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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

#101

Post by jvanderbot »

tgflynn wrote: post #87
btrettel wrote: post #60

Current USPTO patent examiner here. The most effective way to eliminate bad patents would be to give examiners more time, say double the time across the board to start. If an examiner can't find prior art in the little time they're given, and they have no other reasons to reject the application, they'll have to grant it. The amount of time was (basically) set in the 1970s based on data from the 1960s. There have been…

It seems to me that one of the biggest problems with patents is that it has become possible to patent the "what" instead of the "how". In most cases the "what" is obvious, it's the "how" that's hard. An example would be the Amazon One-Click patent. That should never have been granted because the "what", ie. the basic idea, is obvious and once you have that the implementation is trivial. To get a patent you should at…

I thought "how" was the whole point. Imagine I invent an air conditioner that's 100x more effective or efficient based on a new mechanical process I invented. I damn well better be able to patent that "how" despite a century of prior art in "what".

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

#102

Post by bombcar »

TheAdamist wrote: post #80
bombcar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a minimum they’re doing a form of “liability insurance” by foisting 100% of the liability for 5% of the profits on a food truck owner. That changes things beyond just liability - it also makes it appear judgement proof. And the dollar amounts indicate that companies may just settle because there’s nothing to win by a counter suit.

Makes me wonder if instead of settling it would be cheaper to buy the patent, knowing that the patent "owner" is only getting 5-10% of a settlement. Presumably theres some contract with the patent "owner" preventing that, but maybe that would show they aren't really in control of the patent.

There almost certainly is, which is part of the reason the judge is poking this - "ownership" includes control and if they aren't really in control they're not really the patent 'owner' and that could change things.

Also judges in general don't like people being "clever".

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

#103

Post by Andrew_Russell »

christophilus wrote: post #29
Andrew_Russell wrote: post #17

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.

Well, unrelated to the topic, but I'd be curious how many request / sec you were getting, and how many nodes Render autoscaled up to. I'm running a client's site on a single Render node right now and have been curious how it'd stand up to traffic spikes.

I can't tell from the logs that I can see. But the site is all or almost all text from Render with images on AWS, and bandwidth topped out at "220MB" (per hour? Not sure) from Render this morning. It came back up as soon as I enabled scaling, and it only scaled to 3 nodes.

It's also a Python 3 instance running Django/Wagtail/Puput, and all blame goes to me for poor coding. If anyone reading this happens to be a Wagtail & Render expert and wants some short contract work fixing my code, please reach out (arussell@shawkeller.com)!

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

#104

Post by TheRealPomax »

btrettel wrote: post #60

Current USPTO patent examiner here. The most effective way to eliminate bad patents would be to give examiners more time, say double the time across the board to start. If an examiner can't find prior art in the little time they're given, and they have no other reasons to reject the application, they'll have to grant it. The amount of time was (basically) set in the 1970s based on data from the 1960s. There have been…

To be fair, it'd also help if it didn't cost money for concerned citizens to submit the proof required to demonstrate prior art. Because even if you give examiners twice the time, that's only twice the work getting done, instead of orders of magnitude more with the help of people who are already experts in a field and can't believe a patent was granted because of [fill in prior art here].

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

#105

Post by davidgay »

brador wrote: post #78
tracker1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly of the mindset that at this point, the vast majority of patents, from what I've seen, don't pass the obviousness test. At least when it comes to process and software patents, which are very arguable in the first place. I do with the costs for a patent were a bit front-loaded where it costs even half the total amount just to (re)apply, in order to better pay for the review costs.

Every patent should be automatically granted and the courts can sort out the winners if there is a dispute. That is the system we have moved to.

I think we need a name for the fallacy that a process which accepts nearly every application is the same as no process (the same comment repeatedly shows up for warrants). With the former, you only get things which are designed to pass the process. With the latter, you get everything.

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

#106

Post by TheRealPomax »

tgflynn wrote: post #87
btrettel wrote: post #60

Current USPTO patent examiner here. The most effective way to eliminate bad patents would be to give examiners more time, say double the time across the board to start. If an examiner can't find prior art in the little time they're given, and they have no other reasons to reject the application, they'll have to grant it. The amount of time was (basically) set in the 1970s based on data from the 1960s. There have been…

It seems to me that one of the biggest problems with patents is that it has become possible to patent the "what" instead of the "how". In most cases the "what" is obvious, it's the "how" that's hard. An example would be the Amazon One-Click patent. That should never have been granted because the "what", ie. the basic idea, is obvious and once you have that the implementation is trivial. To get a patent you should at…

Except it wasn't: Amazon--like everyone else filing a patent--had a duty to bring the idea to market within the time frame that US patent law required, which they then did. _That_ is the how.

Demanding the patent goes into the specific details on the "how" gets us things like "they implemented it in JS but we used TS so that's legally distinct, this patent doesn't apply to us" (ignoring how idiotic software patents are, and how stupidly long they are allowed to be active for) or "they made their machine using sheet metal and distinct PCB components, we used plastic and an FPGA, this patent doesn't apply".

If you get a patent granted, and you sit on it, you lose that patent. If you make real the ideas/things described in your patent within the required time frame, your patent "kicks in" and you get to sue others for copying your idea, even if their specific realization of that idea differs from yours.

Reducing for how long patents are granted, disallowing "tweaking-a-thing to renew the patent", and either drastically cutting down the duration of, or entirely canning, software patents, would be a nice move though.

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

#107

Post by tgflynn »

jvanderbot wrote: post #101
tgflynn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that one of the biggest problems with patents is that it has become possible to patent the "what" instead of the "how". In most cases the "what" is obvious, it's the "how" that's hard. An example would be the Amazon One-Click patent. That should never have been granted because the "what", ie. the basic idea, is obvious and once you have that the implementation is trivial. To get a patent you should at…

I thought "how" was the whole point. Imagine I invent an air conditioner that's 100x more effective or efficient based on a new mechanical process I invented. I damn well better be able to patent that "how" despite a century of prior art in "what".

Yes, but that's the opposite situation to many software patents. If air conditioners didn't yet exist you shouldn't be able to patent just the idea of an air conditioner without coming up with an effective design for one.

The One Click patent would be like patenting just the idea of an air conditioner because once you have that idea any software developer worth his salt could implement it.

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

#108

Post by NotYourLawyer »

DannyBee wrote: post #50
duxup wrote: post #9

Outside of the liability passed to the smaller entities, what would the advantage of this structure be legally?

I mean, given the cost of litigation, and the inability to get counter-judgement (IE attorneys fees), this is already enough "reason". These are litigation funding exercises, so the goal is protection of the "investors". But you'd also get things like protection against discovery (the smaller entity has nothing to give you), etc. This is the sort of thing where they go too far, and end up in jail despite thinking the…

Prenda is exactly what this brought to mind for me too. Maybe popehat will do a deep dive on this stuff.

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

#109

Post by duxup »

TheAdamist wrote: post #80
bombcar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a minimum they’re doing a form of “liability insurance” by foisting 100% of the liability for 5% of the profits on a food truck owner. That changes things beyond just liability - it also makes it appear judgement proof. And the dollar amounts indicate that companies may just settle because there’s nothing to win by a counter suit.

Makes me wonder if instead of settling it would be cheaper to buy the patent, knowing that the patent "owner" is only getting 5-10% of a settlement. Presumably theres some contract with the patent "owner" preventing that, but maybe that would show they aren't really in control of the patent.

“Dude you made 11k from this and now you’re in court. Judge is pissed, you might be in over your head. Sell me the patents for 10k, and we all can move on.”

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

#110

Post by gunapologist99 »

btrettel wrote: post #60

Current USPTO patent examiner here. The most effective way to eliminate bad patents would be to give examiners more time, say double the time across the board to start. If an examiner can't find prior art in the little time they're given, and they have no other reasons to reject the application, they'll have to grant it. The amount of time was (basically) set in the 1970s based on data from the 1960s. There have been…

> And while search technology has improved, it hasn't become orders of magnitude better.

Are you saying that search technologies of 2022 are not orders of magnitude better than the search technology in the 1970's?

Search tools in the 1970's were basically manually panning through microfiche. This was the time before even relational databases were commercially available, let alone full text search across thousands (or billions) of documents going back hundreds of years. The tech that we have now would be literally unbelievable to most practitioners in the 70's.

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