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Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

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Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#341

Post by lolinder »

dataflow wrote: post #322
Calavar wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> company B should get MAJOR financial rewards from BOTH company A and the patent office, on the order of 10x+ what they spent on their defence By "the patent office" you mean taxpayers, right? Because we're the ones who foot the bill for any judgement against the government. I can't see any situation where individual patent clerks would be held accountable. First, it goes against established case law regarding civil…

> By "the patent office" you mean taxpayers, right? Because we're the ones who foot the bill for any judgement against the government. I think they meant the patent office should cover that from fees, not from taxpayers.

That doesn't really help because money is fungible.

In a city near me the taxpayers recently rejected a tax increase to pay for a bond because they were grumpy that the government took out the bond without asking them first. The city was still on the hook for the bond, so they just siphoned money from the roads fund.

The same thing would happen here—you can say that the judgment must come from fees, but then the patent office will have to either raise fees to crazy levels in order to cover the risk (thus making patents even more of a large company advantage) or they'll siphon money from things that were being covered by fees and use taxpayer dollars to cover those things.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#342

Post by paledot »

mopenstein wrote: post #325
mike_hock wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Patents and copyrights are dangled like winning lottery tickets in front of the average citizen. Maybe you can invent something or write a book and sell it for millions! Which does happen... about as often as people win the lottery. More often a patent or copyright is one of thousands a giant company procures. But all the intellectual property profiteers need is that 1 in 300,000,000 chance dangling in front of a vot…

Somehow the winning ticket in popular discourse is to be a patent troll: at best, "sell my idea" to some big company (troll); at worst convince a court to give you a pile of money because someone "stole" your idea (in advance). It is a rare person who dreams of coming up with a good idea and then working hard for years to make it a reality.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#343

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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.

> Abolish patents. All the rhetoric about incentivizing innovation is bullshit.

Oh, I would immediately start a fund that looks for good ideas at the germinating phase and then superfunds a competitor.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#344

Post by balderdash »

IanCal wrote: post #337
balderdash wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds nice in principal but I think it’s not so easy in practice, if I asked you what’s your car worth you probably say something along the lines of well it would cost x to replace it, or I paid y for it, or I could sell it for z on eBay (all three different prices) but if you then said that well whatever price you say someone can buy your car for and you’re stuck with without a car while you go figure out replac…

The value to me would be the replacement plus hassle value. There's clearly values I'd easily accept, you offer me a hundred grand for my car and you can take it whenever you want. Now for regular items like a car this would be hard. How do I value it and how do I not get caught out when second hand sales spike and I don't follow the markets? But we're not talking about everyone's car. We're talking about asking the…

Yep but that’s kind of my point - let’s say your a poverty level worker with a POS car “worth” $2k but it’s reliable and you need it to go to work, and finding another one for a solar price carries the risk of finding a lemon or having unexpected bills your going to end up saying it’s worth $[4]k because it would be a really bad day for you not to have your car and taking the risk on a replacement is just not worth it. You end up paying a higher tax rate than the guy that’s got three cars in his garage and his happy wearing the risk over time of being slightly under replacement value since it lowers his effective tax rate and if he’s out a car for a bit at slight loss that’s no big deal..

That extra “value” (or tax on people) you ascribe to your car may or may not be distributed in manner that societally makes sense

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#345

Post by scrubs »

Calavar wrote: post #321
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…

> company B should get MAJOR financial rewards from BOTH company A and the patent office, on the order of 10x+ what they spent on their defence By "the patent office" you mean taxpayers, right? Because we're the ones who foot the bill for any judgement against the government. I can't see any situation where individual patent clerks would be held accountable. First, it goes against established case law regarding civil…

The idea would be for the patent office to get $I dollars funding from tax payers, from which they payouts are made when errors are made. If they flub it year after year they'd be forced into process improvements or a huge fight with Congress. Basically, as soon as control becomes separated from accountability, one organizationally hit into these problems.

Another analogy: I'm sort of against housing brokers passing the mortgage onto Fannie Mae. By the time the government finds out something is wrong, it may be too late to "untake" the property. Brokers have short-term control goals and short term risk profile. They stick somebody else with the long term disk, while they're still paid. It's a misalignment.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#347

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

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.

I am still like a 10% sure cloudflare is a government run honeypot.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#348

Post by mcmoor »

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…

I think the most fatal flaw is, and in all other fields too, that money correlates with court victory. If we somehow able to erase just that, lots of laws suddenly becomes much fairer and closer to its original intent.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#349

Post by xpe »

fargle wrote: post #42

Awesome job! Thank you cloudflare. maybe this is the path to kill the trolls. tech companies could fund an insurance-like mutual scheme to defend instead of pay off the trolls and then drive them out of business. it can also research and invalidate their ridiculous patents.

Just make sure the patent trolls don’t find a way to own their own patent troll insurance company.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#350

Post by lathiat »

hot_gril wrote: post #308
greyface- wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they made any commitments, binding or non-binding, to this effect?

That might reduce the effectiveness of this strategy.

There is precedent for this kindof thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Invention_Network
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