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Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

blog.opensource.org

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Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#171

Post by throwaway82652 »

hda2 wrote: post #158
tedivm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the Gnome website they didn't have to pay their lawyers, so I'm wondering where that money went. > GNOME was represented pro-bono by Matt Berkowitz, Kieran Kieckhefer, Joy Wang and Larry Crouch from Shearman & Sterling LLP. https://foundation.gnome.org/2020/05/20/patent-case-against-...

> I'm wondering where that money went. 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, g…

This comment makes no sense at all, every open source non-profit I've ever seen has made social outreach programs their main goal. There's nothing else to spend the funding on. They can't spend a ton of money on focus groups specifically because it's not a multi-billion tech giant and these foundations legally can't be making decisions based on how to make some product profitable. You need to ask a company to do that. These foundations have to make decisions based on their stated mission which is almost always solving a social issue. So in that sense the "primary product" of the foundation is really the community around the project, it actually can't be the project itself.

If you want to start another organization that only does user focus groups then by all means do it, but otherwise you're barking up the wrong tree. The designers (not the foundation) already do user studies regularly anyway, the reason they don't do full focus groups all the time is because it gets expensive real fast.

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#172

Post by nerdponx »

throwaway82652 wrote: post #171
hda2 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm wondering where that money went. 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, g…

This comment makes no sense at all, every open source non-profit I've ever seen has made social outreach programs their main goal. There's nothing else to spend the funding on. They can't spend a ton of money on focus groups specifically because it's not a multi-billion tech giant and these foundations legally can't be making decisions based on how to make some product profitable. You need to ask a company to do that…

> making decisions based on how to make some product profitable

Who said anything about profit? How about paying devs & designers, awarding bug bounties, and user testing?

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#173

Post by car_analogy »

btrettel wrote: post #159
car_analogy wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are telling me how things currently work, I am talking about how they should work. I never said to reject things arbitrarily. Only if there is not enough time for an examination. Think of it as putting things on a backlog. If faster turn-around is wanted, more funding can be provided. Lack of funding should only make the work slower, not broaden patentability. > I'm afraid that you don't know what you're talking…

> Why would US patent law require both non-obviousness and lack of prior art, if the two are the same? The fact that claiming obviousness without prior art "never works" in the USPTO is just evidence of its deep dysfunction. In US patent law, the word "non-obvious" refers to differences between the claimed invention and prior art. See 35 USC 103: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/103 I agree that this confli…

> In US patent law, the word "non-obvious" refers to differences between the claimed invention and prior art. See 35 USC 103: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/103

> I agree that this conflicts with the colloquial use

The law you cite says, distilled:

A patent [..] may not be obtained [..] if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious [..] to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains.

This is, if anything, a superset of the colloquial use of obvious. It covers not only everything obvious to practitioners in the field, but also things that are only obvious if you are familiar with every latest invention in that field.

To clarify: You seem to believe that looking at it in terms of "differences" narrows the scope of what is obvious. Why? "Prior art" is, literally, the sum of human knowledge and invention (up to some date). To say something is obvious in terms of differences from prior art means that, if there is an obvious way (to someone skilled in the art) to accomplish the claimed invention using any prior knowledge or invention, then that invention is itself obvious.

How could you read this any other way? How could something be obvious, but become not-obvious if you referred to prior art?

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#174

Post by throwaway82652 »

nerdponx wrote: post #172
throwaway82652 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment makes no sense at all, every open source non-profit I've ever seen has made social outreach programs their main goal. There's nothing else to spend the funding on. They can't spend a ton of money on focus groups specifically because it's not a multi-billion tech giant and these foundations legally can't be making decisions based on how to make some product profitable. You need to ask a company to do that…

> making decisions based on how to make some product profitable Who said anything about profit? How about paying devs & designers, awarding bug bounties, and user testing?

Paying devs and designers to do what? Testing for what? To make a product more profitable so you can further grow the foundation? If it's not doing social outreach or otherwise fulfilling the social mission of the nonprofit then I hope you understand it falls in that category and they can't legally do that, go to any of the member companies if you want that. When these nonprofits hire actual engineers and designers it's usually only on a contract basis to fix very specific problems that have to do with social issues around the project. It's otherwise hard for them to justify hiring staff to do that.

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#175

Post by btrettel »

sfifs wrote: post #161
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…

Why can't all patent applications be mandatorially opened for a public comments period for a period of say 3 months for anyone else to file any objections? The act of patent application provisionally would protect the idea till the patent is granted. Then the examiner could look at both the application and the comments and decide whether to grant or reject the application.

US patent applications are open for third-party prior art submissions. https://www.uspto.gov/patents/initiatives/third-party-preiss...

Almost no one sends in prior art.

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#176

Post by tedivm »

throwaway82652 wrote: post #174
nerdponx wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making decisions based on how to make some product profitable Who said anything about profit? How about paying devs & designers, awarding bug bounties, and user testing?

Paying devs and designers to do what? Testing for what? To make a product more profitable so you can further grow the foundation? If it's not doing social outreach or otherwise fulfilling the social mission of the nonprofit then I hope you understand it falls in that category and they can't legally do that, go to any of the member companies if you want that. When these nonprofits hire actual engineers and designers i…

I wish you were wrong. I just looked this up out of curiousity, and Gnome themselves had their charity status denied by the IRS for this reason-

> You have a substantial nonexempt purpose because you develop software published under open source compatible licenses that authorize use by any person for any purpose, including nonexempt purposes such as commercial, recreational, or personal purposes, including campaign intervention and lobbying.

> Mere publishing under open source licenses for all to use does not show that the poor and underprivileged actually use the Tools. ? You do not limit your distribution and do not know who uses the Tools much less if they use them for artistic purposes. ? you do not know who uses the Tools much less what kind of content they create with the Tools.

That said it should be clear here that this was explicitly for a charity, not just a non profit, but even still it's pretty messed up.

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#177

Post by zvr »

isaacfrond wrote: post #164

tl;dr; He is a retired attorney and a "firm believer in the patent system” so he filed for re-examination. A random google search gives the costs mere mortals can expect for that (source: https://www.lventre.com/reexam.html ) > Ex parte reexaminations. Expect total costs to be $20,000 - $45,000.

I'm not sure he will agree with the "retired" part ;-)

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#178

Post by throwaway82652 »

tedivm wrote: post #176
throwaway82652 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying devs and designers to do what? Testing for what? To make a product more profitable so you can further grow the foundation? If it's not doing social outreach or otherwise fulfilling the social mission of the nonprofit then I hope you understand it falls in that category and they can't legally do that, go to any of the member companies if you want that. When these nonprofits hire actual engineers and designers i…

I wish you were wrong. I just looked this up out of curiousity, and Gnome themselves had their charity status denied by the IRS for this reason- > You have a substantial nonexempt purpose because you develop software published under open source compatible licenses that authorize use by any person for any purpose, including nonexempt purposes such as commercial, recreational, or personal purposes, including campaign i…

I don't think it's that messed up. If you really want to make something that qualifies as a charity (or a for-profit business) then you can just do that separately. The existence of this foundation doesn't get in the way, they're a home for the trademarks and a few other things but otherwise they don't have much bearing on what you would do.

But there are some people at the foundation who would make it their goal to hire more developers, if the funding was there, it currently isn't.

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#179

Post by robbedpeter »

thechao wrote: post #102
robbedpeter wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This leads to the notion of being taxed for having a brain. Software patents shouldn't exist. The concept is patently absurd.

I fucking hate software patents. The best part about taxing them, like this, is that SW patents become a major financial liability.

If we're doing something stupid, the correct course of action is to stop doing the stupid thing, not to refine the stupidity. Software patents are stupid.

Re: Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

#180

Post by tssva »

throwaway82652 wrote: post #134
tssva wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When GNOME was raising the 150k they said they would not settle and would battle until the patent was overturned. People donated based upon this and then GNOME settled. This is why when things like the he said/she said argument with System 76 have come up I am mystified that some people are ready to believe GNOME's take. They have already shown that they are a project whose leadership's word can't be trusted.

>I am mystified that some people are ready to believe GNOME's take I won't comment on the issue itself, but the way you're framing this is total and complete nonsense. GNOME didn't have a "take", it was a blog written independently by one developer. You're confusing the Foundation itself with random developers. AFAIK System 76 also never put out any official statements, it was again more random unofficial statements…

I'm not confusing a lone developer with the GNOME Foundation. I was referencing statements made in a GNOME Foundation press release.
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