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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

#181

Post by BlueTemplar »

abduhl wrote: post #156
BlueTemplar wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (w…

lol, after your last phrase I'm confused about what we are even arguing ?

(Also, I don't think that in that case the patent expired because its holder died, more likely it came to a term (after being renewed ?) after 35 years (which I agree is a tad long), otherwise my source wouldn't have put it in this way ?)

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

#182

Post by oogali »

pj_mukh wrote: post #140
delfinom wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Said remote business owners can declare their home office or whatever as principle place of business. That is different from a mailing address.

By remote business I don't mean "that one guy who is a contractor LLC", I mean a 50 person team with no office (i.e the new COVID standard). Yes, you could use the "CEO's house", but then he's gotta actually live for a significant amount of time there and receive mail for the company? None of this really makes sense, and the laws (or interpretations) have not been updated.

No, I believe you're conflating the principal place of activity with the registered agent -- they do not have to be the same.

The registered agent is responsible for getting served, receiving legal mail, and other government correspondence on behalf of the company and forwarding it along in a timely manner.

This is different than a mailing address because a process server or government employee must be able to physically walk into the premises of either the principal place of activity or registered agent, deliver the notice/correspondence/etc. to someone, and record who they handed it off to at what time.

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

#183

Post by wellbehaved »

Patents are just inherently bad. There is no way to morally/ethically justify them nor to "fix" the inherently broken system. This is just one of those unquestioned relics from the past that clutches at shackling the youth for the sake of the old entrenched powers, and thus holds back humanity.

https://reasonandliberty.com/articles/patents

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

#184

Post by JumpCrisscross »

silvestrov wrote: post #169
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 think a much more efficient method would be to make the rule that if a citizen finds prior art more than 5 years older than the filing of the patent, then the patent holder must pay $1000 to the citizen and the patent will be invalidated. If the patent holder does not pay within 6 months, then all the patent holders patents since then will be invalidated. It has to function without involving the courts as they will…

> a much more efficient method would be to make the rule that if a citizen finds prior art more than 5 years older than the filing of the patent, then the patent holder must pay $1000 to the citizen and the patent will be invalidated

This would instantly lead to every patent being constantly challenged by everyone. All the time. Since you've created a non-judicial venue for these claims and counterclaims to be settled, you've also created a parallel legal profit centre.

Vigilante justice is terrible not only for being gruesome, but also quite inefficient.

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

#185

Post by btrettel »

salawat wrote: post #146
ksec wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inde…

> 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.

The search tools are acceptable, but could be improved a lot. To get ideas for improvements, you should talk to actual examiners and try searching for patents yourself. Unfortunately, too frequently people who don't know much about how patent searching actually works propose "improvements" that aren't actually improvements.

Case in point: https://www.priorartarchive.org/

While well-intentioned, this site is doomed to mostly be unused by examiners. The classification search doesn't work. Classification search is a critical feature for patent examination. And the classifications are produced by machine learning, which usually produces poor quality classifications (despite loud pronouncements about how great machine learning is for this task).

The internal search tools work mostly by keyboard, and this search site works mostly by mouse. Mouse is much slower in my experience, and this matters a lot for time-constrained people like patent examiners. The main advantage of the internal USPTO search tools is speed, not anything fancy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978043

The documents on the "Prior Art Archive" have tons of broken images, too.

> 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.

Most of the time this is not the case. If it's something that simple, it would be easily rejected. Keep in mind that when the media says a patent covers X, it probably doesn't actually cover X. It probably covers something far more specific that isn't a problem for anyone.

(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

#187

Post by snarf21 »

wellbehaved wrote: post #183

Patents are just inherently bad. There is no way to morally/ethically justify them nor to "fix" the inherently broken system. This is just one of those unquestioned relics from the past that clutches at shackling the youth for the sake of the old entrenched powers, and thus holds back humanity. https://reasonandliberty.com/articles/patents

Serious Question: Do you think that all software should have to be completely and constantly open-sourced? Do you think that all blueprints must be made public? Do you think that all recipes for food must be made public?

Creation is hard and should have some potential for rewards. I think we need software patents (especially) to be shorter lived and non-transferable. They can only be licensed and the licensing schedule should have to be public and available for all people at the same price. The employer can get a free license as part of the patent process for company use. This gets rid of trolls and patent farms.

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

#188

Post by ksidudwbw »

tracker1 wrote: post #89
ksidudwbw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patents should be coupled to the product. The patent is hidden and considered in draft mode until a working product matching the patent completely is created and submitted to the patent office to check if it matches the patent. If you are working as an inventor it's your own responsibility to market and sell your ideas and create appropriate contracts when selling your inventions to someone. A patent has to go throug…

So, does this mean that ARM can't have patents?

That all connects to a working end implementation, which can be presented to the patent process. ARM would need to contractually secure themselves on their own untill an implementation can be presented though

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

#190

Post by ClumsyPilot »

kasey_junk wrote: post #84
bell-cot wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL, and was not proposing specific legislation. I used "shell company" in colloquial sense - a token / minimal / empty legal organization, used by lawyers & their ilk for what most honest & reasonable non-lawyers would see as duplicitous or malicious purposes.

The corporations in this case a) hold assets and b) provide liability limits. That is the basis of all corporations. So we’d need to get specific about which practice is duplicitous. Is it the treatment of IP as an asset? The transferability of patents ? Limited liability of patent defense? I am no expert in any of those things but I bet there is value in each and bad unintended consequences of each. If I described t…

> The corporations in this case a) hold assets and b) provide liability limits. That is the basis of all corporations.

Surely the basis of all corporations is to trade and to undertake usefull economic activity.

We spesifically don't want them to limit liability where profit is made upfront, owners take off with the money, and there is no-one left to pay the costs.

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