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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

#111

Post by Andrew_Russell »

duxup wrote: post #9

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

I've been thinking about this a bit since the hearing, and here are some ideas:

- If lawyers for a defendant are going to settle (we generally prefer not to), we often want a portfolio license -- a "go away" license. By splitting up the patents among entities and keeping itself hidden, an entity like MAVEXAR can keep filing serial suits against the same targets and can keep receiving more expensive "global" settlements.

- It dodges liability for attorneys fees, since the entities have little or no money, and may decrease the chances of a fee award generally.

- It means that the entity with the patent has little or no discoverable information, decreasing the cost of suit because there is nothing to produce. Lawyers for that entity can also take stronger discovery positions because there is no concern about about responsive discovery.

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

#112

Post by soared »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #110
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…

Sounds like they’re saying search tools available to employees at the uspto are not magnitudes better. From the other comment they’re using decades old tools.

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

#114

Post by mikeyouse »

kasey_junk wrote: post #72
newaccount74 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anonymous companies are bad. I think you could fix a lot of the issues by requiring that all companies must be recorded in a public registry that includes contact information, owner and executive names, as well as a list of actual physical locations where the company operates (if any -- online businesses don't need to have a physical location).

You’d need a federal level legislation to achieve that (and perhaps a constitutional amendment). The states decide the information requirements in their jurisdictions and many have vested interests in not changing them (particularly Delaware where this case is).

This is called a beneficial ownership registry and Biden signed the most recent NDAA which actually included a rule to create this. FinCen is developing the framework now and we should have much more transparency pretty soon;

https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fact-sheet-benefic...

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

#115

Post by brightball »

pj_mukh wrote: post #113

"Judge Connolly made very clear that, in cases before him, it is not truthful to represent that a post office box is a "principle place of business" of an entity. " "Uh Oh!" - Every Remote business owner.

That's what UPS Store boxes are for. They can sign for your packages too...

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

#116

Post by tgflynn »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #106
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…

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 a…

"had a duty to bring the idea to market within the time frame that US patent law required, which they then did"

Do you have a reference for that ? I've never heard of any such "duty". There are many patents that have never been implemented yet remain valid.

Beyond that my point is not that they didn't show the "how" but that the "how" in that case was absolutely trivial and completely undeserving of patent protection.

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

#117

Post by mattficke »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #64
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fingers crossed that the court just says "this reeks too much like a scam to me" and summons the real owner of these patents instead of the mailbox / shell companies, under threat of dissolving the shell companies.

I still don't understand what the scam would be in this case. IANAL, but I wouldn't think "this seems sus" to be a sufficient justification for a court to compel discovery without a clear relevance to the issues before it.

The substantive issue the judge is interested in is whether they made false statements in their court filings. The attorneys seem to be misleading the court about the true owner of the patents, and who the attorneys actually represent.

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

#119

Post by zippergz »

brightball wrote: post #115
pj_mukh wrote: post #113

"Judge Connolly made very clear that, in cases before him, it is not truthful to represent that a post office box is a "principle place of business" of an entity. " "Uh Oh!" - Every Remote business owner.

That's what UPS Store boxes are for. They can sign for your packages too...

No, this is exactly what they are talking about. A UPS store box is not a "principal place of business." Yes, lots of people do it. Yes, you will probably get away with it. But it is not complying with the law, and this is the practice the judge was speaking of.

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

#120

Post by ajb »

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…

I'm not convinced that patent examiners could make good decisions on software given infinite time. A couple of reasons:

Let's suppose you had access to all the source code in the world. Given a description of a patented invention, is there any way to find out if it is already implemented somewhere? The answer is no, there is no decidable method for doing that. The proposition that there is, violates Rice's theorem. By contrast, in other areas, for example drug discovery, a patent covers chemicals of a certain class having certain substructures. Whether another chemical is covered is algorithmically decidable. Let me emphasise that: people are complaining about the tools to find prior are are bad, but we can mathematically prove that perfect tools don't exist. I'd suggest that the burden of proof, that sufficiently good tools can exist, should fall on those advocating patentability of software.

But of course, patent examiners don't even have access to all this code. Unlike in drug discovery, where the entire business relies on patents so any discoveries have been filed with the patent office, software companies don't need patents to do business so the vast majority of software ideas aren't filed with the patent office.

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