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Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

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Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#131

Post by saintfire »

hnburnsy wrote: post #98

>The patents relied on by Sable were filed around the turn of the century, and they addressed the hardware-based router technology of the day. At first I was wondering what routers existed back in 1900, then realized it was not that turn of the century. I think this is the first time I have see 'turn of the century' refer to 1999->2000. Chicago Manual of Style has some good usage suggestions on this... https://www.ch…

FWIW I also defaulted to 1900 and think mentioning the millennium is far less ambiguous than the century.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#132

Post by echelon »

criddell wrote: post #125
nordsieck wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $500/year per patent, will ensure use it (if you think it is valuable) or lose it. Not really. Some patents are fantastically valuable to patent trolls. Some are not. A $500/year fee isn't going to deter a "company" of lawyers who are making millions soaking businesses with patents that should never have been granted. If you want a scheme that actually does what you want, you'd need something like: The owner of the…

Maybe when you file the patent, you have to submit an anticipated value statement and you are taxed some % / year on that anticipated value. If somebody violates the patent, you can sue them for up to the amount you anticipated, but not more. In the future you can amend the value claim, but you can only adjust it down.

That's awful for protecting innovation. You don't know the market value of each individual invention with that level of granularity.

Companies and researchers should be free to patent to protect themselves, but patent trolls with no clear technological development (no lab, no product, no licensing+developing) should be stopped.

It seems easy to me to draw a bounding box around these behaviors with a simple test. Perhaps like a Howey test [1], but for patent trolling.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_v._W._J._Howey_Co.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#133

Post by DistractionRect »

fuhrtf wrote: post #34

Cloudflare is like Google early days. They could spend resources on things for the good of the all. In this case they’re spending millions when they could have settled for much cheaper. Thanks Cloudflare.

It probably wouldn't have been cheaper. The settlement would likely look like a fixed fee for previous use + yearly fee for X years before renegotiation, renegotiated y times before the patent expired.

It's likely that over the lifetime of the patent, the total cost would have been more than the cost to fight it, and as the a sibling pointed out, settling begets more suits + settlements. It adds up fast.

This isn't Cloudflare being "good," it's in their best interest to fight frivolous suits.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#135

Post by brlewis »

shagie wrote: post #119
brlewis wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Board game rules fall under patents Please supply evidence. All links in your comment relate to a patent to an invention where lasers are an essential part of the claims. I'm not convinced that rules alone would be patentable subject matter.

https://www.upcounsel.com/board-game-patents https://patentpc.com/blog/example-of-how-a-board-game-is-pat... https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/493249/mythbusting-game-des... https://www.theiplawblog.com/2019/04/articles/intellectual-p... http://www.gamecabinet.com/info/PatentSearch.html https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/93654/blue-and-gray-paten... (Blue and Gray) - this particular one is well known because Sid Sacks…

> https://patents.google.com/patent/US5662332A/en (Magic The Gathering)

Thank you. I concede, this one is proof that an application that's essentially board game rules can be accepted. Whether rules not tied to a particular machine should be accepted is debatable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-or-transformation_test...?

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#136

Post by mike_d »

nordsieck wrote: post #95
thelastgallon wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patents are property and we need taxes/fee on it. $500/year per patent, will ensure use it (if you think it is valuable) or lose it. This is no different from domain names, most people pay $10 - $100/year just to keep a domain name. Some domain names are used, most aren't. These taxes can fund free education or healthcare or defense.

> $500/year per patent, will ensure use it (if you think it is valuable) or lose it. Not really. Some patents are fantastically valuable to patent trolls. Some are not. A $500/year fee isn't going to deter a "company" of lawyers who are making millions soaking businesses with patents that should never have been granted. If you want a scheme that actually does what you want, you'd need something like: The owner of the…

> The owner of the patent chooses the fee that they pay per year. And anyone can pay that fee * the remaining years on the patent * some multiplier (probably in the 2-10 range) to prematurely end the patent.

So basically ending patents? If you invent something fantastic, say a way for a self driving car to perfectly sense its surroundings, Ford could just come in and pay whatever amount to invalidate your patent and prevent you from bringing your invention to market?

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#138

Post by anonymouskimmer »

freejazz wrote: post #129
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the text of the IP clause of the US Constitution I have wondered whether selling or licensing of IP (or even assigning it to a corporation) is technically allowable. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8... : To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; "Exclu…

It means the right is exclusively granted with them. I.e. no one besides the author gets to control the exclusive rights of a patent. By your logic, they can't even license it because "it's an exclusive right".

They control the license according to the terms of a license. But once a patent is sold the author of it no longer has any right to it.

Authors and inventors are mentioned with the same language in the clause. Since it has always been true that authors can basically only profit from their writings by selling copies or originals of their works (without selling the right to the copyrighted material itself) then some form of licensing is necessarily included in the clause for both copyright and patents.

There may have been journalists at the time who wrote works for newspapers owned by others. If so, this would be a reason to include the right of selling all of the rights to one's writings or inventions in the clause. I genuinely don't know if this was the case though.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#139

Post by efitz »

thelastgallon wrote: post #79
duped wrote: post #31

There needs to be a "use it or lose it" doctrine/law around technological IP. I get all the arguments around creating a market for the patent rights, but it just leads to these bottom feeders creating no value and increasing costs for the industry and consumers.

Patents are property and we need taxes/fee on it. $500/year per patent, will ensure use it (if you think it is valuable) or lose it. This is no different from domain names, most people pay $10 - $100/year just to keep a domain name. Some domain names are used, most aren't. These taxes can fund free education or healthcare or defense.

No, the fee should be exponential, to keep people from keeping technology out of the public domain longer than necessary.

For example, maybe the fee is $10000 for the first year. This doesn't come close to recouping the cost of a single enforcement action, but it makes sure that someone has some skin in the game. Then every year the cost gets 10x more expensive. Of course you are free to choose your own base and multiplier.

For someone to keep a patent for 5 years, the total cost would be $10k + $100k + $1M + $10M + $100M = $111110000. Maybe it's worth it for a patent like the light bulb. Probably not worth it for a drinking bird toy. But either way, the value decision is up to the patent holder, and the cost of the patent incentivizes rapid monetization rather than squatting.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#140

Post by perlgeek »

thelastgallon wrote: post #79
duped wrote: post #31

There needs to be a "use it or lose it" doctrine/law around technological IP. I get all the arguments around creating a market for the patent rights, but it just leads to these bottom feeders creating no value and increasing costs for the industry and consumers.

Patents are property and we need taxes/fee on it. $500/year per patent, will ensure use it (if you think it is valuable) or lose it. This is no different from domain names, most people pay $10 - $100/year just to keep a domain name. Some domain names are used, most aren't. These taxes can fund free education or healthcare or defense.

Another valuation/taxation scheme I've read about is: you can value your patent however you want, and it's taxed based on that value.

The kicker is: the values are public, and if anybody wants to buy it for something higher than the assigned value (or maybe some fixed percentage above the assigned value), you HAVE to sell. Of course, the buyer is then taxed at the higher value.

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