminate bad patents would be to eliminate patents altogether. If there are no patents then there can be no bad patents:)

More realistically, it would be more efficient to stop bad patents before they make it to the patent office and waste patent officers' time. And the best way to do that is probably to reduce the incentives to file bad patents. I don't know what the most effective way to do that is though, maybe expire patents sooner, limit the number of patents an entity can file in a period of time, increase the fee for each additional patent filed, a penalty for patents that are rejected or invalidated, require you to actually produce (or license to someone else to produce) the thing you patent in order to keep it, etc.

I was wondering the same about the $1M donation they got in 2018. Turns out they misallocated a significant portion of it to things like social outreach programs.

There is nothing wrong with having SRPs if you're a multi-billion tech giant, but a underfunded open source product shouldn't be wasting money on social programs when their primary product was broken (which, in 2018, gnome3 certainly was). At the very least, they could have used it to hold proper user-focus groups to find out how their users actually used their product.

I think the organization is suffering from a serious mismanagement issue.

150k isn't much. Probably doesn't get you through initial motions against a well funded adversary.

> Dorsey, and all the SV billionaires who made money off open source,

I wouldn't know about his actions in other open source areas, but Dorsey specifically has directly funded defense against patent and vexatious litigation around Bitcoin and against open source developers. https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022...

In particular, a billionaire funded party filed a lawsuit against a dozen current and former developers (including myself!) alleging that we owned him some $6 billion dollars in damages for failing to grant him bitcoins that he claims he lost due to a 'hack' (which sounded like something out of a bad movie plot). The plaintiff alleged that the software's MIT license was irrelevant and that the people wrote the software owe a fiduciary duty to make whole users who lost funds through no fault of the developers. ... a conclusion that would probably mark the end of volunteer contributions in open source generally since no sane person would voluntarily subject themselves to unlimited liability due to publishing some free code.

Fortunately, at considerable cost we were able to convince the court that they failed to establish that their action had more than a fanciful potential for success and got it dismissed in initial motions (though presumably they'll appeal). It also sounds like the same party intends to launch a multitude of additional lawsuits on other basis including patent infringement (which they've been filing 3-4 patents per week in furtherance of, in an apparent attack via sheer volume), and has already filed defamation lawsuits against several journalists and community members ( https://cswarchive.info/ ). Direct defense costs across all parties and actions is in the millions now, without counting the man hours and stress of the defendants, and continuing to grow without a clear end in sight. And all this is just trouble created by a single entity.

Support from those who benefit from open source systems is crucial but because of the astronomical cost of defending even laughable lawsuits attackers will continue to have an upper hand without public policy changes.

We benefit substantially already from the 2010 SPEECH act, which protects US persons from the UK's abusive libel regime. The EU is apparently considering similar legislation with respect to the UK that if in place would likely have protected at least one of the people currently being sued. But the abuse of lawsuits for coercion and extortion aren't limited to libel or the UK-- rather, attackers will use the easiest path and with that one closed they'll use others.