Abolish The Patent, Vanquish The Troll • Hacker News Board

Re: Abolish The Patent, Vanquish The Troll

#131

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 13, 2013, 8:20 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #116

larrys wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let me see if I understand your point. You are saying "they aren't using it so therefore we should be able to use it" and are somehow comparing that to what patent trolls do? Further you are saying that someone who holds a domain name (or any property) should have to satisfy a requirement of "use" of that property or domain name? And if not they should sell it to you for a price that you find acceptable or maybe j…

The mistake is in thinking that domain names should be property. They're not property, they're address space. Imagine if trademarks worked this way -- right now to get a trademark you have to actually use it (or certify that you intend to use it), you can't just squat on a thousand different names and hope somebody is eventually willing to pay you for one of them. And the solution should be the same. You can't sell a…

[deleted]

Re: Abolish The Patent, Vanquish The Troll

#132

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sat, Apr 13, 2013, 1:00 PM UTC

samuellevy wrote: post #125

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mistake is in thinking that domain names should be property. They're not property, they're address space. Imagine if trademarks worked this way -- right now to get a trademark you have to actually use it (or certify that you intend to use it), you can't just squat on a thousand different names and hope somebody is eventually willing to pay you for one of them. And the solution should be the same. You can't sell a…

Define "using" a domain name. I have a couple of domain names where my primary reason for holding them is for email addresses, or an inside joke with friends. Admittedly, no-one is clamoring for these domain names, let alone offering me $7500 for them for their business, but just because you can't see the use doesn't mean that they're not being used. Yes, domain name squatters suck, but they're making money, so they'…

Nobody has to stop you from holding stupid domain names. Hold them all you like. You are using them for something. Nobody said "something" has to be hosting a website. But don't try to sell them without having built any value into them -- you should only be able to profit from the transfer if you're transferring it incident to something of value you've created, like an email service or website with actual users. And yes, that means some of the squatters are going to try to create sham transactions and commit fraud, but at least then you can prosecute it where you can prove it, rather than allowing their useless, irritating, wasteful arbitrage-based businesses to continue lawfully.

Re: Abolish The Patent, Vanquish The Troll

#133

Post by acdha » Sat, Apr 13, 2013, 3:20 PM UTC

ubernostrum wrote: post #108

DaniFong wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God damn; PATO is exactly my proposal. I shall sue him, having come up with it 15 years after his publication... ;-)

Except it doesn't work. 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 fili…

I think the modern wrinkle would need to be establishing a common defense fund with the goal of funding all the way through invalidating bad patents, not just settling a suit. Right now most of these players simply risk losing their time investment, not the grounds for future extortion or possibly even invalidating other settlements.

A well-funded, well-known legal team could have an easier time doing filing to consolidate cases, making the strategy of repeatedly going after small companies less one-sided.

Re: Abolish The Patent, Vanquish The Troll

#134

Post by drakaal » Sat, Apr 13, 2013, 3:45 PM UTC

umsm wrote: post #63

drakaal wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drew is exaggeration. I took on Acacia, it cost me nothing more than the travel, and time away from my primary business. Lawyers cost a lot of money, but for something like "the ability to rotate a mobile screen" that rackspace is fighting you don't need a lawyer. Prior art exists for rotating screens on desktops and tablet PCs. Feature parity on Mobile is not innovative. Obviousness is the challenge to a patent and…

I believe the keyword here is "average". There are probably examples of cases on both ends of the spectrum: cases that dragged on to be very expensive and others that were resolved with a phone call or letter.

Yes a billion dollar fight would skew the average a lot. Several fights between porn companies and streaming media changed the numbers as they were in the hundreds of millions range at that seriously messed with the average. The typical need not be so high.

Re: Abolish The Patent, Vanquish The Troll

#135

Post by ge0rg » Sat, Apr 13, 2013, 3:54 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #35

arbuge wrote: post #7

"IPRs can be risky and costly. We know this IPR will cost us more than the $75,000 that Rotatable wanted to extort from us. But we are not just fighting for us; we are fighting for all the app developers who are also in the line of fire." Clearly the patent system is defective and needs to be fixed radically (or patents entirely eliminated in the software space, which I personally believe is preferable). Nevertheless…

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

Oracle Corporation has taken a public stand against the patentability of software and has forsworn use of its own patents except to counter-sue in infringement claims.

Now this is really a great quote from that article!

Re: Abolish The Patent, Vanquish The Troll

#136

Post by hexagonc » Sat, Apr 13, 2013, 5:56 PM UTC

I'm not a lawyer but this patent troll litigation would seem to be a textbook case for estoppel by acquiescence. [1] These patent trolls are deliberately waiting until the patents are firmly established norms in the industry so that finding alternatives are that much harder. Furthermore, the trolls wrongly allow time to go by so that they can claim a higher damage reward than they otherwise would have.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel_by_acquiescence

Re: Abolish The Patent, Vanquish The Troll

#137

Post by toasterlovin » Sun, Apr 14, 2013, 6:21 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #109

toasterlovin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Actually, its worse than that; they seem convinced that their patents have actual intrinsic value, which kind of makes sense. They spend a lot of money doing research and development, so of course they want to believe that a legal mechanism for preserving the value of that R&D is legitimate. 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 al…

Yeah, I think it'll all be okay for them. Apple does fine, despite the fact that every phone looks like an iPhone, every tablet looks like an iPad, and every laptop looks like a MacBook Air. Companies have been dealing with knock-offs for ages, the club they wield is Brand. Look no further than the fashion industry to see how effective Brand is at combatting knock-offs.

Regarding Google's self driving car: anybody reverse engineering Google's firmware is going to incur enormous R&D costs of their own. The only way they could avoid these is if they could use a copy of the source code, but that's protected by copyright (which, unlike patents, I agree with, since it protects implementations, not ideas).

My issues with patents are these:

1. I just don't think ideas should be ownable. A primary purpose of language, one of the characteristics that defines us as a species, is to transmit ideas from one person to another. In other words, we have evolved to allow one person to have an idea, then make some utterance which takes this idea and makes a copy of it in the mind of another person, instantaneously. To me, this points unavoidably to the fact that sharing of ideas is part of what makes us human. To put restriction on this fundamental human-ness strikes me as deeply wrong. Or, at the very least, good for a few at the expense of the many (AIDS drugs in Africa, etc.).

2. Even if you think ideas should be ownable, patents attempt to reward the first person who comes up with an idea, but being the first to an idea is incredibly arbitrary. As an example, I don't get to invent 1-Click Purchase because I just started developing software 2 years ago. Seems unjust.

Re: Abolish The Patent, Vanquish The Troll

#138

Post by toasterlovin » Sun, Apr 14, 2013, 7:01 AM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #98

toasterlovin wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If I however invent the first hyperspace engine, You shouldn't be able to buy one, take it a part and make your own." Why not? What is special about non-obvious ideas, that they should not be as freely transmitted as obvious ones? Also, why should the first person to file for a patent on an idea be the person who gets the monopoly on the idea? With 7 billion minds on this planet, even for non-obvious ideas, it seems…

What is special about non-obvious ideas, that they should not be as freely transmitted as obvious ones? The sometimes-vast sunk costs of the discoverer.

Sure, but, as you say, ideas are discovered, and because they are discovered as opposed to created, their existence is not dependent on the specific person discovering them. So why assign legal ownership? How are ideas different than a discovery in mathematics?

Re: Abolish The Patent, Vanquish The Troll

#139

Post by takluyver » Sun, Apr 14, 2013, 9:22 AM UTC

m12k wrote: post #123

takluyver wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, there's another similarity to biology. This also advertises to any other patent trolls thinking of suing them 'We are willing and able to fight back'. So patent trolls will pick on some other company that's more likely to pay up. Some species of antelope, when pursued by a predator, will suddenly leap high into the air, jumping from all four feet at once. This is called stotting, and the best theory for why…

That sounds very cool! Although the rationalization for it sounds rather contrived - to me at least any of these explanation would sound at least as plausible: 1) The sudden vertical movement may cause a predator that is used to tracking its prey horizontally to lose sight of the specific animal in the flock, thus making it harder to run it down. 2) Statistically, the jump may prove to evade a certain percentage of p…

Other details suggest 1 & 2 are unlikely - they tend to make this manoeuvre when the predator is still some way off, and at least one species (Thomson's Gazelle) won't stot when a predator is within about 40 metres. It seems unlikely that the rest would outweigh the effort needed to jump 2 metres in the air (3), and I doubt a lion is worried about a kick from a gazelle (4).

But yes, other explanations have been proposed. There's a list on Wikipedia if you look up Stotting.

Re: Abolish The Patent, Vanquish The Troll

#140

Post by anigbrowl » Sun, Apr 14, 2013, 8:03 PM UTC

toasterlovin wrote: post #138

anigbrowl wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is special about non-obvious ideas, that they should not be as freely transmitted as obvious ones? The sometimes-vast sunk costs of the discoverer.

Sure, but, as you say, ideas are discovered, and because they are discovered as opposed to created, their existence is not dependent on the specific person discovering them. So why assign legal ownership? How are ideas different than a discovery in mathematics?

When you're arguing from definitions like this (discovery vs creation) that's a good sign something is wrong with your argument. One could just as easily say 'X has created a hyperspace drive' as 'X has discovered it.' Discovery is rarely so fortuitous as walking along and stumbling across something of value, as if it were a gold nugget lying on the ground. Most 'accidental discoveries' come after lengthy failed searches, much as most 'overnight success' is actually the result of years of hard work.

what you're arguing is basically a sort of teleological justification for communism; if innovations of one sort or another would be found anyway, their finding must be part of an inevitable progression and the identity of the individual finder is incidental, thus we should only reward labor in terms of time spent. Since there's now way to predict where the next discovery will come from, we may as well reward everyone's labor equally on the basis of time rather than productivity.

I don't mean this as an ideological criticism, if that's what you happen to believe is ideal; I'm just pointing out that that's where you argument goes and I'm not sure if that was where you intended it to do.