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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

#291

Post by jMyles »

mike_hock wrote: post #290
yashap wrote: post #175

Nice to see Cloudflare fighting the good fight, but patent trolls aren’t the only issue with software patents. A major issue that people talk about way less is well funded/large companies getting bullshit patents, and using them to sue their small startup competitors into the ground. It doesn’t even matter if they win - when a company with billions in the bank sues a company with millions in the bank, the small compa…

Simple solution: Abolish patents. All the rhetoric about incentivizing innovation is bullshit. They stifle innovation, and they stifle competition. They're designed to protect slow, inefficient established corporations. That's all they ever did and that's all they'll ever do.

Hear hear.

But how?

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#292

Post by kortilla »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #276
dustingetz wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in the software ip case, they can invest in building competitive products in an open market. If your software IP is a secret then don’t publish!

So, for example, the secret sauce that makes the CPLEX and Gurobi solvers tens or hundreds of times faster than open source equivalents should simply be released to the public, leading to the immediate loss of 90% of those products' competitive advantage? You don't see how such a policy would spur terror among large, profitable companies with trade secrets, leading to them moving overseas?

I don’t think you understand how patents are used. It’s not secret sauce if it’s patented.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#293

Post by dmoy »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #289
8note wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pharmaceutical parents seems like an odd choice. Aren't most of those inventions driven by government funding at universities?

No massive amount come from the private sector. Almost all the money used to get a hypothetically effective drug through the approval and trial process is private.

Right, to be clear:

If the initial research is funded by government grants or at Uni or whatever, the overwhelming majority of the cost is still in Phase 2 and 3 trials.

This is why certain drugs don't get developed anymore - if it's a naturally occurring substance that can't be patented, nobody's gonna foot the gallion-dollar bill to go through trials.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#294

Post by michael1999 »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #263
toast0 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My understanding is a patent holder must defend their rights, if they are aware of the infringement, at the peril of losing them. Pretty sure that's just for trademarks.

Agh. Absolutely. Wrong flavor of "intellectual property". Thanks.

And that's why Stallman is so firm that there is no such thing as "intellectual property". As soon as you start using that term, you start believing there is something more general and meaningful to it and start muddying the concepts. But it is just a mirage.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#295

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

patmcc wrote: post #287
creeble wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that one can begin to judge how duplicitous their claims in defence of another's 'invalid' patent my be.

If Cloudflare starts trying to sue or shake down folks with their patents, this will be a very valid point. Until then it's a little silly; everybody holds patents for (at least) defensive reasons.

Exactly. As long as that's how the game is played you must play it or you will be sued out of existence.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#296

Post by nottorp »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #141
spongebobstoes wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide some recent examples of where patents likely played a positive role in innovation?

Fifty years ago they paid for Xerox's PARC where WYSIWYG and GUI interfaces were first developed targeting a mass audience.

Iirc Apple paid (in Apple stock perhaps) but Microsoft didn't :)

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#297

Post by nottorp »

adrr wrote: post #196
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…

So you spend billions($2.5 billion being average) inventing a new drug and anyone should be allowed to copy and sell it? That would foster innovation and not kill pharmaceutical market?

2.3 billion of that being marketing expenses?

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#298

Post by petsfed »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #227
petsfed wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you invented and patented something in the US in 1989, you'd have protections until 2009 at the latest. If it wasn't usable until 2013, then that sucks for you, but it is what it is. Your invention doesn't get 20 guaranteed years of profitability. You get 20 years to figure out how to make it profitable. The two are very different concepts. edit : this is why you don't patent every damned thing, just the things th…

> this is why you don't patent every damned thing, just the things that you believe will be profitable over the next 20 years Unless you work for a corporation, that owns your intellectual output anyway, and encourages you to submit forms for anything that looks even remotely patentable.

I want to be clear here: you submit a form for everything, then people in the legal and business development teams decide if its actually worth patenting.

But even then, if you devise some thing that will be very useful if we ever get teleportation working, your employer may still not patent it, if they believe that teleportation is more than 20 years away.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#299

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

Laaas wrote: post #8

What would be required to get a court to order Sable pay the legal fees Cloudflare incurred?

That alone likely wouldn't help, because often patent trolls are relatively small entities built around the patents they're trolling with. Once those patents evaporate, there isn't much value to be gained, so the limited liability company now owing millions in damages simply goes bankrupt and the people behind it start trolling anew with new patents and a new company.

We should hold the lawyers accountable. If you as a lawyer bring egregiously bullshit cases, you should be on the hook for the costs.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#300

Post by ClassyJacket »

mike_hock wrote: post #290
yashap wrote: post #175

Nice to see Cloudflare fighting the good fight, but patent trolls aren’t the only issue with software patents. A major issue that people talk about way less is well funded/large companies getting bullshit patents, and using them to sue their small startup competitors into the ground. It doesn’t even matter if they win - when a company with billions in the bank sues a company with millions in the bank, the small compa…

Simple solution: Abolish patents. All the rhetoric about incentivizing innovation is bullshit. They stifle innovation, and they stifle competition. They're designed to protect slow, inefficient established corporations. That's all they ever did and that's all they'll ever do.

Agreed. I shouldn't be banned from inventing something just because somebody else already invented it. Patents suck.
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