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Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#161

Post by ako »

madsbuch wrote: post #145
pwg wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Patents are property and we need taxes/fee on it. $500/year per patent Those 'taxes' already exist (at least in the US system). They are called "maintenance fees". See https://www.fr.com/insights/ip-law-essentials/everything-abo... Failing to pay the fee causes the patent to expire, and be unable to be used to sue someone. So these troll firms must also be paying these fees to be able to sue based on the patent.

This is interesting. So Oracle holding around 52000 patents pays around 23.000.000 USD a year in maintenance?

Yes, having patents is expensive. Large corporations often file patents for defensive reasons, and for this they employ multiple patent lawyers full time.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#162

Post by gkiely »

DistractionRect wrote: post #133
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 C…

Why did none of the other companies listed in the article fight it, if this is the case?

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#163

Post by seniorThrowaway »

rvnx wrote: post #3

At the end of the day, this is a deep legislation issue, patents should not exist at all. They are supposed to promote innovation, in practice, it's more about protecting guys who sitting and waiting for passive cash. Once we give exclusive rights to all AI stuff to Nvidia, is the world going to be a better place ? What would be with ChatGPT if Google actually had enforced (or enforces) patents on Transformers. Is th…

There is a general problem with excessive rent seeking in our entire economy and society. But I don't think having zero patent protection is the answer. Like most problems with society, there is no easy answer, just a continual fight against corruption, rent-seeking, nepotism, collusion, price fixing and all the other crappy human behaviors.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#164

Post by AlbertCory »

ronsor wrote: post #158
AlbertCory wrote: post #107

this 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.

Politics happen. Things that were previously unthinkable suddenly become thinkable.

It only seems "suddenly" because all the behind-the-scenes activity was going on when no one was looking.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#166

Post by ahtihn »

phpisthebest wrote: post #113
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.

>>These taxes can fund free education or healthcare or defense. is it is always a bad idea to ear mark a tax for a specific purpose. Especially if you desire to use the tax as a punitive measure to reduce that which you deem bad for society, if it works now you need to come up with the money for the thing you funded elsewhere because all government programs are permanent Look at smoking, all kind of things were funde…

> Using the tax code to punish or reward behavior is always bad

Isn't that pretty much the entire purpose of the tax code and why it's so complicated?

It's one of the tools the government has to shape behavior.

Actual tax revenue doesn't really matter since a permanent deficit and ever-growing debt is apparently fine.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#167

Post by joshuaissac »

solomatov wrote: post #122
lukan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are research companies who only do research and get money by licencing their patents. I mean, I really would like to live in a world without patents, but currently those companies do provide value, but cannot exist, without guarding their IP. Yet they would cease to exist, with your proposal.

Could you give examples of such companies (I am really curious)?

> Could you give examples of such companies

One example is ARM, which licenses the processor designs they create, and do not build or sell the chips themselves.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#168

Post by KptMarchewa »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #127
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.

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

You mean it would bring the price of licensing the patent down? I don't see the downside.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#169

Post by freejazz »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #138
freejazz wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

Authors can license all of their rights away. They can sell their copyrights - I don't see your point...

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#170

Post by berniedurfee »

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.

100% agree.

Pretty sure the original idea of patents was to protect the inventor while they brought a product to market or licensed the patent to others to improve their products.

Holding a patent without even attempting to bring the idea to market should invalidate the patent after some reasonable amount of time.

The whole system as it is today needs a hard sanity check.

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