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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

#81

Post by nonrandomstring »

themitigating wrote: post #57
nonrandomstring wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't an invention just an implementation of an idea. I also don't understand why many accepy patents except for software

The problem here is your use of the word "just".

Consider the idea of "going to the moon" versus the implementation of Project Apollo.

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

#82

Post by tracker1 »

hulitu wrote: post #40
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.

A few RICO cases could bring a lot of light to this space, but could be career suicide.

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

#83

Post by gregsadetsky »

christophilus wrote: post #29
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.

Well, unrelated to the topic, but I'd be curious how many request / sec you were getting, and how many nodes Render autoscaled up to. I'm running a client's site on a single Render node right now and have been curious how it'd stand up to traffic spikes.

I recently had an unoptimized Django site running on render.com with the `plan: standard` setting survive the HN front page with a single node. I had autoscale set to on, but it never needed to scale up.

I don't know the requests/second, but at peak on Google Analytics it said that 300 people were on the site "right now" -- unsure of what that corresponds to. ~5-10 reqs/s roughly?

Also note that render.com puts Cloudflare in "front" of the nodes automatically, which helps with some caching.

(I'm unaffiliated btw, just moved to them from Heroku and have been happy to far)

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

#84

Post by kasey_junk »

bell-cot wrote: post #75
kasey_junk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

IANAL, and was not proposing specific legislation. I used "shell company" in colloquial sense - a token / minimal / empty legal organization, used by lawyers & their ilk for what most honest & reasonable non-lawyers would see as duplicitous or malicious purposes.

The corporations in this case a) hold assets and b) provide liability limits. That is the basis of all corporations.

So we’d need to get specific about which practice is duplicitous. Is it the treatment of IP as an asset? The transferability of patents ? Limited liability of patent defense?

I am no expert in any of those things but I bet there is value in each and bad unintended consequences of each.

If I described to a lay person that there was a hacker website frequented by lots and lots of people with an active forum community, you’d likely get at least some of them to suggest banning it…

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

#85

Post by pixelfarmer »

bdw5204 wrote: post #34
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…

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 P…

Copyright was not introduced by authors, it was introduced by the people who print books, or at least some of them. In Germany books and booklets were dirt cheap, which allowed broad access to all kinds of works and consequently knowledge to spread. Then came copyright, and guess what happened: It wasn't exactly the authors who got richer, and neither the biggest bunch of the guys who printed all these things saw any of the benefits, either. It was a net loss for the society, because some greedy idiots couldn't get enough.

Trademark also has a good few issues, aside of being abused to the point where it becomes obviously stupid (like trademarking colors, common words and similar idiocies). It also cannot prevent counterfeits, which is more a game of whack-a-mole than anything else.

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

#86

Post by NotYourLawyer »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #64
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fingers crossed that the court just says "this reeks too much like a scam to me" and summons the real owner of these patents instead of the mailbox / shell companies, under threat of dissolving the shell companies.

I still don't understand what the scam would be in this case. IANAL, but I wouldn't think "this seems sus" to be a sufficient justification for a court to compel discovery without a clear relevance to the issues before it.

The hook for compelling discovery is probably standing. That is, if you’re not the “real” patent owner (for whatever definition of “real” the judge likes) then you might lack constitutional standing to bring suit for infringement.

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

#87

Post by tgflynn »

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…

It seems to me that one of the biggest problems with patents is that it has become possible to patent the "what" instead of the "how". In most cases the "what" is obvious, it's the "how" that's hard.

An example would be the Amazon One-Click patent. That should never have been granted because the "what", ie. the basic idea, is obvious and once you have that the implementation is trivial.

To get a patent you should at least have to describe a method for solving a non-trivial problem and prove that it actually works.

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

#88

Post by pxmpxm »

brador wrote: post #78
tracker1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly of the mindset that at this point, the vast majority of patents, from what I've seen, don't pass the obviousness test. At least when it comes to process and software patents, which are very arguable in the first place. I do with the costs for a patent were a bit front-loaded where it costs even half the total amount just to (re)apply, in order to better pay for the review costs.

Every patent should be automatically granted and the courts can sort out the winners if there is a dispute. That is the system we have moved to.

Agreed, though then the cost of litigation or patentability-discovery need to be orders of magnitude lower.

Blow away USPTO filing/examination process and replace it with straight arbitration.

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

#89

Post by tracker1 »

ksidudwbw wrote: post #25
commitpizza wrote: post #2

Maybe patents is a bad idea and should be removed.

Patents should be coupled to the product. The patent is hidden and considered in draft mode until a working product matching the patent completely is created and submitted to the patent office to check if it matches the patent. If you are working as an inventor it's your own responsibility to market and sell your ideas and create appropriate contracts when selling your inventions to someone. A patent has to go throug…

So, does this mean that ARM can't have patents?

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

#90

Post by yumraj »

brador wrote: post #78
tracker1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly of the mindset that at this point, the vast majority of patents, from what I've seen, don't pass the obviousness test. At least when it comes to process and software patents, which are very arguable in the first place. I do with the costs for a patent were a bit front-loaded where it costs even half the total amount just to (re)apply, in order to better pay for the review costs.

Every patent should be automatically granted and the courts can sort out the winners if there is a dispute. That is the system we have moved to.

> 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?

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