"stop the trolls through prior art"
Use Alice instead.
Using prior art is a waste of time.
Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial
151–160 of 426 posts
Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial
#152No mention of Cloudflare’s own large portfolio of software patents. Wonder when they’ll start enforcing their patent on CNAME flattening, for example: https://patents.justia.com/patent/11159479 Edit; clarity
Why should there be a mention about their patents?
Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial
#153There 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.
patent maintenance fees are already higher than that.
amusing opinions that remind me not to trust them
Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If we take the position that an inventor should be able to try and get profit from their invention The premise is flawed, the conclusion can only be wrong. Patents are an invention by the bourgeoisie to extend their control of the production of anything and extract as much money from it, but to make it acceptable they have the play the image of the "lone inventor in their garage". This inventor doesn't exist. No in…
To continue your point, here is my proposal to replace intellectual property: Pay the inventor for their work , not the result of that work. This has several advantages: 1. Inventors get paid to fail. Failure is a critical step in the process of invention. 2. Inventors get paid immediately. How can an inventor be expected to have time to invent something if their only means of income happens after the work of inventi…
You're proposing that the state pay a good wage to anyone who chooses to be a full time inventor, regardless of the results? Does that include paying for whatever facilities might be required?
Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial
#155Earlier 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.
Domain names pay per year because there's an ongoing service attached. There's no such thing for patent (besides fee to file) Why punish patent holders because of patent trolls or garbage patents ? Make it unprofitable to be a troll, and they will go away. Trolls need to be tagged , like pirates. There should be rules to make hunting for trolls profitable. For that, you need a "bounty". Here's my take: In any patent…
> Domain names pay per year because there's an ongoing service attached. There's no such thing for patent
Erm, what service? A record in a database? How's that different from a patent office? I guess there's fancy registrar website...to do what...help me pay my recurring bill?
Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial
#156Reminds me of the patent troll from Silicon Valley
Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial
#157There 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.
law of unintended consequences the moment you put an expiration date on patents due to lack of use, watch moneyed competitors sitting around waiting for your patent to expire instead of using yours to bring it to market
then you shouldn’t form the patent then as you would still just be increasing costs for the industry by existing and delaying things
you could have just written about it on your blog and been the same place and been a net positive for society
Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial
#158this is an excellent summary of how the system works. Every month HN has a thread like this, and every month the usual suspects rant about how patents are fucked up, and there needs to be this, that, or the other. And nothing changes. Ask your local candidates for Congress if they'll support removing patentability for software. That's how you solve this problem.
They won't.
The reason patents (and copyright) have gotten so bad is a mixture of corrupt lobbying activity and a quagmire of questionable international treaties.
Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial
#159Lots of patent hate in the first few comments. If we take the position that an inventor should be able to try and get profit from their invention how can we protect that without patent system?
The myth of patents is that some inventor working in their garage comes up with a genius invention, patents it, and then can leverage that patent-granted period of exclusivity into a thriving business. Hard work and smarts translating directly into rewards! This is, of course, a myth. It's not impossible for that to happen, theoretically, but the way the patent system actually works these days is that large companies…
It's not a myth!
My uncle is such a garage inventor, and has made a comfortable living for himself by licensing a number of different inventions.
One of the things he invented was the Zipit drain cleaner. It's a long piece of plastic with barbs on it. You shove it down your drain, pull it back out, and it pulls out a gigantic disgusting hairball that you had no idea was down there!
It's really quite remarkable, it works so much better than what people were using to unclog their drains before. It seems obvious in retrospect, so why weren't such products already on the market?
Unfortunately after seeing the success a competitor decided to copy it and, when my uncle tried to sue, the competitor got the patent invalided. Meanwhile my uncle lost much of his savings in legal fees.
https://usinventor.org/portfolio-items/34660/
In my (biased) opinion, this was a case of a legitimate, deserving patent. But all the junk patents and patent trolls, and the arms race you describe, have shifted expectations so much that the patent review board now tends to invalidate everything brought before them. So now the patent system doesn't even work for the people it's supposed to work for, since when a small inventor makes something actually worth patenting, a big company can just invalidate the patent.
With all that said, I do agree that software patents are pretty broken. If nothing else, the 20-year time limit is way too long, as technology moves much faster than that. We are constantly building the next layer on top of whatever was invented last decade, so last decade's inventions have either become foundational or have been discarded. Patenting an idea means it has to end up in the later category, as a proprietary idea cannot be made foundational; the industry must work around it. Meanwhile, the upfront investment cost in software ideas is much lower than other kinds of inventions, so there's no need for 20 years of royalties to incentivize it. I think software patents could make a lot more sense with something like a 3-year time limit. But I'm not really sure it's needed at all, as first-mover advantage seems sufficient to reward many software inventions.
(Disclosure/disclaimer: I work for Cloudflare, but obviously the above is personal opinions. I am proud of what Cloudflare has done with Project Jengo -- which I had no personal role in, I'm just an enigneer.)
Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial
#160Imagine I'm a small software company, and I can't fight a patent troll, and I don't want to pay them or go bankrupt in legal costs.
Can't I short-circuit that by just selling services elsewhere?
Aren't there companies that just refuse to abide or negotiate with patent trolls, out of spite, what happens then? Can a patent troll shut down a company? At some point, wouldn't that make the news? What are the risks? What allows patent trolls to have legitimacy?
I can understand that it's mostly a scam operation to extort money to those who want them to go away, but that can't always work.
I've heard it's mostly a few courts in Texas or elsewhere. Isn't it possible to just not interact with the states where those patent trolls are?