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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

#281

Post by geraldwhen »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #233
mring33621 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Reduced cost.

Yeah, we’ll see there. This is the federal government, not a startup.

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

#282

Post by geraldwhen »

btrettel wrote: post #158
lordnacho wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, patent applications don't need to be filed via fax. I've heard bad things about the various USPTO websites, so fax might have been the guy's preference as I can see it being relatively simpler. (Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)

Certain patent types are required by law to be submit via facsimile. It’s in the code of federal regulations.

This comes up almost immediately when studying to be a parent examiner.

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

#283

Post by kasey_junk »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #190
kasey_junk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The corporations in this case a) hold assets and b) provide liability limits. That is the basis of all corporations. So we’d need to get specific about which practice is duplicitous. Is it the treatment of IP as an asset? The transferability of patents ? Limited liability of patent defense? I am no expert in any of those things but I bet there is value in each and bad unintended consequences of each. If I described t…

> The corporations in this case a) hold assets and b) provide liability limits. That is the basis of all corporations. Surely the basis of all corporations is to trade and to undertake usefull economic activity. We spesifically don't want them to limit liability where profit is made upfront, owners take off with the money, and there is no-one left to pay the costs.

There is no need for a corporation purely to enable trade. The entire point is to limit liability of the investors. Otherwise we could just ban them wholesale.

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

#284

Post by geraldwhen »

ajb wrote: post #120
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…

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.…

It doesn’t matter since Obama passed the America invents act. America is now a first to file country, not first to invent.

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

#285

Post by ksidudwbw »

jmugan wrote: post #216
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…

The small inventor is supposed to monetize a patent by building something useful for society. That's the whole deal. The patent itself shouldn't have value beyond protecting that path.

Bump

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

#286

Post by caf »

themadturk wrote: post #280
MereInterest wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't surprise me, as faxes have some really weird legal exceptions carved out for them. For example, a faxed document is considered equivalent to the original, but a scanned image is not. So even though a scanned image signed with your private key would be much more verifiable than a faxed copy that is transmitted without encryption and printed in a shared office, the law considers the fax as better than the s…

Faxes are (or were originally) point-to-point electronic transmissions -- one fax machine dialing via POTS to another fax machine. In addition, the received fax, and the response sheet received by the sender, have time and date stamps that give legally-admissible proof of transmission and reception (and the sender will get a report of failure if that's the case as well). As a former fax server administrator (and trou…

The underlying telephone network is in most cases packet-switched now anyway, so fax-to-fax is exactly as point-to-point as a TCP connection.

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

#287

Post by btrettel »

geraldwhen wrote: post #282
btrettel wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, patent applications don't need to be filed via fax. I've heard bad things about the various USPTO websites, so fax might have been the guy's preference as I can see it being relatively simpler. (Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)

Certain patent types are required by law to be submit via facsimile. It’s in the code of federal regulations. This comes up almost immediately when studying to be a parent examiner.

Interesting. I stand corrected.

> This comes up almost immediately when studying to be a parent examiner.

To my knowledge, this wasn't part of my training. Perhaps you mean studying for the patent bar? I'm not a patent attorney or agent, just an examiner.

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

#288

Post by headhasthoughts »

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…

The latter. Under your proposed ideal, he wouldn't be able to defend such a thing, as he was an individual.

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

#289

Post by OisinMoran »

btrettel wrote: post #155
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'll agree that many of the tools are bad. I have a particular dislike for how slow Word is. But, I don't think that transitioning everything to the cloud is necessarily going to help. Word is slow many times because it freezes up when syncing. And a lot of the tools are good. EAST and PE2E Search have a lot of great features for power searchers that I'd like to see in tools outside of the USPTO. (But they also have…

You are right that a transition to the cloud is not going to help. Bad software will still be bad in the cloud, good software can be just as good (and often better on several axes) when not in the cloud. Though from reading some of the complaints in the thread you link here, Amazon does have very good OCR software (called Textract), so that could help.

But on this point:

> And while search technology has improved, it hasn't become orders of magnitude better.

In general it has, it is just that the USPTO's software hasn't. I imagine a team of the right 2-5 people could make something better than you would wish for in your wildest dreams. But how to actually make that happen is another kettle of fish. Anyone capable of fixing this would most likely be better remunerated doing something else, but nerds are easy to snipe and even just reading your gripes here and in the subreddit has made me want to solve this problem if for no other reason than the humanitarian one.

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

#290

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

Andrew_Russell wrote: post #143
jrmg wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says “All they had to do was become the owners of a patent assertion entity, and accept the "liabilities" that come along with that.” Can you say more what this means? What were the risks these people were (I would guess unknowingly) accepting in return for their 5-10% if things went ‘well’?

They seemed unsure at the hearing of what exactly they had signed up for. Certainly, their LLCs could be subject to attorneys fees if the Court awards fees (which it generally only does in exceptional cases) or for sanctions based on attorney behavior. However, normally, only their LLCs would be liable rather than the owners personally--unless they fail to observe the corporate formalities.

> However, normally, only their LLCs would be liable rather than the owners personally--unless they fail to observe the corporate formalities.

Failing to observe which formalities in particular would expose them personally to such liability?

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