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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

#191

Post by BlueTemplar »

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?

What is the issue exactly ?

AFAIK email to fax (and vice-versa) converters have existed for a while ?

I'm much more annoyed that in 2022 we are still misusing pdf, treating it as a digital-first format rather than one more appropriate for archival of paper documents... (and with the associated "pdfs cannot be modified" myth)

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

#193

Post by whoopdedo »

kmeisthax wrote: post #96
brador wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every patent should be automatically granted and the courts can sort out the winners if there is a dispute. That is the system we have moved to.

No, it absolutely shouldn't work like that. When a patent is granted, you can sue over it, and challenging a patent at that stage means spending lots of time and money defending against an infringement lawsuit. The entire patent troll business model relies on people paying to not be sued. The patent system was designed with the assumption that USPTO would do its job, and switching to an adversarial model for patentab…

> spending lots of time and money defending against an infringement lawsuit

It works unfavorably the other way as well. If you have your patent infringed you have to spend lots of time and money advancing the lawsuit. More, in fact, since the burden of proof is on you to claim infringement. No matter how you slice it the end result will be the biggest organizations with the beefiest legal teams will win all the spoils of patents while independent inventors can only survive by attaching themselves to those behemoths. That's the situation that open patents were designed to prevent. Ideally patents should exist to empower inventors to be able to live off their ingenuity; not for the sake of rent-seekers to bully creators into entering a protection racket.

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

#194

Post by silvestrov »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #184
silvestrov wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 settle…

Add: When you challenge a patent you must pay $100 in fee which you will get back (in addition to the $1000) when and if the challenge succeeds.

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

#196

Post by nu11ptr »

snarf21 wrote: post #187
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 schedu…

> 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?

No, we have copyright and trade secrets to protect those things. There are many forms of IP protection, but patents are the most questionable by far IMO, and are more likely (in most fields) to be a net loss rather than a net gain for humanity.

> 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.

Copyright protection is sufficient for software IMO. Very few pieces of software are novel enough to be worthy of a patent, and in the few cases that are, the greater number that aren't outweigh the benefit to the few. When you have to try this hard to salvage the system, it is usually best to not try and salvage it.

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

#197

Post by cryptonector »

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…

IMO the "most effective way to eliminate bad patents would be to" set patent lifetimes that are industry/field specific -- you get a number of years of patent protection that should be enough to yield a positive ROI in that industry/field.

So pharma might get 20 years like they do today, hardware might get 12, software might get 8, and cryptography might get 5 (no one ever turns much of a profit with cryptography patents -- the entire industry avoids them like the plague).

This will greatly discourage patent trolls because they won't have enough years to shake people down. But it won't discourage legitimate patent owners, and it will encourage continuous innovation (so that products can keep some patent protection all the time).

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

#198

Post by JumpCrisscross »

silvestrov wrote: post #194
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 settle…

Add: When you challenge a patent you must pay $100 in fee which you will get back (in addition to the $1000) when and if the challenge succeeds.

> When you challenge a patent you must pay $100 in fee which you will get back (in addition to the $1000) when and if the challenge succeeds

This does little to change the dynamic. Paying a few hundred dollars to harass one’s competitors, commercially and ideologically, is peanuts.

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

#199

Post by MrStonedOne »

snarf21 wrote: post #187
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 schedu…

Copyright protects software better than patents do.

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

#200

Post by newaccount74 »

cycomanic wrote: post #179

I find the framing of the conversation around problems with the patent system to largely be about patent trolls quite disingenuous. This might sound controversial, but patent trolls are pretty much the only way for a "small inventor" to monetize a patent (note not invention). If say IBM violates your patent an individual or even a moderate startup or company has absolutely no chance of defending it, because IBM will…

I think the story of "small inventor makes big contribution" is very misleading. If an invention is small enough that someone can make it without spending significant resources, it is probably obvious enough that you shouldn't be allowed to patent it, because it is more likely other people incidentally have the same idea than they are "stealing" it.

The only scenario where patents make sense is when a research group spends significant resources to invent something, and then publishes the invention with all the necessary documentation to make use of the invention, then they should be rewarded with licensing fees for their contribution, so they can continue and hopefully make more inventions.

Edit: When I say research group I'm not just thinking of non-profit universities. A research group could also be a group within a for-profit company that develops something, a for-profit institute, a joint industry working group, etc.

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