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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

#141

Post by toss1 »

blobbers wrote: post #134
toss1 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so the players with money can simply massively burden the minor players, often to bankruptcy. A Patent is simply a ticket to start a lawsuit as a plaintiff. So just file, get your ticket, and start suing competitors, putting on them the burden of proving your patent is worthless. That is the opposite of the way it is supposed to work. Without some kind of penalty beyond the costs of patent & prosecution, this…

Interesting that you view the patent as a sword. Depending on your view of mutually assured destruction, you could also view the patent as a shield. Certainly this is what I was told when I started filing them at my mega corp. 3K for filing, 10K bonus if granted and helping shield the product in case we are served. Our patents can be horse traded to settle a dispute. Because I believed in our team, product etc. it wa…

Yes, good point!

Like many weapons systems, patents can certainly serve defensively as well as offensively. In this case, defending against others using them as offensive weapons.

Patents can also have some marketing value.

The one thing the do NOT do is universally stop infringement in real time, which is what people think they do.

If you have a new product/technology, a large company that wants to use it will simply go ahead and litigate it later. You will have a ticket to sue them. They'll have their defensive wall of patents, and maybe you'll make a deal and settle out of court. If not, you'll try to stay afloat and if you manage to fund the suit, in 9-15 years after all the appeals, maybe you get a big judgement.

If it's a small or Chinese company, they'll just run with it, you can sue them, if you're lucky, you'll get an injunction to have products seized at the ports by customs, and you'll never collect a penny at the end because the company will be long dissolved. They'll have stolen some of your market with impunity.

Medium-sized companies might actually respect a patent, because they are intending to stay in business, but don't have unlimited resources.

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

#142

Post by judge2020 »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #83
christophilus wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recently had an unoptimized Django site running on render.com with the `plan: standard` setting survive the HN front page with a single node. I had autoscale set to on, but it never needed to scale up. I don't know the requests/second, but at peak on Google Analytics it said that 300 people were on the site "right now" -- unsure of what that corresponds to. ~5-10 reqs/s roughly? Also note that render.com puts Cloud…

> Google Analytics

Hardly effective for gauging HN readership, given the abundant use of ad blockers. Based on no evidence whatsoever, 100x that and you should have a reliable estimate.

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

#143

Post by Andrew_Russell »

jrmg wrote: post #126
Andrew_Russell wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The article says “All they had to do was become the owners of a patent assertion entity, and accept the "liabilities" that come along with that.” Can you say more what this means? What were the risks these people were (I would guess unknowingly) accepting in return for their 5-10% if things went ‘well’?

They seemed unsure at the hearing of what exactly they had signed up for.

Certainly, their LLCs could be subject to attorneys fees if the Court awards fees (which it generally only does in exceptional cases) or for sanctions based on attorney behavior.

However, normally, only their LLCs would be liable rather than the owners personally--unless they fail to observe the corporate formalities.

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

#144

Post by salawat »

blobbers wrote: post #134
toss1 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so the players with money can simply massively burden the minor players, often to bankruptcy. A Patent is simply a ticket to start a lawsuit as a plaintiff. So just file, get your ticket, and start suing competitors, putting on them the burden of proving your patent is worthless. That is the opposite of the way it is supposed to work. Without some kind of penalty beyond the costs of patent & prosecution, this…

Interesting that you view the patent as a sword. Depending on your view of mutually assured destruction, you could also view the patent as a shield. Certainly this is what I was told when I started filing them at my mega corp. 3K for filing, 10K bonus if granted and helping shield the product in case we are served. Our patents can be horse traded to settle a dispute. Because I believed in our team, product etc. it wa…

Are you the legal department? Do you know what your legal team does with it? Do you really trust your management team to be good stewards?

The only upside to patents as originally formulated was they actually traded an implementation blueprint for exclusivity. A worthy trade. Many patents don't even do that anymore, and devolve down to "draw the rest of the owl" tier parking lots on ideas. IP attorneys have done nothing to skew away from this outcome.

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

#145

Post by kelseyfrog »

toss1 wrote: post #136
kelseyfrog wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make fees means tested and scaled to income or wealth. Make fees scale according to a power law. There are numerous ways to level the playing field. We have only to improve upon the current system and cannot let perfect be the enemy of good.

What? What you are proposing has nothing to do with the perfect vs the good, it is a massive fantasy completely ignorant of how things actually work. Fees are merely a rounding error in the overall cost of patents, prosecuting (obtaining) them, pursuing cases against "violators" or defending them. The fees are in the $hundreds to small $thousands of dollars [0]. It typically costs $20,000 to $50,000 in patent lawyer…

Help me understand how cost scaling doesn't fix the problem of "players with money can simply massively burden the minor players, often to bankruptcy." If it becomes more costly for players with more money to burden minor players, then would they not burden minor players less?

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

#146

Post by salawat »

ksec wrote: post #123
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…

Hats off for even admitting you are are a patent examiner. On a site that is 99% against patents and all patents ( or software patents ) are evil.

Patent examiners are not the enemy, and someone needs to do the work regardless. I feel bad for them myself, because their tooling is apparently terrible. Makes me wonder if I should take a look into the space and see if I can come up with some ideas for a halfway decent set of tools.

I've seen a lot of patents whose prior art could be found by spending a bit of quality time with a thesaurus, or a halfway decent index.

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

#147

Post by abduhl »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #49
abduhl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m interested in what “traditions” you’re talking about here? Honestly, it is not even clear to me what you’re talking about when you say “these” in your sentence. Certainly tradition hasn’t held that Rust memory management is an idea and therefore not patentable. Same with new models in ML? Maybe there is some tradition for protocols, but even those are generally patentable but required to be licensed via FRAND. Yo…

I'm sorry I can do nothing more to help with your misunderstanding of my good faith post. Please do the necessary research with regard to the history and purpose of designs and patents law.

So you have no examples or explanations for what “traditions” you’re talking about where ideas are not inventions or vice versa.

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

#148

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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.

I suspect it's something like this: Company A owns some patents that it wants to troll with. They get entities B through Z to buy the patents and troll, with the contract saying that A gets a chunk of the winnings if they win. If they lose, B through Z are on the hook for expenses. So A gets to hide, first of all, and second gets insulated against financial losses, and third doesn't get tainted by a bunch of adverse legal rulings. (That is, think about how Prenda Law got tainted. If they came after you, you weren't going to settle, because you knew it was garbage. Well, in this setup, if B through F have been shown to be bogus, and G is suing you, you may settle rather than fight, because you don't realize it's all part of the same bogus collection of junk.)

As I said, that's what I suspect. The actual scam may be different.

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

#149

Post by mring33621 »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #137
temporallobe wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do contracting for USPTO and have another perspective as an insider to their technology and internal processes (not legal), who works very closely with examiners and other stakeholders. The tools that patent examiners use is quite awful. Like many other government agencies, it’s embedded with legacy tools that are extremely obtuse, difficult to use, and time consuming. Many of these tools are decades old, unreliabl…

what does the cloud have to do with the tools being old and creaky? Is there some magic sauce that makes the search suddenly useful once it's sitting in AWS? I ask because I see this ALL the time. technical people abusing business ignorance by using initiatives to improve tools to "move to the cloud". Unless you're telling me the problem you're solving has to do with elastic demand or too much costs maintaining infra…

"move to the cloud" is a top strategic objective in my org

I have explained why it should not be, but Mgmt does not care.

Everyone's doing it. We NEED to do it.

I believe we are in a mix of FOMO, resume-driven development and empire-building.

Ok, I can tell that you want me to expand. Here goes:

Cloud may offer:

1) improved scalability (both horizontal and vertical)

2) improved availability

3) reduced cost

None of these are guaranteed and will require much expertise in both initial choice-making and continuing execution.

We don't really have that expertise.

Do you?

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

#150

Post by MereInterest »

lordnacho wrote: post #128
temporallobe wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do contracting for USPTO and have another perspective as an insider to their technology and internal processes (not legal), who works very closely with examiners and other stakeholders. The tools that patent examiners use is quite awful. Like many other government agencies, it’s embedded with legacy tools that are extremely obtuse, difficult to use, and time consuming. Many of these tools are decades old, unreliabl…

I used a patent lawyer who said the patent had to be filed using a fax machine. For those who are too young, a fax machine is this arcane device that used to be everywhere, like a remote photocopier. Got the US patent dated 2013. Was the lawyer pulling my leg?

It wouldn't surprise me, as faxes have some really weird legal exceptions carved out for them. For example, a faxed document is considered equivalent to the original, but a scanned image is not. So even though a scanned image signed with your private key would be much more verifiable than a faxed copy that is transmitted without encryption and printed in a shared office, the law considers the fax as better than the scanned image.

Which is all to say that it wouldn't surprise me if there were a legal requirement for an "original document", and if that requirement could only be met by physical mail or fax.

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