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Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

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Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#311

Post by sircastor »

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.

I don't think they're designed to project established corporations, but lawyers move faster than congress. So much like the Tax code, they've already figured out how to take advantage of the existing system.

In fact, I would say the ultimate realization of that is the existence of patent-trolls. The patent-holder which exists solely for the purpose of possessing the patent rather than creating it, or utilizing it to make their own product.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#312

Post by mschuster91 »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #282
akoboldfrying wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In these threads it always end up being: "Sure Foo would be nice, but, I don't know if you are aware, we are actually held at gunpoint by the status quo; its all really a non starter when you consider this fact." If this is the only real problem, than why not just let them go overseas? Let the market play it out? The boon of progress and freedom X country would get from becoming even little more rational about IP wou…

> The boon of progress and freedom X country would get from becoming even little more rational about IP would pay for itself and be better for actual people.

That's what China has been doing for decades, and "gongkai" [1] is just one tiny part of it. While life for the average Chinese citizen has gone up - the CCP managed to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty - the life of most Western populations has gone down the drain as entire industries, entire towns were unable to cope with unfair competition.

The societal consequences of that will haunt us all for many years to come.

[1] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#313

Post by asoneth »

mike_d wrote: post #136
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…

> 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…

I agree that patents serve a purpose, but taxing intellectual property similarly to other property doesn't seem like it would end patents.

A slightly different approach would be for patent owners to declare an estimated value and pay property taxes on that value to enforce their monopoly. (They may also wish to update the estimated value periodically as circumstances change, perhaps every few months or years.)

To keep owners honest, anyone is allowed to pay the owner a multiple (1.5x? 2x? 10x?) of the patent's current estimated value to invalidate it.

If the patent owner wishes to hang onto the patent but cannot afford the taxes then perhaps banks would be willing to offer a patent equity line of credit, like using any other income-generating property as collateral.

To use your example, if you estimate that your self-driving patent is a ten million dollar asset and Ford pays you twenty million dollars to invalidate it that seems like you come out ahead because you have more than the patent was worth and can still build your product.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#314

Post by chefandy »

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.

I reckon simple solutions are often simple because they ignore important complexities. I'd love to abolish patents, but I don't see how our society could before figuring out stuff like how else to support the people that do important knowledge work, and incentivizing creating new things when it's a hell of a lot more profitable to just wait until someone else does it first. The software industry is already compatible enough that many companies open source their code voluntarily, but I don't see how we can generalize that. What incentive would companies have to pour all of those resources into complex chip design, intricate novel medical devices, or new medicine? You might be able to have open source insulin pump controllers, but how about a lifesaving new linear accelerator or chemotherapy drug when your competitor could just pay your lead engineer half of your 9 figure R&D budget to completely replicate the process and hit the market at nearly the same time? I'd love if this work could be done by universities or publicly funded because it so obviously benefits the greater good, but it's not, and that seems like a prerequisite you simply can't ignore.

I'd love to be proven wrong, but I think the "well if you wanna make an omelet..." kind of attitude I usually see accompany sentiments like this seem more edge-lordy than anything else.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#315

Post by Aeolun »

thih9 wrote: post #201

> the jury went further and found that Sable’s old and broadly-written patent claim was invalid and never should have been granted in the first place–meaning they can no longer assert the claim against anyone else Perhaps people/institutions that grant overly broad patents should be held responsible in a scenario like this?

I don’t think it’s possible to hold the patent office responsible for these cases without making it impossible to run it.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#316

Post by margalabargala »

hamandcheese wrote: post #273
margalabargala wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like this genuinely does hurt very small businesses or inventors who invent something actually valuable but don't have time to quickly scale up. What I like for IP laws is as follows: When you create a protected work, you pay a very small fee. Say, $1 for copyright, maybe $500 for a patent. Each year thereafter, if you wish to maintain your IP protection, you must pay double what was paid the previous year.…

Patent protection already is not indefinite. It seems much simpler and more fair to shorten the protection period.

Even if we halve the patent protection period, that is still ten years during which a patent troll can scoop up a BS patent and then simply send threat letters and rake in money, while chilling any actual advancement.

Currently, there's an incentive to disallow progress. If someone does not want to make use of their own patent, they are currently incentivized to sit on it and keep the ability to create that thing out of the hands of anyone else, "just in case". If we shorten the period as you suggest, to half (for example), then that freezes that progress for a decade.

If an incentive is created to put inventions into the public domain if one is not using them, then that is better for everyone.

And by doubling the fee each year, it becomes financially infeasible for even large companies to keep things out of the public domain forever. A fee of $500 that doubles annually would, at the 20 year mark that is the current patent lifespan, cost a half a billion dollars to renew for that year.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#317

Post by aldonius »

IanCal wrote: post #232
kstrauser wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I offer as an alternative: IP is property, and it's taxed at the value you declare that it's worth. However, if you swear to the IRS that it's worth $500/yr, then you can't claim in court that a violation of it is costing you $10,000,000/yr in losses. That would be perjury. Your patent is worth $10,000,000? Awesome! I bet your local school district will love to hear how much you'll be paying in taxes on it.

Something I've wondered about - you specify a value and pay a tax accordingly. Anyone is then able to buy it from you for that price. Have some short term part for free, then fees scale over time.

alternative: anyone is able to make it public domain for that price

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#318

Post by adrr »

rakoo wrote: post #301
adrr wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We need a pharmaceutical library, not a pharmaceutical market. Research doesn't cost $2.5 billion, lobbying does.

Spending 10 seconds to do a search yields a wiki page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_drug_development

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#319

Post by grishka »

hcrean wrote: post #307
grishka wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would work even better if patents were non-transferable and only assignable to actual people, not companies or other entities.

What if Bob and Alice and Charlie all had a hand in developing invention X... suddenly we would find ourselves just redefining companies.

Then you assign the patent to them collectively by listing them all as inventors. It's not redefining companies because it's still assigned to people, not an abstract entity that can arbitrarily change hands in the future.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#320

Post by nottorp »

ahofmann wrote: post #303
nottorp wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2.3 billion of that being marketing expenses?

This is a very unhelpful pseudo question, that adds nothing to the conversation but can easily derail it. Do you have at least a source for that "claim"?

Eh, I'm hyperbolizing of course.

But I remember seeing statements here and there that at least half the "cost" of a new drug is marketing. Commercials, paying for 'conferences' for doctors etc.

Not going to search for citations, I'm sure you have something ready to prove me wrong and show how 95% of the cost is blood, sweat and tears.

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