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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

#31

Post by nonrandomstring »

commitpizza wrote: post #11
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…

But real inventions can occur in software too? Inventions that takes serious money, expertise and so on. Some examples: - Rust memory management - New models in machine learning that enables amazing results - Protocols

Tradition has held that these are ideas, not inventions, and thus obtain value precisely because they can and should be freely shared (which is the ultimate aim of patents anyway).

Ideas may also require intellectual labour. But one may not receive the protection of the government for them to give temporary advantage over competitors. Ideas are a collaborative venture, protocols being the very epitome of this - since a "protocol of one" is a bit like a birthday party for one... a bit sad and pointless.

If one wants to make money, by all means invest time in pursuing patentable inventions, but do not presume that mere ideas (most of which are "nothing new under the sun") should be afforded the same protection.

The problem we have today is that the patent system is derelict. The goalposts have shifted to allow almost all and any silly idea to obtain a patent and the system itself is weaponised for extraction. It has not shown any will to reform, so abolition may be its ultimate fate.

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

#32

Post by rhn_mk1 »

speeder wrote: post #13
commitpizza wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see the difference, why just software?

The purpose of patents, is incentive companies to share their secrets. For example, Coca-Cola never patended their formula. So you might think: I can copy it and sell my own right? Well, yes, legally yes, if you ever found their formula, somehow. They been successful for more than a hundred years now in hiding that formula. Thing is, software patents allowed people to actually patent ideas, concepts, stuff that is ob…

Thankfully, the ghost racer patent is expired by now:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210824042808/https://www.gamas...

That doesn't make it any more deserving of a patent.

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

#33

Post by rhn_mk1 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #19
speeder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of patents, is incentive companies to share their secrets. For example, Coca-Cola never patended their formula. So you might think: I can copy it and sell my own right? Well, yes, legally yes, if you ever found their formula, somehow. They been successful for more than a hundred years now in hiding that formula. Thing is, software patents allowed people to actually patent ideas, concepts, stuff that is ob…

> stuff that is obvious Stuff that is obvious cannot be patented, according to the law. The problem is the system's implementation of the law. Software shouldn't be patentable because math isn't patentable.

I think you need a better argument than that.

Is physics patentable? Everything in the real world eventually depends on physics. Yet despite the unpatentability of physics, patents built on physical properties of the world exist as well. Why should mathematics and software be different?

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

#34

Post by bdw5204 »

bell-cot wrote: post #10
commitpizza wrote: post #2

Maybe patents is a bad idea and should be removed.

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 Pong (according to Wikipedia) but it was Pong that popularized gaming and made it mainstream. Calculus was independently invented by both Newton and Liebnitz but there was also a Japanese calculus called wasan from the same period invented by Seki Takakazu based on a different foundation. The telephone was also independently invented by several people around the same time but Alexander Graham Bell got the credit because he was the first person to get it to the patent office.

There are endless examples of this because ideas are not scarce and there are typically multiple intelligent people who have the same idea. All patents do is allow somebody who fails to successfully execute an idea to weaponize the legal system to extort money out of people who do successfully execute "their" idea.

That's not even getting into how the US Supreme Court allows GMO seed companies to patent plants and sue farmers for patent infringement because the neighboring farm's GMO seeds cross-pollinated with their seeds. In Bowman v. Monsanto, the US Supreme Court actually ruled that farmers can't plant their own seeds (when this cross pollination happens) without paying the patent trolls at Monsanto! Patents are simply corrupt, innovation stifling monopolies the entire way down and should be completely abolished and banned from ever coming back via constitutional amendment.

(Current copyright terms are excessive but copyright itself along the lines of the US Copyright Act of 1790 is reasonable as a tool to encourage creative works and copyright abolition would likely be even worse than the status quo's century long copyright terms. Likewise, trademarks are also legitimate as a fraud prevention tool. They shouldn't be conflated with patents as they are in the concept of IP.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_for_Two

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

#36

Post by bombcar »

Andrew_Russell wrote: post #28
webartisan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What made you remove it?

We have readers at the Delaware courthouse and, incredibly, the courthouse network setup blocks the site for Chrome users if I use Cloudflare. I tried for weeks to find a solution other than removing Cloudflare but nothing seemed to work, and I really want people from the courthouse to be able to read the blog!

Can you intercept their network and redirect it to a copy hosted elsewhere or on another CDN?

Blocking cloudflare blocks half the internet so I presume there’s something else going on somewhere.

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

#37

Post by adql »

commitpizza wrote: post #2

Maybe patents is a bad idea and should be removed.

The idea was basically "Let's give some legal protections to investment in research so someone can't just steal it the second you publish it".

As it is common, the idea was fine, it even somewhat worked in few places, but applying it everywhere turned out to be silly. We have medical companies changing an atom here in there to make "same" but legally distinct drugs, and software people patenting half a day of work of someone as some "invention" (and my favourite [1], "playing with cat using a laser pointer").

It failed as a system decades ago and if anything it became blockage to innovation (gotta check thousands of patents, they might be too similar!).

More than that, it is peanuts in cost for corporation but significant one for a single "inventor" so majority of it lies in hands of corporations that would do that R&D anyway.

The protection it provides was also supposed to encourage publishing the science (as opposed to just lock up your trade secrets and never show it to the world) but frankly long patent interval makes it a bit pointless, competition can just invent "same/similar legally distinct process in many situation and only people getting richer by patents are lawyers, not "inventors".

I start to think laws should have "best by" date, and be re-evaulated after 10 or 20 years whether they served a purpose well and still serve it...

[1] Method of exercising a cat https://patents.google.com/patent/US5443036A/en

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

#38

Post by kasey_junk »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #22
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…

> But maybe a better moral would be that shell corporations (& lawyers playing shell games with them) should be outlawed. Shell companies have done more damage to the world than most tyrants ever could - enabling tax evasion, escaping responsibility for substandard construction (you close the company after completing contruction of a house) or for decommissioning toxic assets like exhausted mines or oil rigs. They ar…

Most of those aren’t shell companies by the common definition of a shell company.

Usually people talking about shell companies are referring to companies with no business interests at all or if they are bring expansive only contracts/ip agreements. A construction company is doing actual business. Land owned in a corporation has an actual asset etc.

Most startups start as shell companies, you sort of can’t create a corporation without being one for some amount of time.

So I’m ok with the idea of corporate ownership reform but I think you’d need to get more specific than “shell companies == bad”

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

#39

Post by abduhl »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #31
commitpizza wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But real inventions can occur in software too? Inventions that takes serious money, expertise and so on. Some examples: - Rust memory management - New models in machine learning that enables amazing results - Protocols

Tradition has held that these are ideas, not inventions, and thus obtain value precisely because they can and should be freely shared (which is the ultimate aim of patents anyway). Ideas may also require intellectual labour. But one may not receive the protection of the government for them to give temporary advantage over competitors. Ideas are a collaborative venture, protocols being the very epitome of this - since…

I’m interested in what “traditions” you’re talking about here? Honestly, it is not even clear to me what you’re talking about when you say “these” in your sentence. Certainly tradition hasn’t held that Rust memory management is an idea and therefore not patentable. Same with new models in ML? Maybe there is some tradition for protocols, but even those are generally patentable but required to be licensed via FRAND.

Your post seems to entirely misunderstand the patent system. “But one may not receive the protection of the government for [ideas] to give temporary advantage over competitors.” This is just flat out wrong. The purpose of a patent is literally to receive the protection of the government for your ideas in order to give you a temporary advantage over your competitors via a government granted monopoly on an idea. The bargain that’s struck is that the patent owner gives the details of their patented idea to the world so that anyone can eventually practice it or build off of it in exchange for a limited exclusionary protection in commerce.

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

#40

Post by hulitu »

duxup wrote: post #9

Outside of the liability passed to the smaller entities, what would the advantage of this structure be legally?

In some countries this is called organized crime. In this case it is like drug dealers and cartels: they get the drug dealer but the cartel continues to operate.
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