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Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

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Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#241

Post by jeltz »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #221
notfed wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Domain names pay per year because there's an ongoing service attached. There's no such thing for patent Erm, what service? A record in a database? How's that different from a patent office? I guess there's fancy registrar website...to do what...help me pay my recurring bill?

I don't think you are arguing in good faith. OK fine want an ongoing patient fee ? Make it $9.99 per year just like a registrar, who gives you convenient ways to renew and pay fees from a working, modern site, and allow migration , with a few clicks. Is that going to prevent trolls ? Unequivocally, no. Parent was arguing for some ridiculous, unnecessary , tax. Then cited registrars as an example. My point, 1 gives a…

I do not think you know the domain business, which I happen to work in (I own a small registrar and know people at registries). The reason domain costs money is to make it more expensive to hoard, not to pay for any service. There is a service but it just costs a tiny fraction of the registry fee the rest they often use for funding various non-profit initiatives to improve the internet not related at all the providing any service. The fee is set where it is to discourage hoarding.

Edit: It is also there to make it slightly more expensive to create scam sites, but mostly for the anti-hoarding.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#242

Post by squeaky-clean »

iamthirsty wrote: post #203
ummonk wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I invent something but don’t have the capital to manufacture it myself, I shouldn’t be able to make money from licensing it to companies?

Wouldn't that be a "use it" situation?

How are patent trolls not "using it" then? If licensing the patent is using it, this suggestion does nothing to prevent trolling.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#243

Post by margalabargala »

kstrauser wrote: post #223
thelastgallon wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patents are property and we need taxes/fee on it. $500/year per patent, will ensure use it (if you think it is valuable) or lose it. This is no different from domain names, most people pay $10 - $100/year just to keep a domain name. Some domain names are used, most aren't. These taxes can fund free education or healthcare or defense.

I offer as an alternative: IP is property, and it's taxed at the value you declare that it's worth. However, if you swear to the IRS that it's worth $500/yr, then you can't claim in court that a violation of it is costing you $10,000,000/yr in losses. That would be perjury. Your patent is worth $10,000,000? Awesome! I bet your local school district will love to hear how much you'll be paying in taxes on it.

Something like this genuinely does hurt very small businesses or inventors who invent something actually valuable but don't have time to quickly scale up.

What I like for IP laws is as follows:

When you create a protected work, you pay a very small fee. Say, $1 for copyright, maybe $500 for a patent.

Each year thereafter, if you wish to maintain your IP protection, you must pay double what was paid the previous year. Otherwise the property reverts to the public domain.

This ensures a period of protection if it's genuinely needed, but ensures that everything will eventually enter the public domain, especially in the case where no one is making any economic use of the material.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#244

Post by rpnx »

willsmith72 wrote: post #225
awesomeMilou wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you invent something fantastic, say a way for a self driving car to perfectly sense its surroundings That sounds like a highly constructed example, and even if we take it for bare value, makes a lot of assumptions, for example that whatever you invent is patentable. The way you phrase it also makes it sound like patents are all about individual contributions, when in reality the era of lone genius inventors is l…

Doesnt sounds constructed to me. The "you" in that case could very easily be a startup

The number of patents owned by startups is greatly dwarfed by the number owned by large companies. Furthermore, the competition opportunity for small businesses to offer similar products at lower prices greatly outweighs the value of patent invention.

Some people would say large businesses can make things cheap in a way that small businesses can't compete with. However, that turned out to not happen in practice as big companies chase huge profit margins, supported only by the government.

China doesn't have this problem the US does because they have weaker patent laws. Patents need to be eradicated ASAP or we will not be globally competitive. We are also harming humanity as a whole as the inventive utility of patents simply doesn't scale in proportion to the harms, with the large populations we have now, they are clearly harmful on balance.

The fundamental problem with patents is that the benefit has lower asymptotic complexity with respect to population size than than the harm does. When you exceed some population size, patents become harmful.

The utility of copying is N^2 since you have O(N) copiers and O(N) inventions to copy from.

The harm of patents is therefore O(N^2) since this is the copying that patents prevent.

What we find is that the benefits of patents seem to scale at most around some O(N /log N) ish metric. Doubling the population size increases the number of inventors, but the chance an invention was already invented by someone else increases as population size increases. Hence the benefits of patents scale worse than O(N). Applying that to the harm and we still get O(N(N/logN)) for harm and O(N/logN) for benefits. Clearly patents do not scale.

* Here I am using Log N as a substituite for the difficulty increase of finding an invention not already invented. This exact measure is difficult to estimate.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#245

Post by beefield »

kstrauser wrote: post #223
thelastgallon wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patents are property and we need taxes/fee on it. $500/year per patent, will ensure use it (if you think it is valuable) or lose it. This is no different from domain names, most people pay $10 - $100/year just to keep a domain name. Some domain names are used, most aren't. These taxes can fund free education or healthcare or defense.

I offer as an alternative: IP is property, and it's taxed at the value you declare that it's worth. However, if you swear to the IRS that it's worth $500/yr, then you can't claim in court that a violation of it is costing you $10,000,000/yr in losses. That would be perjury. Your patent is worth $10,000,000? Awesome! I bet your local school district will love to hear how much you'll be paying in taxes on it.

I offer one more alternative. Double the tax every year, and once the ip holder decides not to pay the tax, IP is released to public domain. No compnay has money to keep IP indefinitely in such a scheme.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#246

Post by squeaky-clean »

spongebobstoes wrote: post #130
huijzer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so convinced of your argument yet. You point out some cases in which granting a patent will lead to reduced innovation, which I agree is bad. But how about innovations which might never have happened without the patent system in place? I agree with you that patents a probably a net negative for innovation, but we need to come up with a stronger argument than monopolies are bad.

Can you provide some recent examples of where patents likely played a positive role in innovation?

ARM CPUs

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#247

Post by thelastgallon »

EnigmaFlare wrote: post #230
kstrauser wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I offer as an alternative: IP is property, and it's taxed at the value you declare that it's worth. However, if you swear to the IRS that it's worth $500/yr, then you can't claim in court that a violation of it is costing you $10,000,000/yr in losses. That would be perjury. Your patent is worth $10,000,000? Awesome! I bet your local school district will love to hear how much you'll be paying in taxes on it.

But property usually isn't taxed. Trading is. If you license a patent to someone else for $500/year, you'd pay tax on that $500. But if it's actually worth more, of course you wouldn't charge such a low fee.

Property is almost always taxed. In Texas, property taxes on homes are 2.5 - 3% of value, most people pay between 8K - 30K every year. And this keeps going up! Over a 30 year mortgage, I'm sure most people pay more on property taxes than on their home. Approximately 50% of property taxes go to school districts, the rest for other municipal services.

Some states also tax car as property.

What is not taxed is Intellectual Property. Because it is almost completely owned by the super rich. And, of course, these billionaires need all the help they can get. How about we change this? We can think of wiping out property taxes for homeowners (making homes affordable) and fund education from patent taxes. After all, the super rich are deriving these patents from the education system, its only fair they pay their fair share.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#248

Post by grishka »

duped wrote: post #31

There needs to be a "use it or lose it" doctrine/law around technological IP. I get all the arguments around creating a market for the patent rights, but it just leads to these bottom feeders creating no value and increasing costs for the industry and consumers.

Would work even better if patents were non-transferable and only assignable to actual people, not companies or other entities.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#249

Post by brookst »

kstrauser wrote: post #223
thelastgallon wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patents are property and we need taxes/fee on it. $500/year per patent, will ensure use it (if you think it is valuable) or lose it. This is no different from domain names, most people pay $10 - $100/year just to keep a domain name. Some domain names are used, most aren't. These taxes can fund free education or healthcare or defense.

I offer as an alternative: IP is property, and it's taxed at the value you declare that it's worth. However, if you swear to the IRS that it's worth $500/yr, then you can't claim in court that a violation of it is costing you $10,000,000/yr in losses. That would be perjury. Your patent is worth $10,000,000? Awesome! I bet your local school district will love to hear how much you'll be paying in taxes on it.

Doesn’t work.

Lots of people don’t know what their IP is worth, and it can change with market and tech trends.

And the damages aren’t based on the harm to the IP owner, but on the benefit to the infringer.

I could have a patent that I think is worthless, but in 10 years I discover that a multinational flat out stole the IP after an NDA meeting. What is the value that I should have declared?

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#250

Post by pulse7 »

How can it be, that the US legal system derailed so much that such trolls can exist? A regular person or small business >>can't afford<< to go to trail and is therefore willing to settle... and patent trolls are living on this situation like parasites...
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