Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls

ipde.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 360 posts

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

#201

Post by kag0 »

AlbertCory wrote: post #171

I'm a patent agent and I worked in Google's Patent Litigation department. This is a slight hyperbole, but only slight: I can bust any software patent. I found the prior art that prevented Google Maps from being shut down in Germany: https://www.themarysue.com/google-maps-facing-german-ban/ @btrettel is right that examiners need more time, but that would mean the PTO would have to hire a lot more of them. A better sol…

> change patentable subject matter to (effectively) exclude computer software

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but what makes software unique in that it would be effectively excluded by changes while other subject matter (presumably) wouldn't be affected?

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

#202

Post by nu11ptr »

system2 wrote: post #192
DueDilligence wrote: post #189

.. I now fear for the judges life.

This is not Brazil. They do not kill judges in the street.

Street killings are for amateurs. This is the USA. Here they take them out Epstein style...complete with cameras that malfunction and a client list that disappears. After that, they involve the media to ensure it is sold as a "suicide".

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

#203

Post by YetAnotherNick »

AlbertCory wrote: post #171

I'm a patent agent and I worked in Google's Patent Litigation department. This is a slight hyperbole, but only slight: I can bust any software patent. I found the prior art that prevented Google Maps from being shut down in Germany: https://www.themarysue.com/google-maps-facing-german-ban/ @btrettel is right that examiners need more time, but that would mean the PTO would have to hire a lot more of them. A better sol…

In general exclude enforcing patents where another implementation doesn't directly decrease the patantee's revenue. And most of the software falls in this category. Most of the patents used by the trolls don't even have implantation, let alone revenue.

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

#204

Post by pclmulqdq »

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 usually an excuse for big organizations like the USPTO to modernize their technology and business processes. Business executives, for some reason, expect "cloud" to be more modern than "on-prem" so the modernization of your business processes and modernization of the feel of the UI goes along with a move to cloud.

It's really dumb.

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

#205

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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…

> 3) reduced cost

From what I've always heard, of all the benefits the cloud has, reduced cost is not one of them unless your compute need is exceptionally small (ie, you only need a few t3.* instances).

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

#206

Post by btilly »

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…

Not associated with the USPTO, but my name is on multiple patents.

The problem is that examiners have no real way to determine what is "obvious". Every new field is a gold rush, and I've seen multiple fields slowed down dramatically by it. Worse yet, those rushing to new discoveries are usually not those rushing to file patents. This is most clearly where the patent system is destructive.

I would like to see a rule that it is on the issuer of the patent to demonstrate that not only does it seem novel, but their patent is on something that could have been done, and would have had a market, for the previous decade. To demonstrate non-obviousness not by someone's say-so, but by the fact that people failed to figure it out.

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

#207

Post by MrStonedOne »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #5

Can someone explain the significance of the court's inquiry? I understand how it's interesting to see how one NPE structures it's relationships. But aside from the mail drop / physical location shenanigans, I can't tell if there's any legal significance to this information.

No post body was provided.

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

#208

Post by pclmulqdq »

AlbertCory wrote: post #171

I'm a patent agent and I worked in Google's Patent Litigation department. This is a slight hyperbole, but only slight: I can bust any software patent. I found the prior art that prevented Google Maps from being shut down in Germany: https://www.themarysue.com/google-maps-facing-german-ban/ @btrettel is right that examiners need more time, but that would mean the PTO would have to hire a lot more of them. A better sol…

What are your thoughts on Alice? I thought that precluded most software patents from being valid. It is a fairly recent precedent, though, so the common knowledge about software patents is still very much about the pre-Alice world.

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

#209

Post by MichaelZuo »

jason-phillips wrote: post #62
MichaelZuo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't they correct? I would ballpark Delaware court IT security requirements as similar to DoD Secret level clearance. And as far as I understand a higher security cloud solution is usually a custom ask and really expensive at any of the major providers, simply not affordable for smaller organizations.

> Aren't they correct? Not in my professional estimation, unless you want to reduce the argument to absurdly pedantic levels. My quick response to the county government was for immediate effect, "The CIA uses AWS."

So do you know how much more expensive a solution, that can meet their Secret classification, is compared to regular AWS?

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

#210

Post by munk-a »

newaccount74 wrote: post #200
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…

I think that's one way to view invention but the classic way it's been viewed in America is that if you found a novel way to put a sponge on the end of a dowel and manage to market it you should have protections to exclusively make your good for a while - there has always been, for me at least, a very strong romanticization of folks inventing things in their garage and making a few hundred thousand dollars off of them.
Post reply on HN