11–20 of 127 posts
It's worth mentioning that SAIC is not a lightweight. It is a large government contractor with $4 billion in annual revenue.
We shouldn't blame patent trolls for acting the way they do in the same way that we shouldn't blame banks and stockbrokers for acting the way they do. If there is big money to be made, and it's legal, somebody is going to do it - and if it's not you, well, your loss. This is, and always has been, a problem of bad legislation . It is a structural problem in the system . The human race would save so much time, money, a…
This line always comes out, for some reason, regarding patents. In other discussions we get completely different logic - eg: people get terribly riled up about whether Google is "evil" or not and it is rarely connected to whether it's legal or not. The ultimate with your logic is that it would call for massive legislation to cover every facet of our lives - everything bad must be made illegal, otherwise nobody can ev…
Also, what makes you think we don't already have "massive legislation to cover every facet of our lives"? Have you ever heard of the book "Three Felonies a Day"?
We shouldn't blame patent trolls for acting the way they do in the same way that we shouldn't blame banks and stockbrokers for acting the way they do. If there is big money to be made, and it's legal, somebody is going to do it - and if it's not you, well, your loss. This is, and always has been, a problem of bad legislation . It is a structural problem in the system . The human race would save so much time, money, a…
This line always comes out, for some reason, regarding patents. In other discussions we get completely different logic - eg: people get terribly riled up about whether Google is "evil" or not and it is rarely connected to whether it's legal or not. The ultimate with your logic is that it would call for massive legislation to cover every facet of our lives - everything bad must be made illegal, otherwise nobody can ev…
We shouldn't blame patent trolls for acting the way they do in the same way that we shouldn't blame banks and stockbrokers for acting the way they do. If there is big money to be made, and it's legal, somebody is going to do it - and if it's not you, well, your loss. This is, and always has been, a problem of bad legislation . It is a structural problem in the system . The human race would save so much time, money, a…
This line always comes out, for some reason, regarding patents. In other discussions we get completely different logic - eg: people get terribly riled up about whether Google is "evil" or not and it is rarely connected to whether it's legal or not. The ultimate with your logic is that it would call for massive legislation to cover every facet of our lives - everything bad must be made illegal, otherwise nobody can ev…
Increased legislation is rarely the answer. I do not have a pre-rolled solution for the 'patent problem', but - contrary to popular opinion - this is not required to point out flaws in the current system. Perhaps the current system is the best we can do, but that does not excuse its flaws. We should always aim for what could be - and what we could, maybe, come up with is a system that encourages innovation (through financial reward) yet disallows this kind of destructive behaviour. How? Who knows.
I bet 10 years ago if you applied such thinking to finance you wouldn't have got very far - "central bankers supplying fiat money is good enough"...yet now we have Bitcoin et. al., a whole host of currencies whose aggregate behaviour is mathematically provable.
Focus on the could, anything less is not worthy of the tag 'innovation'.
I define "patent troll" as an entity that has a sliver of a chance of winning, but 100% chance that they will impose high costs on the defendant at little cost to themselves. They use this assymetry as a form of legal extortion. They limit their downside by holding few assets aside from the patent.
EDIT: I am in no way commenting on the merit of the case or the 1% figure.
We shouldn't blame patent trolls for acting the way they do in the same way that we shouldn't blame banks and stockbrokers for acting the way they do. If there is big money to be made, and it's legal, somebody is going to do it - and if it's not you, well, your loss. This is, and always has been, a problem of bad legislation . It is a structural problem in the system . The human race would save so much time, money, a…
Unfortunately, patents are becoming more commoditized than healthcare in our country. It seems silly to me that someone is permitted to sue on the basis of patent violation when a) they weren't the original inventor, b) they bought the patent for the entire reason of profiting from litigation, or c) they're suing people who 'violated' their patent prior to the time they purchased it.
Also, the inventor listed on the patents, Dr. Robert Short, who previously worked at SAIC, is CTO at VirnetX: http://virnetx.com/company/executive-management ("Dr. Short has been the Chief Scientist for VirnetX since May 2007 . . . . From February 2000 to April 2007, Dr. Short was Assistant Vice President and Division Manager at Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC. . . . Dr. Short is named as a co-inventor on substantially all of the patents in the VirnetX patent portfolio.")
I haven't studied the patents in question and am not commenting on whether they're any good or not. But considering how much of the core internet technologies were developed by private defense contractors working for the government, it's not far-fetched that some of them would hold key patents.
So in that sense, I'm happy about this.
Majority of the patent is explanation on how a VPN works, different mathematical explanations on how to generate random numbers, the theory behind secure communications. But none of that stuff is actually covered by the patent, so don't be impressed by it. What is covered is basically the straightforward and logical application of the explained VPN concepts, but the VPN concepts them selves are not patented.
I am not sure if the patent examiner of this patent was dazzled by the 50+ pages of VPN theory and just granted this thing. To me it's stunning! It's like filing a patent that in intricate detail explains how an automobile works and than sneaking in a claim that you invented that an automobile can be used to move personal belonging from place to place.