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

Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 285 posts

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#261

Post by valuearb »

MatthewWilkes wrote: post #85
mjevans wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software is already covered by /copyright/ law. It does not need patents.

Copyright covers implementations, not ideas. I have no moral objection to truly novel inventions in computer science being protected by patents. An innovative search algorithm, a compression scheme, etc. Its shit when MP3s and GIFs were encumbered, but they were genuine inventions whose sharing publicly genuinely advanced the public good. The kind the patent trolls use are not innovative in the same way. We need a st…

Allowing novel software ideas to be patented ensures common software ideas will be. The incentives are for expanding patent coverage, it's a fallible system of people and it's why we are in this mess.

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#262

Post by valuearb »

yxhuvud wrote: post #190
sqeaky wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I covered one major distinction well. Copy software has 0 cost, copying matter has some. This is just a re-wording and perspective change on "software patents are just math" angle. Some people feel that since there is no copying cost, software favors the little guy more than with physical goods, so normal patent protection doesn't provide an benefit. These people claim that a big big evil corporation could st…

They are currently necessary for the payment structure in the medical industry. I'm not saying they couldn't be replaced for that somehow, but simply removing patents without having something in place would be very disruptive there.

they are already far more disruptive everywhere else

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#263

Post by sqeaky »

pnw_hazor wrote: post #192
frenchie4111 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Even "hardware" patents are too hard to defend to really be worth it most of the time (ex: fidget cube and other chinese kickstarter clones). You can't rely on patents to ensure defensibility to your business model, so they really just end up being money-sinks.

A US Patent has jurisdiction in the US. You can bar foreign companies from legally importing your patented inventions. US customs will seize such goods at the port or elsewhere if they are aware of them.

That isn't a real solution. Searches are imperfect and this forfeits the entire foreign market. I think Musk has the right idea on novel inventions, the only way to keep them secret is to actually keep them secret.

An honest patent forces a description good enough to duplicate. Better to keep your secret sauce secret.

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#264

Post by sqeaky »

pnw_hazor wrote: post #192
frenchie4111 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Even "hardware" patents are too hard to defend to really be worth it most of the time (ex: fidget cube and other chinese kickstarter clones). You can't rely on patents to ensure defensibility to your business model, so they really just end up being money-sinks.

A US Patent has jurisdiction in the US. You can bar foreign companies from legally importing your patented inventions. US customs will seize such goods at the port or elsewhere if they are aware of them.

That isn't a real solution. Searches are imperfect and this forfeits the entire foreign market. I think Musk has the right idea on novel inventions, the only way to keep them secret is to actually keep them secret.

An honest patent forces a description good enough to duplicate. Better to keep your secret sauce secret.

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#265

Post by frandroid »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #84
frandroid wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty weak.

How so?

Lawyers are blocked from some fancy restaurants and they drop their animal rights client? If you were looking at hiring these lawyers, would that inspire confidence in you?

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#266

Post by pas »

tracker1 wrote: post #65

I think that this is absolutely brilliant. I've been against the patent of generalistic ideas, and basic processes for a very long time. Anything in software should not really be patentable, unless there is a concrete implementation of an invention, it's not an invention, it's a set of instructions. Let software work under trade secrets, but not patents. Anyone can implement something they think through. It's usually…

Someone comes up with a very amazing compression, chemical, medicine, foreign language learning trick? (Not like H.264, which is basically a patent on a lot of prior art [1], because they put the "video" word in the title instead of data.) Yeah, sure, you get a patent on that. But it has to be so outlandishly out of the box innovative, that it should be pretty much in the same league as Einstein's tensor equations compared to Newton's F= G (M1 M2) / r^2 .

It shouldn't be the next iterative step in the field, that comes naturally in the context, after looking at the latest few interesting papers. It should be a leap, an invention to change the world.

Innovation, research/development/engineering, the process of understanding problems and (partially) solving them itself become a lot better understood as we see fundamental sciences, theoretical limits, progress over time, as we have a better mental toolkit, full of amazingly powerful concepts (information, data, power consumption, space-time trade offs, threat model, probability/statistics/risk/incentives/microeconomics).

Or, of course, make the term shorter and field based (based on the speed of adaptation and change of ideas/technologies/methods in fields), and/or mandate reasonable licencing fees (and licensing frameworks).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2349585

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#267

Post by bdowling »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #98
Bartweiss wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting point. Obviously these firms don't have much power over their ex-attorneys, but a culture that opposed this sort of thing might be a disincentive to strike out as a troll (what if you want to go back to respectable practice some day?). And, more dramatically, a firm that wanted to clear its name could easily volunteer some hours to fighting trolls - that's the sort of thing that could make an i…

There's also the plain-and-simple risk that lawyers at a firm I've handed the keys to know a lot about my company. That they may use this to profit against me, in a personal capacity, is all kinds of wrong. It's akin to an investment firm, doing confidential diligence on Company X, having an employee, who may or may not have been on the diligence team, run out and start a hedge fund that shorts Company X. It's not, b…

What you describe is, without a doubt, not only unethical but also illegal. A lawyer or accountant with confidential information on a current or former client who trades on that information violates SEC rules against insider trading, agency law prohibiting an agent from profiting from his position, and rules of professional responsibility. The first could send him to jail, the second would cost him his profits, and the third could cause him to lose his license to operate.

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#268

Post by bdowling »

Bartweiss wrote: post #95
cortesoft wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly are they supposed to do about that, though? They left the firm?

Well, law firms commonly do some amount of pro bono work as a public service and reputation builder. I'd be interested to see a firm or two donate legal support to smaller companies fighting trolls - it'd be a show of good faith and might immediately knock out low-powered trolls. Newegg has showed what happens when these cases actually get fought, and that's something a firm could offer to build popularity and suppor…

Helping a for-profit company avoid paying licensing fees hardly qualifies as pro bono work.

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#269

Post by notyourday »

frandroid wrote: post #265
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so?

Lawyers are blocked from some fancy restaurants and they drop their animal rights client? If you were looking at hiring these lawyers, would that inspire confidence in you?

Lawyers that decide that they want to represent scum that harasses other people in restaurants should not be surprised when they are not going to be serviced in those restaurants.

To me it sounds like the exact thing that should be happening. I want every lawyer to ask himself or herself "is this cause worth it?". That is how we would know if the lawyers actually believe in their client or if they are there just to make a buck or make a name for themselves.

Re: Cloudflare’s fight with a “patent troll” could alter the game

#270

Post by pbhjpbhj »

riskable wrote: post #253
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Disagree. Look at claim construction in a patent "a fixing means", for example, isn't an implementation it's an element of an idea. A patent application has to include a concrete implementation but the claims - which define the patent legally - are always broader than the specific implementation and will cover multiple implementations that use the inventive concept. Thus, a new product that's never been made be…

Proving that a patent's claims cover disparate implementations is how you successfully defend yourself against patent lawsuits. If a patent's claims are ambiguous enough to cover multiple, novel implementations it is by definition "overly broad" and will be ruled invalid. See: https://www.law360.com/articles/608579/overbroad-patent-clai... So no, patents (and their claims) are not "ideas". They are disclosures of how…

I have to press my disagreement.

Claim drafting is a specific broadening process - overly broad claims (I'm coming primarily from a UK perspective [ex-professional]; I can't cite chapter and verse of EU/US but consider myself a well informed layman in those areas). Yes claims must be supported by the description (UKPA S.14, EPC Art.84, no idea for USC) and not cover a plurality of inventions but multiple independent claims specifically cover a multitude of implementations of the same invention.

The claims shouldn't cover multiple inventive concepts (called "plurality" in UK terms), as you intimate, but covering multiple _implementations_ of a single inventive concept is kinda the whole point. An example being drug patents [not my former area] where the functional chemical groups will be claimed when paired with many other standard chemical forms. Another example would be for an allowed compression algorithm that could be implemented in silicon as part of a co-processor, or which could be implemented purely in software [to gain a real technical contribution in the inventive part of course].

FWIW your cited case (discussion here is useful https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/13-298; I only get an abstract at your link; cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Intern...) concerns a different issue entirely, that of claims being made to a financial concept rather than an invention per se, basically the contention upheld is that the claims were to a financial fact that falls within excluded subject matter. It's nothing to do with breadth or multiplicity of implementation.

Post reply on HN