Is there anybody still doubting there is a corporate shadow world? You know the "pulling the string in the shadow", and that without fantasy conspiracy theories.
Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls
311–320 of 360 posts
Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it absolutely shouldn't work like that. When a patent is granted, you can sue over it, and challenging a patent at that stage means spending lots of time and money defending against an infringement lawsuit. The entire patent troll business model relies on people paying to not be sued. The patent system was designed with the assumption that USPTO would do its job, and switching to an adversarial model for patentab…
> spending lots of time and money defending against an infringement lawsuit It works unfavorably the other way as well. If you have your patent infringed you have to spend lots of time and money advancing the lawsuit. More, in fact, since the burden of proof is on you to claim infringement. No matter how you slice it the end result will be the biggest organizations with the beefiest legal teams will win all the spoil…
You make it sound like these concerns are even remotely symmetrical. GP is describing how (non-obvious) patents have a significant negative effect on everyone creating something potentially patented whereas your example is of patents not perfectly protecting everyone that chooses to participate in the system.
Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting that you view the patent as a sword. Depending on your view of mutually assured destruction, you could also view the patent as a shield. Certainly this is what I was told when I started filing them at my mega corp. 3K for filing, 10K bonus if granted and helping shield the product in case we are served. Our patents can be horse traded to settle a dispute. Because I believed in our team, product etc. it wa…
Are you the legal department? Do you know what your legal team does with it? Do you really trust your management team to be good stewards? The only upside to patents as originally formulated was they actually traded an implementation blueprint for exclusivity. A worthy trade. Many patents don't even do that anymore, and devolve down to "draw the rest of the owl" tier parking lots on ideas. IP attorneys have done noth…
The entire idea of defensive patents makes a mockery of the original intention. "Patents are so fucked that the only recourse is to get your own patents so that even though you may inftringe others' patents they likely also infringe yours and would lose as much as they can gain by enforcing their purpoted exclusivity." MAD.
Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls
#314Current 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…
Do you see AI decreasing your workload? When you look for prior art would something like gpt-3 be useful?
Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure they can happen, but in general they require a much lower investment to be done, and are easy to reinvent. Once I had an idea while sitting on the toilet, about how to use past log data to pre-emptively scale up, when the peak hour is about to come. I had the idea just randomly sitting on the toilet for a few minutes… it was already patented.
I don't understand your point, do you mean that this cannot happen in other fields? I imagine that this is the case for most stuff in the world. Ideas are not usually unique but it's the great execution of the idea that present the real challange.
Well do you think a new pill is done thinking 10 minutes?
Just the testing procedures involve massive investment.
I'm not in favour of patents at large by the way, but they make even less sense for software.
Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corporations were made without a constitutional amendment, they can be regulated without one. Don't like it? Lots of ways to run a company without using the government vehicle/definition.
Corporations are people, my friend.
That concept was created by the US supreme court judges interpretation of laws made by Congress. At any point since then, we (Congress) could have passed a late to clarify language or simply say "corporations are not people".
Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls
#317Earlier 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.
Once they own the patent, could they not break with MAVEXAR and keep 100% of what they would get from the litigation? In theory, I'm aware they probably had neither the know-how nor the funding.
Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls
#318Current 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…
Do you see AI decreasing your workload? When you look for prior art would something like gpt-3 be useful?
See this other series of posts I made and the links from them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33506241
I don't see how GPT-3 could be particularly useful for me as it exists now. GPT-3 doesn't know anything about the prior art, so I can't see how it would work there. I think some sort of AI system could be useful for non-prior-art analysis like 101 or 112(b) compliance, but that would need a specially trained system. The data's out there [0]. I think if combined with existing 112(b) analysis software this could be quite useful, but not as useful as something good that finds prior art.
[0] https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/economic-research/research-d...
Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corporations were made without a constitutional amendment, they can be regulated without one. Don't like it? Lots of ways to run a company without using the government vehicle/definition.
Corporations are people, my friend.
More accurately, corporations are a special class of people that can never be jailed or executed (at least in all but the rarest cases) for their misdeeds, merely fined. That's the real problem, they want the rights of people without the punishments of people.
Re: Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm the author. It's actually kind of hard to say at this stage, and the judge suggested amicus briefing to help the Court figure out what to make of all this.
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’?
It sounds like a trade. I give you a patent, aka cause of action, and in return you cut me in on your winnings. But if you lose you're on your own.
It spreads downside risk directly. It also makes unraveling the real interests harder.
It's a clever, evil hack of the justice system. It's very cool this judge uncovered it. I hope they get nailed and I hope we close these loopholes.