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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

#231

Post by alistairSH »

yieldcrv wrote: post #228
thewebcount wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're suing IBM, maybe. But I don't see how the majority of patent trolls that seem to be suing small businesses for things like using a printer, scanner, fax combo they bought at Office Depot is helping anyone out.

Its about identifying symptoms, not being an apologist okay so you’re living paycheck to paycheck and took the risk of filing your patent with the attorney for $10,000 and arguing with the patent office a couple times for another $10,000 now you need to monetize it and other people did the thing you described after you described it everyone on the internet says “hm you should have launched a startup using more capita…

The argument is that society would be better off the the inventor licensed (or sold outright) to a company that will actually use the patent. Instead of to a NPE that exists only to sue.

If an inventor just wants to sit on a patent and not produce anything based on it, they should be forced to (eventually, though I have no idea what timeframe would be optimal) release their rights.

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

#233

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

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…

how does improved scalability, improved availability, and reduced cost help the patent examiners make more reliable decisions?

It doesn't, that's the point, you're adding to the same noise everyone else is.

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

#234

Post by waterhouse »

bdw5204 wrote: post #34
bell-cot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software patents, "better paperclips", and a lot of other "lawyers get rich, bureaucracies get bigger, little people get screwed patents? - YES. (Some sort of IP protection or reward system is still needed for real inventions - where it takes serious money, expertise, time, etc. to achieve something major.) But maybe a better moral would be that shell corporations (& lawyers playing shell games with them) should be o…

Generally speaking, most "real inventions" are independently invented by multiple people and aren't successful until somebody figures out how to market them. For example, video games were invented in the 1950s and Tennis for Two[0] was basically Pong in 1958 (a bunch of people had already written tic tak toe, checkers and/or chess). The Magnavox Odyssey (likely the first console) was released around 2 months before P…

I've always found Wikipedia's "List of multiple discoveries" article fascinating. So many, many scientific principles and inventions that I know about, and it turns out there were others I've never heard of who also figured them out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries

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

#235

Post by AlbertCory »

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…

There are several errors in your analysis, while it IS accurate that "suing IBM" is difficult for a small inventor.

First, patent trolls have a very simple business model (and I heard this from a former troll):

- Don't even sue the real easy marks, the ones who will just write a check for $50,000 to make you go away. Just threatening them is enough.

- Sue the slighter harder targets. For these, you have to actually file a suit. They will settle with you, and you'll demand more than $50K because they made you work a little.

- (This step is optional) Sue the real hard targets, like Google, who will file an IPR (inter-partes reexamination) to try to invalidate your patent. Again, many times you'll end up with a settlement out of this.

- (also optional): go to trial, and hope for a gigantic jury verdict. Buy a lottery ticket, in other words.

Now your statement "Patents are written so broad that they are essentially meaningless." is nonsense. "So broad" means that they apply to lots of products, and the jury just has to decide one of the claims applies to yours.

So, your "small inventor" might get some money by selling to the patent troll, but it might not be from defeating IBM, and it won't be 100% of the money.

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

#236

Post by pclmulqdq »

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…

The point of patents isn't just to protect you from theft. It's to grant you a monopoly on the invention in exchange for publishing details about it (thereby allowing others to build on your invention). Trade secrets law protects you against theft. Multiple people having the same idea doesn't actually mean anything - the person who makes the public disclosures of its existence is the one who gets the patent.

No, you don't necessarily need to spend a lot of resources or even have a "research group" to invent something completely novel, and the price of research is actually a lot lower than you think if you aren't hiring people. For example, you can make a new silicon chip to prove that your new circuit works for under $10,000. A new electronic device of some other kind is only a few thousand. Software (for the few remaining fields where you can get a software patent) is pretty much free to develop.

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

#237

Post by AlbertCory »

drannex wrote: post #162

I'll take a very unlike myself opinion in this - I'll support patent trolls, but only if their exploits are increased by a thousand fold and punishes the entire patent system for being incredibly inept, antiquated, and against any and all forms of innovation. We need serious and far ranging complete patent reform (or revolution) and if deliberate brute-force use of the horrendous laws and regulations that have allowe…

> we need to force massive patent reform

Exactly. How will that happen?

My answer: you get some congressman or senator to introduce a bill, and then you apply all the influence you can muster to get it passed. And there will be opposition.

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

#238

Post by pclmulqdq »

newaccount74 wrote: post #221
headhasthoughts wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your proposed world, shouldn't we simply get rid of patents entirely? The person who made the flash freezer, for example, was just one person. If he couldn't protect his patent, despite definitively changing the face of global food preparation, why should IBM have any intellectual property?

I don't know if abolishing patents altogether would improve innovation. But I'm pretty sure that patents on obvious things hinder innovation, rather than help it. I'm not familiar with the invention of flash freezing. Did the inventor just patent the idea of freezing food fast? That sounds like a pretty obvious idea that should not be patentable. Why give someone a monopoly on quick freezing? Or did the inventor pate…

What is obvious?

In the case of flash freezing, hasn't the market shown that the idea of quickly freezing food (to preserve the food without producing large ice crystals) was novel when he invented it? We have been able to freeze food for hundreds of years, and nobody was doing it that way until 1924. That sounds like a non-obvious novel idea to me.

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

#239

Post by pj_mukh »

oogali wrote: post #182
pj_mukh wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 physic…

Either way, when a judge demands a physical "principal place of business", we can't answer "the cloud". When that's the actual answer.

"mailing address because a process server or government employee must be able to physically walk into the premises"

Yea, that would be the CEO's house if their spouse is home, maybe.

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

#240

Post by ajb »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #124
ajb wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced that patent examiners could make good decisions on software given infinite time. A couple of reasons: Let's suppose you had access to all the source code in the world. Given a description of a patented invention, is there any way to find out if it is already implemented somewhere? The answer is no , there is no decidable method for doing that. The proposition that there is, violates Rice's theorem.…

While I applaud your effort, arguing that software would not benefit, the conclusions do not transfer across domains.

Well, if business methods are Turing complete, it transfers to that domain too :-)
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