101–110 of 143 posts
> Patent litigation typically costs defendants between $1 million and $5 million just to stay in the fight. A battleground where only the rich can win a fight. There doesn't seem to be any justice left in the American courts :(. The only way to win is to not play their game. It's probably cheaper to buy a shotgun and show up at the doorstep of the person suing you with the message: "I know where you live" :S
I've been thinking about the connection between biological signaling and advertising; like colored plumage or a large chest cavity, a multi-million ad campaign is a hard-to-fake signal, and in a way, such campaigns are as much about overt displays of power than the contents of the ad. In that sense, this move is the pinnacle of the best form of advertising. Whether they are acting out of pure altruism or pure strateg…
"thereby earning genuine trust with current and prospective customers" I don't disagree with that in general but I will raise the issue that you would need to know the percentage of current and future customers that really care about things like this to know the effect that it will have on their business in dollars. Consumers and business are fickle. Good will has a value but people will drop you in a dime if the nex…
Now, as a lean startup we probably shouldn't have been looking for an expensive domain name in the first place. But ineffective squatter rules (10K for an arbitration!) are preventing the marketplace from making the most of attractive, catchy domain names, and instead we're settling on domains that do not adequately describe the business.
I've been thinking about the connection between biological signaling and advertising; like colored plumage or a large chest cavity, a multi-million ad campaign is a hard-to-fake signal, and in a way, such campaigns are as much about overt displays of power than the contents of the ad. In that sense, this move is the pinnacle of the best form of advertising. Whether they are acting out of pure altruism or pure strateg…
"thereby earning genuine trust with current and prospective customers" I don't disagree with that in general but I will raise the issue that you would need to know the percentage of current and future customers that really care about things like this to know the effect that it will have on their business in dollars. Consumers and business are fickle. Good will has a value but people will drop you in a dime if the nex…
Patent trolls suck. But with out patents there is no incentive for innovation. The issue is not that Patents are bad, it is that you can patent a "unique way to swing on the playground" and be awarded a patent. Patent officer often don't know what they are awarding a patent for. This is supposed to be kept in check by the fact that you can fight a patent. I think that if you file a patent, sue someone over it, and lo…
In some areas, perhaps, but not when it comes to software.
This is easy to show. Software was not always patentable or was rarely patented, and innovation was no less rapid than it is now.
The underlying reason is that the marginal cost of R&D for software is lower than in any other field. In principle, it just requires a person and a computer (which is what you need for any kind of R&D). No expensive labs, no clinical trials, etc. If you have a person and a computer, you're a potential inventor; if you have a bunch of them, you're virtually guaranteed to invent something. If you have a bunch of such companies (or college departments), you're virtually guaranteed to constantly reinvent what somebody else has already figured out.
When Oracle sued Google, almost all of their patent claims were thrown out on reexamination; and those weren't trivial patents. It just so happened that practically all of them had already been figured out by somebody else; and we only know because Google was willing to throw a few thousand hours at researching prior art.
This is why reinvention in computer science is so common; this is also why patent trolls can flourish: Because reinvention is common, they have plenty of victims to target. If innovation were not so easy in computer science (at least relative to the standards of the USPTO), patent trolls in their current form could not sustain themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I support software patents. I'm just against idea patents, as opposed to invention patents. Screen rotation is no invention. It's an idea; once you have it, it's trivial to implement. That, IMO, does not afford patent protection. However, certain things can, and should be patents. RSA, for example. It's a non-trivial procedure that was non-trivial to invent and there are not very many alternatives.
There's an interesting question about just what an invention is, though. At least in software, actual implementations are covered by copyright, and I can't see any hard and fast distinction between ideas and inventions. For instance, determining the optimum layout of a mail application for a four inch screen probably takes a lot of tweaking and user testing. But there's no way that you can call it an invention, and y…
That may have merited a patent (if it wasn't already invented, and I suspect it was), but Apple's implementation does not.
>Patent trolls then follow each filing with a settlement demand “at a price far lower than the cost to defend the litigation.” (Id. at 1326.) This allows trolls to use the high cost of litigation as a club against operating companies. This smells like another ugly practice by "rightsholders". Namely, the RIAA/MPAA litigation against individuals.
It's a common pattern in almost any litigation, not specific to IP rightsholders.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I support software patents. I'm just against idea patents, as opposed to invention patents. Screen rotation is no invention. It's an idea; once you have it, it's trivial to implement. That, IMO, does not afford patent protection. However, certain things can, and should be patents. RSA, for example. It's a non-trivial procedure that was non-trivial to invent and there are not very many alternatives.
RSA is actually kind of a bad example. It's an eminent example of almost-pure number theory ported over to a software domain, and mathematics is explicitly non-patentable. Next you'd be telling me that Fourier transforms should be patentable. I get that it's difficult to incentivize the development of truly difficult abstract ideas, but mathematicians and physicists have been doing exactly that for centuries and they…
So I was an aerospace engineering major in undergrad. For my professors, financial support came from: 1) government; 2) tuition and fees from students looking to get jobs at Lockheed, Honeywell, Raytheon, etc.
The former is mostly subsidized by the military, while the latter is subsidized directly and indirectly by companies who definitely do leverage patents and trade secrets laws to monetize their developments.
So its a "pick your poison" situation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Check out John Walker's PATO proposal from 1993, following Autodesk getting hit with a bogus patent: http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_105.html
God damn; PATO is exactly my proposal. I shall sue him, having come up with it 15 years after his publication... ;-)
Here's what really happens:
PatentHoldingShellCompany60852, Inc. files a lawsuit. They have no products and no services and so cannot be countersued for any conceivable infringement. Even if you do manage to sue them successfully, the company's only asset is the patent. It declares bankruptcy, nobody involved in setting it up gets hurt, and tomorrow PatentHoldingShellCompany60853, Inc. is filing in East Texas to try to shakedown somebody else.
If IPR for screen-rotation ends up with nullifying the patent, can organizations like EFF start doing that pro-actively for other ridiculous patents like One-Click-Buy and Swipe-to-Unlock? Or does the patent-holder have to be proven as a troll?
I would guess that there are asymmetries that make this an untenable approach, long term. First, there is the asymmetry of cost, ie. it probably costs less money to file for and be granted a bogus patent than it costs to invalidate said patent. Secondly, there is the asymmetry of motivation, ie. patent trolls have greater financial motivation to file for bogus patents than other parties have financial motivation to i…
Is it not? Should Apple, Google, etc, do the industry's R&D for free? Google's self-driving car is patented. Should Kia be allowed to come along and reverse-engineer the firmware and free-ride on their efforts?
I'm not being confrontational, I'm genuinely interested to hear your viewpoint.
I think this is an area where Google could really be useful. With their database and search algorithms, it'd be doable for them to put together a service to do prior art searches. Maybe use text analysis to summarize prior patents into English (since they're written in a fairly structured way to begin with).
It doesn't need to be advanced AI. Anything they came up with would certainly be better than whatever process the USPTO uses now.