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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

#321

Post by hanniabu »

temporallobe wrote: post #93
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 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…

Why isn't a new system built from the ground up in parallel instead of trying to swap the engine in a moving car?

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

#322

Post by btrettel »

OisinMoran wrote: post #289
btrettel wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In general it has, it is just that the USPTO's software hasn't.

On the contrary, USPTO's internal search tool (PE2E Search) is overall good and has many features that I wish public search engines like Google had. The main difference is that it's designed for power searchers, not the general public. Yes, PE2E Search has a lot of issues, but the USPTO contractor who commented here has probably never used it to search for patents and thus has no basis for comparison. You should take what they said with that caveat in mind.

My basic point is that no existing search technology makes up for the sheer increase in documents to search. The last significant innovation in patent search was switching to computerized search in the 90s. The changes since then have been relatively minor, but the number of documents to search since then has increased dramatically. Maybe some AI based search will eventually be a game changer, but for now it's not (I've tried 5+ AI search tools and they usually aren't good) and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Also see these other comments I made:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33509535

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33506241

(Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)

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

#323

Post by btrettel »

amelius wrote: post #262
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…

What do you think about the idea of having a "challenge period", i.e. a time where other parties than the applicant can come up with solutions to the problem stated in the patent (or with prior art)? I bet there is an army of volunteers that would want to help fight illegitimate patents. Also, if $BIGCORP tries to file a patent application, then why can't $SMALL_COMPETITOR contest it during such a challenge period wi…

You can submit prior art as a third-party while the application is being examined here: https://www.uspto.gov/patents/initiatives/third-party-preiss...

A lot of people propose things similar to what you have, but in practice these sorts of things almost never are used.

You also don't need a formal procedure like this. I'm sure if you contact the examiner assigned to the application, they'll listen if you have a valid legal reason to reject the application.

(Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)

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

#324

Post by tracker1 »

ldoughty wrote: post #316
disillusioned wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

The trouble is actually breaking that premise. The SC has ruled, effectively that money is analogous to speech. Undoing that would pretty much need an amendment to overcome. They could also find that trying to limit corporations at this point could be a violation of the 14th amendment.

I don't like it, I really don't agree with it, but the reality is that's what it would likely take to overcome counter arguments in favor of continuing corporate personhood. As I mentioned, it might be tolerated if it came with tax exemption, in leiu of new taxes against corporate/stock loans and more taxation on profit distribution.

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

#325

Post by tracker1 »

cycomanic wrote: post #168
yumraj wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the courts can sort out the winners if there is a dispute. This will skew the issue towards deeper pockets. whoever has more money for court battles will win the patent case. Is that what we want?

That's already the reality.

So, the answer is to make it significantly worse?

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

#326

Post by unequiv88 »

tracker1 wrote: post #77
williamcotton wrote: post #6

It is too easy for people to hide behind corporate entities and to the detriment of public accountability.

Unfortunately, anything short of a constitutional amendment explicitly stating that corporations and other collective entities do not have $list_of_rights that one may possess as an individual would be very difficult to keep in practice. Of course, this also would have to be limited to collective representation, not a group of people in person (such as at a physical protest). It could be very messy at this point. And…

It won’t take an amendment, just enough government officials to interpret the meaning of the documents differently.

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

#327

Post by jmugan »

cycomanic wrote: post #304
jmugan wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? They might be much better at inventing things than starting and running a business. The stated goal behind patents is to advance the sciences not to create businesses.

My understanding is that the goal is to advance society (not really the sciences) by enabling someone to produce their invention so society can benefit from it. The patent protects someone from having that invention copied as soon as it is put to use, which provides motivation to spend the time inventing it.

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

#328

Post by Out_of_Characte »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #319
disillusioned wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure what you mean, people working for companies can and have been jailed. Or did you mean the legal entitiy of a corporation can't be 'jailed'?

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

#329

Post by theGnuMe »

btrettel wrote: post #172
joshspankit wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether that’s true of current AI or not, it’s temporary. Finding prior art is inherently a “graphy” problem and current AI is getting better at graphy problems by the day (probably even by the hour). I have zero doubt that AI could solve this problem, but am unsure whether it will be allowed to.

I think AI searches could be much better even without an improvement in the technology. Probably the best AI patent search tool would be written by a ML engineer who has spent time examining a wide variety of patents. The current tools seem to be written by people who have only a cursory understanding of how patent search works, and that limits the usefulness. For example, the current AI search tools don't seem to lo…

Is there an online training course or illustrative examples that runs one through a patent examination search?

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

#330

Post by BurningFrog »

disillusioned wrote: post #310
undersuit wrote: post #306

Earlier 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.

Corporations are groups of people.

You don't lose your right because you act collectively, though some things get conceptually awkward.

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