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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

#331

Post by themadturk »

caf wrote: post #286
themadturk wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Once again, law lags behind technology.

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

#332

Post by btrettel »

theGnuMe wrote: post #329
btrettel wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The USPTO has some training for registered patent attorneys and agents: https://www.uspto.gov/about-us/events/international-agents-a...

It's apparently based on the training examiners get.

The USPTO also posts a lot of the slides they use for training: https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/examiner-traini...

Otherwise, I'm confident there's information out there on how to search patents, but I haven't seen it.

But I think examining an actual application will be more useful for you. You can do this yourself as practice. Find a patent application that was examined. Be sure to pick an application and not a granted patent. In the US the number will be formatted like USYYYYXXXXXXXA1. You want to do an examined one so that you can compare against what the examiner did. That will be pretty easy if you pick one that was published a while back, so YYYY could be like 2015. On Google Patents for the application you picked, look for "External links" on the top right and go to "USPTO PatentCenter". Then under "Documents & Transactions" on the left, look for "Non-final rejection". If there's a rejection posted then you can see what the examiner did and compare against what you did when you're done.

Look at the independent claims of the application and find prior art that fits the claims. Don't check what the examiner did before you search, just try searching on your own. Write an office action (the report listing why it's the same). "Map" the claims by putting in parenthesis after each claim element why the prior art shows this feature. For example:

> A widget (Bob fig. 6 shows a widget) with blue lights (Bob fig. 6 shows the lights; para. 0076 says that the lights are blue).

When you're done, compare against what the examiner did.

Be aware that it probably will take you several weeks or longer to do your first one.

Here's the USPTO's new public search tool, which is similar to the one used by examiners (main difference is that the public version only has US patent documents): https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/static/pages/landing.html?...

You could also read a book like Patent it Yourself by David Pressman to better understand the legal aspects than what you'll get from the USPTO's slides.

You also might be interested in some other suggestions I've made here on designing patent search systems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33519398

(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

#333

Post by smsm42 »

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".

It wasn't. The misconception that SCOTUS declared "corporations are people" is a meme launched by those who think people lose their rights when they decide to act together. SCOTUS just confirmed they do not. Corporations are not people, never been, never will be, and you don't need an act of Congress to know that - you just need to be a bit better informed.

There is a legal concept of "corporate personhood", but it has nothing to do with "being people", it's a legal term of art. For example, it makes it possible to sue a corporation instead of trying to sue each of its shareholders and executives individually. And it wasn't used in Citizens United v. FEC at all.

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

#334

Post by smsm42 »

tracker1 wrote: post #324
ldoughty wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

CU vs FEC did not rely on the concept of corporate personhood. If anything, if this concept didn't exist it would be even stronger, because then there would be absolutely no legal reason to treat a group of people differently just because they're acting together. What would be the argument - you can do it individually, but once you gather in one building and have a banner at the entrance and a receptionist, you all suddenly lose your free speech rights?

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

#335

Post by smsm42 »

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.

It's not a problem because corporations never had "the rights of people" - people still do. People have free speech rights, and people can go to jail for crimes.

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

#336

Post by xxpor »

btrettel wrote: post #176
xxpor wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much time do you get today? I'm hesitant to support extra time because it can already take 5+ years from file to grant today.

This question is hard to answer as the time given varies depending on the patent classification and seniority. For the application which I'll post an office action for this afternoon, I will be credited 22.6 hours. (I can't claim this is representative of what I'm working on as a whole. Looks to be a bit high for my current docket, but I don't know if my current docket is representative either.) I'm a new examiner an…

Thanks, that does seem like quite a short amount of time. I've seen what patent attorneys can do to the 2 page technical description that I've written (turn it into 100+ pages of legal nonsense), so I'm sympathetic. IMO it really seems like the USPTO is way understaffed and has been for quite a while then, since it would seem that the majority of the 5+ years is literally just sitting there waiting for someone to get to it.

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

#337

Post by smsm42 »

williamcotton wrote: post #6

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

We've been running that "public accountability" experiment with twitter mobs (and sometimes actual arsonist mobs) running around "holding people accountable" for whatever they don't like... And I'm not sure we actually want more of this. It doesn't seem somehow to improve anything.

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

#338

Post by blobbers »

account42 wrote: post #313
salawat wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Curious why you say that it mocks the original intention.

If they're infringing on you, and you're infringing on them, then it nets out. By patenting your own developments, you allow yourself to legally net out. If you don't patent it, then in the eyes of the law it is not equal. Seems like its a quantification of intellectual property, which doesn't mock anything.

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

#339

Post by omniglottal »

smsm42 wrote: post #334
tracker1 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

CU vs FEC did not rely on the concept of corporate personhood. If anything, if this concept didn't exist it would be even stronger, because then there would be absolutely no legal reason to treat a group of people differently just because they're acting together. What would be the argument - you can do it individually, but once you gather in one building and have a banner at the entrance and a receptionist, you all s…

No, you (the individual) do not lose any of your rights. However, the manifestation of a corporate entity should not generate a new right-bearing entity. I get only one vote - making Me, Inc. should not provide me a path to be represented twice - as though to cast a second vote. Money is not speech. This is tge court's error. Treating a thing as though it's a different thing or concept than what it is breaks everything and is quite literally insane. Else, with my free speech, I ought to just act as a mint. Either my self-generated fiat is now legal tender or actual, government-minted legal tender is already spoken for and means something precise, distinct from the transaction where it purportedly speaks. A group of people can speak and transact - the solution to this dilemma is recognizing that a corporation is still full of individuals with unhindered rights, but no trickery allows those individual rights to be replicated - only represented.

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

#340

Post by anurag »

Andrew_Russell wrote: post #17

Sorry all. Apparently I need to put Cloudflare back on the server. Here is the achive.org version: https://web.archive.org/web/20221107120623/https://ipde.com/... Edit: I discovered the Render.com autoscaler setting. Hopefully it's back now.

Glad to hear scaling went well! Maybe we should automatically ping you about the autoscaling option when your traffic spikes.
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