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A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

wired.com

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Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#51

Post by asabjorn »

rhino369 wrote: post #49
asabjorn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it benefit Uber or its backers to hire him unofficially instead of hiring experts directly? It seems like he was able to make a solid case for invalidating the patent, and hiring experts to investigate patent claims is pretty standard in patent lawsuits. It makes me wonder why Uber didn't hire such experts, or if they did and this guy beat them to the punch.

You don’t have to invalidate the patents at the USPTO. You can argue invalidity in court. Uber almost certainly looked for prior art. And in most cases uber wouldn’t use ex parte re-examine. They’d do an inter partes review, which would them to stay in the proceeding and argue for invalidity.

What is the difference between inter partes review and ex parte re-examine?

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#52

Post by matt4077 »

Buge wrote: post #48
matt4077 wrote: post #35

Waymo has already dismissed the patent claims in its initial lawsuit, after getting serious pushback on it from the judge over the last year. See, for example Footnote 2 on page 2 of http://www.almcms.com/contrib/content/uploads/documents/1/Wa... : Defendants also moved for summary judgment of noninfringement of Waymo’s United States Patent No. 9,368,936, but Waymo’s dismissal of its patent claim moots that part of t…

Yes, that's what the article says. The article says Waymo dismissed their last patent claims after they heard that this guy was contesting them.

Ah, you're right. But I'm pretty sure I read some extremely sceptical/dismissive comments by judge Alsup months ago, so I'd hesitate to infer causality.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#54

Post by zodiac »

golfer wrote: post #38
ajross wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thinking the same thing. I mean... this whole article just smells off. It's a press hit about one patent claiming that somehow this invalidates the Waymo case in a dispute that is fundamentally about trade secrets anyway. I mean, he found prior art on a LIDAR patent. Good. But... why do we care?

Wired fell for this guy's story. This feels incredibly fishy. A random guy feels sorry for Uber, the lovable plucky underdog of all companies... and invests lots of time and $6K to invalidate patents? It just doesn't compute. There must be a tie between this guy and someone at Uber. Or it's VC backers.

The article begins by making a plausible story for his motivation. He had been sued for patent infringement in his own company - "overreaching patents" caused a lot of damage to him personally before and he saw Alphabet use one to attack Uber. And Uber is indeed smaller than Alphabet.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#55

Post by TeMPOraL »

thisisit wrote: post #20

Is auto playing embedded video is becoming the new norm? I opened the link on iPad and the video on the page auto plays but on mute. Anyone else having this problem?

It's been a norm for a year or two now. It's reason #243 for using an ad blocker and/or plugins disabling JS on non-whitelisted pages.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#56

Post by jlgaddis »

aeleos wrote: post #29
asabjorn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a lawsuit without merit took your startup from success to a below-valuation firesale, any similar situation might feel personal to you and it must feel good to do something about it.

I would understand if it was a small small startup like his that was in trouble, but even if Uber got in trouble for violating the patents, its still just research for developing self-driving cars that isn't critical to their day to day business. I am not asking why bother helping a company in a similar situation, but why bother helping a company that didn't really need helping?

There are many people who believe that this trial is very important to the survival of Uber. If they lose -- or otherwise can't develop self-driving cars -- they are 100% permanently screwed.

They are burning through way too much money and it's simply not sustainable long term. If they can bring self-driving cars to market -- allowing them to not have to pay drivers -- they'll be able to survive and may even do quite well.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#57

Post by jlgaddis »

stickfigure wrote: post #37
Deimorz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely the new norm. Most news sites have an autoplaying video on almost every article now. Sometimes the video will even follow you down the page as you scroll. Even worse, sometimes the video isn't even about the same story. I guess they just desperately need to show you a video even if they don't have a very relevant one. It's terrible, and yet another reason to block almost everything by default with som…

I thought I was the last holdout, but I finally added a Chrome plugin that disables javascript on a domain-by-domain basis. At this point I have JS disabled for pretty much every single news-related site - cnn, nytimes, bloomberg, sfgate, wsj, salon, etc... and dozens of less notable ones. It's incredible how much more usable these websites are without JS. No autoplay, no popups, no "CPU goes to 100% and scrolling ta…

OT: WRT CNN, you might prefer "CNN Lite" [0]. I certainly do. I can't even stand to view their home page anymore.

[0]: https://lite.cnn.io/

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#58

Post by Fnoord »

asabjorn wrote: post #45
frenchie14 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm specifically talking about his statement that "It’s definitely not a drop in the bucket for me" seems disingenuous when he appears to have a large amount of wealth. I'm not disputing that he paid for the fee himself. It's almost like he's trying to make himself seem more relatable by saying the fee was a bigger deal for him than it actually was. To me, it comes off like he's trying to hide something

I would imagine spending $6k is a consideration even for a millionaire. Spending the time to research and write a 101-page challenge to the patent seems like quite a considerable investment for anyone, dwarfing the $6k even for a middle class person. Why do you think $6k is not a consideration given his liquid capital? What do you expect his liquid wealth to be and what do you base that on?

If he owns a house which is worth at least 5.5M USD then he's more than a millionaire; at least a multimillionaire.

Just to put it in perspective: 6k USD is 0,6% of 1M USD. If I got a savings of 10k USD, and I donate 0,6% of that to EFF during Christmas, then we're talking about 60 USD while I keep 9940 USD or 99,4%.

Even that doesn't tell us much though because your networth isn't descriptive to your income. If you own 0,5M but you don't have income that's something different than owning 0,5k but having 2k to spend every month.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#59

Post by kilburn »

I am a bit surprised that most comments here focus on whether the guy's genuine or not.

What surprised me, in a bad way, is that to challenge a patent you have to have 6k USD to throw away plus the expertise and time (which the article estimates at 60k USD).

IMHO, if the patent ends up overturned, the patent holder should be liable for those costs. In fact, I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't be that way. Can you?

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#60

Post by JFFalcon »

kilburn wrote: post #59

I am a bit surprised that most comments here focus on whether the guy's genuine or not. What surprised me, in a bad way, is that to challenge a patent you have to have 6k USD to throw away plus the expertise and time (which the article estimates at 60k USD). IMHO, if the patent ends up overturned, the patent holder should be liable for those costs. In fact, I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't be that way. Ca…

Maybe because then you could pick on small patents that a competitor isn't really using to hit them for 6k/60k a pop? Of course, that would only work if they have several dodgy patents, so you argue they should just be more careful.

Disclaimer: I'm just speculating and know nothing about patent law.

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