He's a different kind of troll in his own right but I love geohot and I want only the best for comma.ai. Give them hell.
Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit
81–90 of 318 posts
Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit
#82"comma isn’t run by rational actors in suits sitting on a committee. It’s run by me, George Hotz. I’m willing to lose $1M before I give him $10k." This stance is admirable but comma.ai is partly owned by investors. Isn't he obliged to find the lowest cost solution to this ? Or is George Hotz planning to spend his personal money on the lawsuit ?
comma was profitable pre-investment, so Geohot has a lot of leeway to do what he wants.
Besides, there is no fiduciary requirement to handle situations like this in any particular way. Fiduciary duty is to keep the business operating. Maximizing profit and minimizing costs are generally good practices; but they are not (legally) fiduciary duties.
Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit
#83These are infuriating.
Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit
#84"comma isn’t run by rational actors in suits sitting on a committee. It’s run by me, George Hotz. I’m willing to lose $1M before I give him $10k." This stance is admirable but comma.ai is partly owned by investors. Isn't he obliged to find the lowest cost solution to this ? Or is George Hotz planning to spend his personal money on the lawsuit ?
It's easy to argue that spending $1M on deterrence once is cheaper than paying each patent troll who asks $10k.
It's also likely that this post is part of the defense strategy. If you were the patent troll, what would you do at this point - withdraw the claim and try again with an easier victim, or try to find out whether the "if this continues" part is true?
Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit
#85I frankly don't understand why a judge or jury would ever find for a company which has no revenue, other than through litigation settlements. I mean if they're not even selling a license or royalties for their patents, any cases should be dismissed. We can call it the "use it or lose it" rule for patents.
There’s a simple reason for this - corruption. That’s why most of this suits are filed in a specific court in texas
Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit
#86"comma isn’t run by rational actors in suits sitting on a committee. It’s run by me, George Hotz. I’m willing to lose $1M before I give him $10k." This stance is admirable but comma.ai is partly owned by investors. Isn't he obliged to find the lowest cost solution to this ? Or is George Hotz planning to spend his personal money on the lawsuit ?
It's easy to argue that spending $1M on deterrence once is cheaper than paying each patent troll who asks $10k. It's also likely that this post is part of the defense strategy. If you were the patent troll, what would you do at this point - withdraw the claim and try again with an easier victim, or try to find out whether the "if this continues" part is true?
"If you were the patent troll, what would you do at this point ?"
If I could get the trial moved to a jurisdiction where I'm friends with a judge, which I recall was part of the strategy, I'd keep trolling. While geohot gets love on a hacker forum like HN, most courts (and people in general) as far as I can tell just assume guilt.
Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit
#87Patent trolls are one of many reasons to have personal and business finances buttoned up with proper LLC and other financial instruments.
Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit
#88Who was the tech big-wig who also took on the trolls? (other than Cloudflare..)
Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
The patent in the complaint doesn't even have anything to do with what we do as a company! It describes a system that calls 911 when it detects a crash (like onstar). Ignore the (very generic) title and read on in the actual patent. https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/10454707 We write open source ADAS software, and it doesn't have any functionality like that: https://github.com/commaai/openpilot But for…
The disclosures in the patent aren't what they are suing you over. Read the claims. Patents like this often have a lot of stuff shoved into the disclosure so that they can keep the patent application alive to write more patents based on the original disclosure. The claims appear to be written to read on devices like yours: My knowledge of your system is a bit dated, but I thought you had a device that you plugged int…
The DARPA Grand Challenge ran in 2004 and 2005 (i.e. before 2007) and the cars there definitely all had emergency shut off mechanisms.
Maybe one of the competitors used an existing (i.e. not custom made) car part for this?
———
Found this from 2004:
“A DARPA-provided electronic stop device allowed a remote control shut-down of the vehicle in case of an emergency”
Is that a lead?
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Reinhold-Behringer/publ...
Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit
#90There needs to be an anti-patent-troll membership organization. You pay a fee relative to some metric and the organization acts as insurance against parent trolls by fully defending any patent lawsuits that are obviously unjustified. And to keep costs low, membership in this organization would be public to deter patent trolls from even trying to sue a member in the first place.