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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

#151

Post by BlueTemplar »

speeder wrote: post #13
commitpizza wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see the difference, why just software?

The purpose of patents, is incentive companies to share their secrets. For example, Coca-Cola never patended their formula. So you might think: I can copy it and sell my own right? Well, yes, legally yes, if you ever found their formula, somehow. They been successful for more than a hundred years now in hiding that formula. Thing is, software patents allowed people to actually patent ideas, concepts, stuff that is ob…

It's only "obvious" after the fact, and was clearly not obvious to the patents office, or the patent wouldn't have been granted.

As for the "no effort" claim, reminds me of the :

Henry Ford vs Charles Steinmetz' (of General Electric) invoice for fixing a generator : "Making chalk mark [showing where the issue is], $1. Knowing where to make mark, $9,999."

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

#152

Post by zerocrates »

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…

There's no requirement that you actually implement a patent to keep it. The patent troll industry runs to a large extent on patents that aren't being practiced.

You may be thinking of trademarks, which can be granted on the basis of an intent to use the mark in the market with a time limit thereafter to keep them.

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

#153

Post by birdman3131 »

MereInterest wrote: post #150
lordnacho wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

At least in the medical world the security requirements of documents at rest is much higher than ones in transit. So you can't easily do efax because as soon as you have a queued pdf its at rest. (It can be done. just not easily.) So when everybody switches over to voip they usually try to keep the old fax machines going which faxing over voip is hit or miss.

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

#154

Post by brightball »

zippergz wrote: post #119
brightball wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know. Ultimately, the reason to use one is if you're largely working out of a house and you're goal is to avoid putting your home address on your business.

While I get what the judge is going for here, there's nothing about renting an office space somewhere that makes a patent more valid.

If anything, the contracts that allow the parent company to take 90-95% of the income should also entitle them to the same level of liability and that should have nothing to do with the shell company address. As soon as that is addressed, hopefully by law, all of this stuff goes away very quickly.

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

#155

Post by btrettel »

temporallobe wrote: post #93
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 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'll agree that many of the tools are bad. I have a particular dislike for how slow Word is. But, I don't think that transitioning everything to the cloud is necessarily going to help. Word is slow many times because it freezes up when syncing. And a lot of the tools are good. EAST and PE2E Search have a lot of great features for power searchers that I'd like to see in tools outside of the USPTO. (But they also have a lot of annoyances.)

I don't think more than 1/3 or so of my time is wasted due to these sorts of things. That's significant, but it won't be the game changer that doubling examination time would be.

I don't know anything about what's happening on the backend, for what it's worth. I assume that it's always near exploding.

By the way, you can find a bunch of annoying time wasters listed by examiners here: https://www.reddit.com/r/patentexaminer/comments/y9pyfx/mild...

(Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)

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

#156

Post by abduhl »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #51
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…

Pretty sure that it's not for ideas, but for specific implementations of ideas, patents being criticized as abusive when they are not specific enough ? One example I saw just today : Thomas Savery getting a patent on "make, imitate, use or exercise any vessells or engines for raiseing [sic] water or occasioning motion to any sort of mill works by the impellent force of fire,", which I assume subordinated Thomas Newco…

This seems to be splitting hairs on what an “idea” is. Is a patent on the use of water heated into steam to drive an engine different from the idea to use steam to drive an engine? I don’t really see where you draw the line here, and the idea to use steam to drive an engine was definitely new at the time so why shouldn’t it be patentable? And also note that your linked story does not implicate the US patent system (which addresses the problem you’ve identified: your patent only lasts for 17 years, not for your or your competitor’s life) but seems to be reliant on the British patent system as it was in the late 1600s.

You can argue that the patent system in the US is partially broken because of how broadly patents are granted nowadays, but that does not support the GP’s contention that there is some kind of distinct line that can be drawn between an idea and an invention, which is why the patent system is what it is now. And, again, your own link underscores how far we’ve come in understanding that unlimited monopolies on technologies/ideas are bad and how limiting patents durationally can help with that. Note that one of the requirements for a patent to issue is called “enablement” which basically means that your patent MUST describe the invention with sufficient particularity that a person with ordinary skill in the art could make and use your invention.

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

#157

Post by voakbasda »

mring33621 wrote: post #149
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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

I feel confident saying that the government does not have this expertise and never will, so this just seems like yet another taxpayer-funded boondoggle (aka, the status quo).

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

#158

Post by btrettel »

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?

No, patent applications don't need to be filed via fax. I've heard bad things about the various USPTO websites, so fax might have been the guy's preference as I can see it being relatively simpler.

(Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)

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

#159

Post by btrettel »

pxmpxm wrote: post #79
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 have serious doubts that more examination time is the solution here - at the end of the day, the only people that have an incentive for completely thorough search are the people filing or defending themselves against the patent. And the people filing obviously make sure their language doesn't easily bring back prior art. Meanwhile you have no skin in the game at all. I would posit the better solution is curbing ove…

> I have serious doubts that more examination time is the solution here - at the end of the day, the only people that have an incentive for completely thorough search are the people filing or defending themselves against the patent. And the people filing obviously make sure their language doesn't easily bring back prior art. Meanwhile you have no skin in the game at all.

While I agree with you that multiple stakeholders are incentivized to do thorough searches, not everyone agrees on that, and those stakeholders rarely ever do thorough searches. People aren't Homo economicus.

Applicants are required by law to provide prior art on an IDS form. Usually that prior art is close but not close enough. And almost no one submits third-party prior art. I've never once received a third-party prior art submission.

And as I said, not everyone agrees that these folks are incentivized to do good searches. For example, many patent attorneys recommend against doing patent searches for various reasons.

> I would posit the better solution is curbing overly broad/abstract patent language that can be used to litigate anything and anywhere

I strongly agree that enablement requirements should be higher. My understanding is that would require a change in the law, which would make this much harder than increasing examination time. And don't think that enablement rejections will take a lot less time than prior art rejections for examiners. Attorneys love to argue that sort of stuff, so rejections which are basically arguments are often time consuming. A prior art rejection can leave a lot less wiggle room for attorneys.

(Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)

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

#160

Post by abduhl »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #81
themitigating wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't an invention just an implementation of an idea. I also don't understand why many accepy patents except for software

The problem here is your use of the word "just". Consider the idea of "going to the moon" versus the implementation of Project Apollo.

The idea of going to the moon is not patentable. The implementation of Project Apollo may be patentable.
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