Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

blog.comma.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 318 posts

Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

#121

Post by dmix »

djsamseng wrote: post #118
wombatpm wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Run the numbers: Assuming you need a legal staff of 20 with avg cost 500k per. So that’s 10 million per year. Double it for rent, SGA, etc. we’re at 20 million per year. Offer a protection package at 10k per year, you need 2000 paying customers. Since all the lawyers are on staff, you can have them invalidating patents when not defending case. If you structure it like a mutual insurance company, you could return a po…

Just make sure you include a way for the rest of us non founders to donate to the cause! Time to start building a neural net to invalidate patent trolls.

They could do a substack type of blog or Youtube channel documenting their battles and covering the issue. Become the industry expert that all the media sources from.

Content is always super valuable for companies with a social good angle.

Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

#122

Post by mauvehaus »

cratermoon wrote: post #115
acdha wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s John Walker’s proposal for that in 1993 after getting extorted by the XOR patent troll: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_105.html I think the problem is that most of the major companies are comfortable writing it off as a cost of doing business and don’t want to give up the possibility of using strategic patent suits themselves.

> don’t want to give up the possibility of using strategic patent suits themselves This is a highly under-appreciated aspect of the patent world. Companies that buy and own lots of patents do so defensively. Big companies even enter into patent cross-licensing agreements with each other, where they basically say "I know you probably infringe on my patents and I probably infringe on yours, but we'll make a deal and in…

Having beaten my head against the immovable mass of Quickbooks, I'm shocked to find myself cheering Intuit for anything. I'm not about to switch back, but that earns my grudging respect.

Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

#123

Post by _carbyau_ »

pxmpxm wrote: post #91
labrador wrote: post #3

I always thought Hotz an interesting character. This paragraph adds to that impression: "What he didn’t take into account is that 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. We will hire an amazing legal team, fight this, and while doing so invalidate his patents so they can’t be used against anyone else. Not because…

There very well may be a second order game theory at play - not only you broadcast far and wide that litigation will be exceedingly costly for anyone that tries, but you add an explicit threat that any attempt will result in invalidation risk to plaintiff patent portfolio. For patent trolls, time spent on legal is mostly opportunity cost, but killing their patent portfolio has a real dollar cost associated to it.

I agree with this. There is a legal fight. Then there is a legal fight to the corporate death.

By turning the former into the latter, it should make people think twice. But then people aren't necessarily rational.

Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

#124

Post by KerrAvon »

sometimeshuman wrote: post #86
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s not how patent litigation works. And a small-time troll may not be able to afford to go to trial.

Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

#126

Post by justapassenger »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #82
sometimeshuman wrote: post #78

"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.

comma was profitable. Geohot is open about them not being anymore, so their leeway situation is much different now.

They released new HW, that gives them lower margins and volume didn’t pickup as much as they planned.

Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

#127

Post by KerrAvon »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #62
frellus wrote: post #52

I 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.

Not every company that has no revenue other than through lawsuits got there by choice. Someone can copy your invention and sell it for less (or give it out for free), and you will be screwed. There are lots of calls for exponentially escalating fees for patents over their life, and I think that is a much better idea than "use it or lose it."

Fees for what?

I’m not convinced there’s any value in the patent system in the 21st century. Maybe it should be abolished. Who is it now helping? Certainly not the individual inventors it was meant to encourage.

Software patents should absolutely be prohibited altogether. They help no one; they’re not useful for small inventors and they’re just a pointless tax paid to patent trolls on innovation for everyone else. (I am a named inventor on many software patents.)

Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

#128

Post by matheusmoreira »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #8

Any engineer who has ever filed a software patent soon realizes that the entire patent system in America (at least with respect to software) is a scam. It seems to be designed to enrich lawyers and tax engineers. It's almost like all the kids in school who failed out of CS 101 went to law school and cooked up a scheme to tax their classmates who actually stuck it out and built something. Why the hell do we have a sys…

At least it's just 20 years unlike copyright's functionally infinite state-granted monopoly on data...

Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

#129

Post by grayfaced »

ummonk wrote: post #90

There 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.

The risk models for potential members would vary wildly. The fee structure would have to account for different levels of risk based on the activity of members. And then what if one member faces a lawsuit that could be an existential threat to that company, how much of a legal defense is the appropriate response? And then who determines the legal strategy (settle vs court)?

This sounds like ransomware insurance. Often you would expect the insurance to help you recover from losses but instead they just pay the ransoms since it's cheaper. Which in-turn makes the insurance holders even more of a juicy target.

Re: Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

#130

Post by matheusmoreira »

omginternets wrote: post #94
dqpb wrote: post #75

Is there a path toward criminal lawsuits against patent trolls?

I believe a lawsuit is always a civil case. Do you mean criminal charges? I think the bar is pretty high for that (like, fraud or conspiracy).

Filing an invalid intellectual property claim should be considered fraud. Especially invalid patents with existing prior art and automated DMCA claims. Granting invalid patents should also be fraud. If a patent is granted despite the existence of prior art, whoever granted it has clearly caused damage to society.
Post reply on HN