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Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

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Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#351

Post by efitz »

efitz wrote: post #139
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.

No, the fee should be exponential, to keep people from keeping technology out of the public domain longer than necessary. For example, maybe the fee is $10000 for the first year. This doesn't come close to recouping the cost of a single enforcement action, but it makes sure that someone has some skin in the game. Then every year the cost gets 10x more expensive. Of course you are free to choose your own base and mult…

Just curious: what about this comment made it worthy of downvoting?

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#352

Post by atoav »

ummonk wrote: post #209
atoav wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never used a fixed number for anything. Just tie it to a percentage of yearly revenue of the entity. This way you can ensure: - small companies and private people can afford patents - big corps do not get an advantage, in fact the bigger they get, the more expensive holding a patent becomes, ensuring they have to use those patents and not patent everything just because - number of patents any single entity can hold i…

That just means patent trolls would split their patent portfolios into hundreds of holding companies. Also people would start filing bigger and bigger patents, stuffing more and more claims into a single patent.

Well this is a problem we need to tackle anyways. Splitting things into a thousand holding companies should be with considerable cost as well for those involved with a thousand holding companies.

There is literally no case in which society profits from a corp being split up into a thousand holdings.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#353

Post by atoav »

thechao wrote: post #184
atoav wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never used a fixed number for anything. Just tie it to a percentage of yearly revenue of the entity. This way you can ensure: - small companies and private people can afford patents - big corps do not get an advantage, in fact the bigger they get, the more expensive holding a patent becomes, ensuring they have to use those patents and not patent everything just because - number of patents any single entity can hold i…

Tie it to the expected value of the IP? If you think your idea is worth $1 billion, pay $10 million (1%) every year.

How often are you allowed to change this? Could just undervalue it until you suddenly don't. If you are not allowed to change it that is not an uninteresting idea.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#354

Post by freejazz »

paledot wrote: post #342
mopenstein wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many patent trolls do you know? As compared to people that you know who would/could be an inventor on a patent? I'm a patent litigator and it's still the latter for me. This narrative is a bit histrionic.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#355

Post by throw10920 »

rakoo wrote: post #22
djbusby wrote: post #7

Lots 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?

> 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…

This is a lot of evidence-less claims and opinions masquerading as fact. Looks like someone has an irrational grudge.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#356

Post by throw10920 »

fargle wrote: post #38
djbusby wrote: post #7

Lots 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?

patents were intended to protect the little-guy, the inventor (meaning a person), with an artificial monopoly so he could make money. they weren't intended to be used by huge companies to help further their already impressive monopolistic empires. they collect them and use them as a kind of insurance or mutual-assued-destruction policy. microsoft won't sue ibm (and so on) because both have such a vast portfolio of ga…

> it's obvious that the time and place for patents has come and gone

This is a ridiculous (and incorrect) opinion being presented as fact, coupled with a lot of strawman arguments.

The fact that the implementation of the patent system has been massively abused over the past few decades does in no way imply that the theory is flawed and that

> just abandon the whole system. it literally helps nobody

This entire comment is as ridiculous as claiming that "kids keep graduating from high school with barely any education, we might as well abandon the public school model and have every parent teach their kid".

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#357

Post by btrettel »

zomgbbq wrote: post #327
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…

Sounds like a problem AI could solve filtering patent applications before they make it to a person.

Former patent examiner here. Current AI patent search isn't that useful in my experience. The USPTO had multiple AI patent search tools circa 2022 (when I quit), most of which were of comparable quality to the similar documents listed at the bottom of a patent document on Google Patents.

I've posted before about some of the issues here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33506286

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#358

Post by btrettel »

jedberg wrote: post #333
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…

> patent clerks aren’t actually subject matter experts in the field This is sometimes true, but also isn't super relevant. The patent office contracts out to experts to help them evaluate a patent. My friend worked as one of these contractors. He would get patents in his field of expertise in which he holds a PhD and had 15 years of work experience, and then write a report and do the prior art searches. He would then…

> The reason you get BS patents is because they only give the clerk a small amount of time to make a decision, so they have to work with whatever info they have -- they don't have time to seek out additional information.

As a former USPTO patent examiner, I can confirm that this is the main reason for low patent quality.

> This is sometimes true, but also isn't super relevant. The patent office contracts out to experts to help them evaluate a patent. My friend worked as one of these contractors. He would get patents in his field of expertise in which he holds a PhD and had 15 years of work experience, and then write a report and do the prior art searches. He would then send his report back to the patent clerk.

I never found the contract search help to be useful. ("STIC search" is what I'm thinking of. Your friend may have been on a different contract as I'm not familiar with specific contract subject matter experts providing search help.) I'd guess that the problem is that those folks get even less time than I did!

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#359

Post by Twirrim »

creeble wrote: post #143

No 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

All major tech companies are building up a portfolio of patents, as a deterrent as much as anything else.

So that when competitors come knocking on the door, they can use the portfolio to say, "Well okay, but then you owe me license money for $x, $y, $z from my portfolio, how about we just not bother with this, agreed?"

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#360

Post by acomjean »

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…

I believe that patent office budget is mostly fees.
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