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Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

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Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#141

Post by pclmulqdq »

jordanpg wrote: post #76
linuxhansl wrote: post #68

I have a challenge out to all my friends: "Show me one, just one, software patent that is not obvious to someone skilled the field, and I will stop my annoying diatribes about how bad software patents are." To this day I have yet to see to a useful software patent.

> software patent that is not obvious to someone skilled the field Small but significant correction: software patent that was not obvious to someone skilled in the field AS OF THE FILING DATE (or priority date).

The filing date is often a year after the provisional was filed, and the invention was already marketed. That doesn't mean that the provisional wasn't novel.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#142

Post by pclmulqdq »

jpollock wrote: post #36
nobodyandproud wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So damned if this goes through, damned if it doesn’t.

No, the board can combat "extortion" in other ways. Don't allow the initiator to _drop_ the request once started. Initiator pays all costs (I think this is already done?). Then any extortion has to happen up front, and it becomes much more obviously extortion.

Unless they have changed it since I learned about this, the loser pays at the PTAB.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#143

Post by lazide »

strbean wrote: post #29
robertlagrant wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bad example though, because everyone knows who Apple are. There's no point inventing anything as a new company if an existing one can just copy it and outspend your marketing.

Patent law doesn't provide you much protection unless you can outspend infringers in court.

And the infringers can be reached/influenced by the court.

Random resellers on China have no reason to care about US patents.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#144

Post by karaterobot »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #10
myshpa wrote: post #6

Why Software Patents are Bad, Period. https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0027 Patents are out of control, and they’re hurting innovation https://www.learnliberty.org/blog/patents-are-out-of-control... Economic and Game Theory Against Intellectual Monopoly https://web.archive.org/web/20120121014753/https://levine.ss... PATENTS AND INNOVATION IN ECONOMIC HISTORY https://gwern.net/doc/economics/2016-moser.pdf Historical rec…

I’m not sure radicalising this debate helps anyone. We are trying for a narrow victory of preserving IPR. Turning that into a broader argument about software patents plays into the opposition’s hands.

I agree that, in general, a series of narrow, tactical victories, especially those which lend themselves to being enshrined in legislation, do more to help a movement than trying to overturn an entire system in one stroke. Base hits rather than grand slams. It's not sexy, it's not what revolutionaries scream about, but it's about a million times more effective.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#145

Post by dathinab »

dathinab wrote: post #33
BSEdlMMldESB wrote: post #13

so which is it? "patents" being used by trolls? or American Corporations protecting their investments? I remember when I realized why software patents are not going away any time soon; it was the same thought that I had when I tried to consider the quantity (amount) of dollars represented as 'valuable assets' in IBM's finances; assets which are just software patents.

fighting a patent is quite expensive and hard and in case of proper patents (and many less proper) unlikely to succeed else many patent trolls wouldn't be able to earn so much money This is the reason why most times patents are not fought until someone gets sued even through at that point more things are at risk, like temporary restricted sales, so normally a precaution patent invalidation should be preferred by the…

I hope this pushes other platforms to provide some more memory channels, could be tricky for AMD due to them wanting to commit to AM5 and I'm not sure if you can retrofit it.

Through then most consumer applications don't necessary need/profit much from the wider memory bandwidth as more bandwidth is harder to use then faster memory speed.

And more channels in a "motherboard not on-die" setup is much more costly for everyone (motherboards + CPUs + end user) then for on die. So maybe new CPUs with some on-die memory with their own channels + 2 classical channels is more likely. But then more on-die L3 or L4 cache (e.g. X3D) is probably more useful then on-die RAM. Hm, it's fun how in some way apples CPUs mismatch most of the consumer marked, but then Apple PRO models don't sell to most of the consumer marked.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#146

Post by JohnFen »

drschwabe wrote: post #48
myshpa wrote: post #6

Why Software Patents are Bad, Period. https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0027 Patents are out of control, and they’re hurting innovation https://www.learnliberty.org/blog/patents-are-out-of-control... Economic and Game Theory Against Intellectual Monopoly https://web.archive.org/web/20120121014753/https://levine.ss... PATENTS AND INNOVATION IN ECONOMIC HISTORY https://gwern.net/doc/economics/2016-moser.pdf Historical rec…

Thanks for the links. How do you suggest startup entrepreneurs work around the broader moral dillemma here? On one had, we shouldn't feed the flames but on the other hand - we may need a foundation of patents for defensive measure or to reaslitically compete against the likes of IBM who have a gajillion patents. And I'm aware of at least one government grant programs that requires patents apart of their application p…

> How do you suggest startup entrepreneurs work around the broader moral dillemma here?

Turn your invention into prior art. Publish it, in detail, publicly. Then, if someone else tries to patent it, it's much easier to contest the patent application.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#147

Post by Spivak »

telecuda wrote: post #140

The most useful thing about software patents IMO is what you uncover during the patent writing process. When you’re sitting there writing the equivalent of a 10-20 page college essay on the problem background, operating environment, then all the present and future uses of something novel (the provisional stage), it forces you to think in a way that no typical product management process does. There are few (any?) othe…

And then the legal team runs it through the legalese obfuscator 9000 to make sure no one else will have any idea what it's even about.

Seriously, Google needed insider information at Sonos to infringe on their multi-room audio patent. Go read it and see if you could implement a working system from it https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/07/ef/fb/ac27ac8...

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#148

Post by 0xDEF »

Nezteb wrote: post #120
joemullin wrote: post #56

I work for EFF and wrote the text of this blog post and action. On here I speak only for myself, but a couple points I want to add. 1) EFF has only filed one IPR ever, (linked in the post), against Personal Audio, to invalidate a patent asserted against podcasting. This was crowd-funded by hundreds of people. It required years of litigation beyond the IPR process itself. 2) Patent challenges should be open to all. Th…

Please set up a petition with https://resist.bot as well!

Interesting. Are there other apps and services like Resistbot?

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#149

Post by kbenson »

Zigurd wrote: post #138
anankaie wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in large part because FDA multi-stage trials are very expensive to get through and the risk of failure is high. I know it is popular to hate on the pharmacy companies right now - and deservedly so - but the research costs are not totally made up like you are implying.

Maximized is not "totally made up." You will find software companies maximizing R&D tax credits, too, for example. A JHU study found median costs for clinical trials of $19 million. That's expensive relative to software. If I piled HIPAA, payments processing, and whatever telcos might require for hooking up to SS7 in one app (call it "X") I doubt I could get halfway to $19 million. But $19 million is peanuts compared…

> I stand by the assertion that pharma gets undeserved sympathy for long patent terms.

Sure. That's an assertion that's easy to stand by because it's so easy for it to be true because it's so open ended and unbounded.

I think most people believe the pharma companies are playing it up some and getting some undue sympathy, but 10x the sympathy and 10% more sympathy are vastly different situations and your assertion is "true" for both. It's less a question of whether that assertion is true, and more about to what degree, because that's what really matters in a discussion like this.

A statement about the median cost of a single study across an industry compared to pharma revenue (across an industry, across all studies done, whether resulting in a successful product that can make it to market and earn revenue), is not something we can make useful assertions from, whether or not I believe your assertion to be true (I do). It's just throwing disjointed numbers around and using implications instead of data to link them, which isn't a useful way to convince people who want to understand what's going on.

Re: Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

#150

Post by AlbertCory »

yebyen wrote: post #55
ImHereToVote wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well obviously. How else could publicly funded research be price gouged?

"Obviously." I like how this is the argument for drug patents, and if you don't just simply agree with this, the only real other option is to accuse the person arguing that it "obviously" is the right decision of arguing in bad faith. ...because it's an argument in bad faith? I too don't see why drug patents are "obvious" or clear case that it is helpful enough to be in the public interest to maintain drug patents. I…

> Is there any evidence that drug patents can actually enter the public domain productively at their end of their expiration period?

Practically all generic drugs are available because the original drug is off-patent. You picked one (insulin) and ignored all the others:

https://www.healthgrades.com/right-care/patient-advocate/dru...

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