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Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls

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Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls

#11

Post by commitpizza »

bell-cot wrote: post #10
commitpizza wrote: post #2

Maybe patents is a bad idea and should be removed.

Software patents, "better paperclips", and a lot of other "lawyers get rich, bureaucracies get bigger, little people get screwed patents? - YES. (Some sort of IP protection or reward system is still needed for real inventions - where it takes serious money, expertise, time, etc. to achieve something major.) But maybe a better moral would be that shell corporations (& lawyers playing shell games with them) should be o…

But real inventions can occur in software too? Inventions that takes serious money, expertise and so on.

Some examples:

- Rust memory management

- New models in machine learning that enables amazing results

- Protocols

Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls

#13

Post by speeder »

commitpizza wrote: post #8
bheadmaster wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software patents, at the very least. https://endsoftwarepatents.org/

I don't really see the difference, why just software?

The purpose of patents, is incentive companies to share their secrets.

For example, Coca-Cola never patended their formula. So you might think: I can copy it and sell my own right? Well, yes, legally yes, if you ever found their formula, somehow. They been successful for more than a hundred years now in hiding that formula.

Thing is, software patents allowed people to actually patent ideas, concepts, stuff that is obvious and don't need sharing, for example: "ghost racer" is a patented concept, for a while any game that wanted to display to the player his past run by showing a slightly different copy of himself so he can compare, had to pay patent royalty. But the concept is obvious, it is simple, it is there, nobody used a ludicrous amount of money and time to invent it.

This is different than the patent for Michael Jackson dance moves that requires specialized devices, he patented physical objects that required time and money to make, they had a non-trivial purpose on his dance and he had to work to create them to make his dance moves possible. And now that he is gone, the awesome stage tricks he invented can keep existing, because he wrote detailed patents explaining how to repeat his feats.

Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls

#14

Post by Akronymus »

bell-cot wrote: post #10
commitpizza wrote: post #2

Maybe patents is a bad idea and should be removed.

Software patents, "better paperclips", and a lot of other "lawyers get rich, bureaucracies get bigger, little people get screwed patents? - YES. (Some sort of IP protection or reward system is still needed for real inventions - where it takes serious money, expertise, time, etc. to achieve something major.) But maybe a better moral would be that shell corporations (& lawyers playing shell games with them) should be o…

Which would you count the olds elevator as?

https://youtu.be/-fu03F-Iah8

Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls

#15

Post by ajsnigrutin »

commitpizza wrote: post #2

Maybe patents is a bad idea and should be removed.

The idea behind them is solid... the time limits are absurd, especially for trivial stuff.

So, to solve the triviality, the patents shouldn't be worth more than it would take for a competitor to reinvent the end result - so if we're talking about a truly advanced chemical process, sure, takes time and reasearch and people and experiments... definitely worth millions. In contrast, pressing pageDown and in result moving one (full) page down (instead of moving a screen-height) should be practically worthless, since it'd take someone just a few hours to reimplement. Valuing would be hard but still better than nothing.

The other is the time limits.. especially in software, a year is a lot of time, really a lot... and 20 years is way too much.

Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls

#16

Post by rocqua »

commitpizza wrote: post #8
bheadmaster wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software patents, at the very least. https://endsoftwarepatents.org/

I don't really see the difference, why just software?

Because the bar for 'invention' is even lower in current software patent law than for current physical engineering patent law.

In general, the software world sees plenty of innovation, and would continue to see that innovation without patents. Besides, software is much closer to mathematics. The idea that e.g. long-division is patentable is ridiculous, but if you write "long-division, but on a computer" the only thing that prevents a patent is how glaringly obvious the prior-art is.

Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls

#17

Post by Andrew_Russell »

Sorry all. Apparently I need to put Cloudflare back on the server. Here is the achive.org version:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221107120623/https://ipde.com/...

Edit: I discovered the Render.com autoscaler setting. Hopefully it's back now.

Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls

#18

Post by anonymous_sorry »

commitpizza wrote: post #11
bell-cot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software patents, "better paperclips", and a lot of other "lawyers get rich, bureaucracies get bigger, little people get screwed patents? - YES. (Some sort of IP protection or reward system is still needed for real inventions - where it takes serious money, expertise, time, etc. to achieve something major.) But maybe a better moral would be that shell corporations (& lawyers playing shell games with them) should be o…

But real inventions can occur in software too? Inventions that takes serious money, expertise and so on. Some examples: - Rust memory management - New models in machine learning that enables amazing results - Protocols

But is there broader benefit to a legal system that enables the inventor to enforce time-limited monopolies on them?

Rust's memory management was invented without any such incentive, and the world is richer for it.

Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls

#19

Post by bryanlarsen »

speeder wrote: post #13
commitpizza wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see the difference, why just software?

The purpose of patents, is incentive companies to share their secrets. For example, Coca-Cola never patended their formula. So you might think: I can copy it and sell my own right? Well, yes, legally yes, if you ever found their formula, somehow. They been successful for more than a hundred years now in hiding that formula. Thing is, software patents allowed people to actually patent ideas, concepts, stuff that is ob…

> stuff that is obvious

Stuff that is obvious cannot be patented, according to the law. The problem is the system's implementation of the law.

Software shouldn't be patentable because math isn't patentable.

Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls

#20

Post by Andrew_Russell »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #5

Can someone explain the significance of the court's inquiry? I understand how it's interesting to see how one NPE structures it's relationships. But aside from the mail drop / physical location shenanigans, I can't tell if there's any legal significance to this information.

I'm the author. It's actually kind of hard to say at this stage, and the judge suggested amicus briefing to help the Court figure out what to make of all this.
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