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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

#91

Post by PeterisP »

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 purpose of the patent system is to facilitate the progress of the "useful arts". The existence of large quantities of bogus patents that need to be challenged in courts acts as a severe barrier of entry, hampering this progress - if we have a system where truly everything is automatically granted without review and has to be disputed in court, then arguably a patent system like that is a net negative, only hampering the progress, and thus has no right to exist.

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

#92

Post by xxpor »

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…

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.

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

#93

Post by temporallobe »

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, unreliable, and have limited capabilities. We are JUST NOW starting a shift to the cloud (AWS), but most of that will be a “lift and shift”, keeping the old systems and practices in place while we figure out how to replace entire workflows. Basic functionality like searches, file transfers, data transforms, validation, content management, and archiving suffer from neglected maintenance or they’re so brittle that any little disruption can take a vital system down, further wasting examiners’ time. All of the above-mentioned issues are hidden time wasters that examiners have simply come to accept.

My point is, you many not actually need more time, rather you may need better and more modern tools that would vastly improve efficiency and accuracy of examiner workflows.

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

#94

Post by dathinab »

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 would also like that simple straight forward language is required and the typical (lets call it) claim stacking isn't allowed.

A lot of patents would fall under obviously not palatable, or obviously priority art if they where written in simple to understand language.

Also patents should not be legal if they fall under "everyone who looks for a solution to the problem they solve would find it (or something very close to it) by spending around ~100k in salaries on normal employees doing the research". (I choose 100k€ as this is where I live roughly a more senior and two non qualified junior software devs working on it for half a year, I also choose it because it less then what fully invalidating a absurd patent can easily costl.) I just don't see a point patents for anything any arbitrary company could easily invent by throwing "just" 3 non highly specialized people at it. As many companies would do so anyway if they need the problem solved. Such patents don't protect innovation they hurt innovation. Alternatively allow patenting them, but only with a patent live spawn of 2 years, i.e. "grant a head start for the first inventor without hampering innovation in general too much".

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

#95

Post by seeEllArr »

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#96

Post by kmeisthax »

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.

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 patentability would just make it easier to get obvious patents.

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

#97

Post by pixelfarmer »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #52
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea behind them is solid... the time limits are absurd, especially for trivial stuff. So, to solve the triviality, the patents shouldn't be worth more than it would take for a competitor to reinvent the end result - so if we're talking about a truly advanced chemical process, sure, takes time and reasearch and people and experiments... definitely worth millions. In contrast, pressing pageDown and in result movin…

But that's not how invention works : what about advances that seem trivial after the fact... yet nobody has thought of for centuries, despite all the "ingredients" being available ?

What about patents are non-transferable and only valid, if the issuer actually makes use of them? The moment you let them rot in a drawer, you invalidate the patent. That would disable companies whose sole purpose is to "troll" others with patents they aquired from whomever, and it would also disable companies from inventing something just to block off this path to competitors, while never making use of it itself to press more money out of customers with the "old garbage".

I mean the marketing blabla behind patents is always the little inventor who found something incredible but will be eaten by the large corps, right? Which means they should be interested in actually creating a product out of it to make money, and the patent gives them a "safety" period before the big corps stomp the little guy to the curb. Or ... maybe this whole thing was a pure marketing ploy and patents have been misused in all kinds of ways in the 19th century already?

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

#98

Post by toss1 »

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.

Right, so the players with money can simply massively burden the minor players, often to bankruptcy.

A Patent is simply a ticket to start a lawsuit as a plaintiff. So just file, get your ticket, and start suing competitors, putting on them the burden of proving your patent is worthless.

That is the opposite of the way it is supposed to work.

Without some kind of penalty beyond the costs of patent & prosecution, this is massively anticompetitive.

If your point was that we are, in a practical sense, close to this now, then yes, I agree (but that was not clear to me in that comment).

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

#99

Post by joshspankit »

btrettel wrote: post #68
joshspankit wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who seems to have insight: Are the actual workings of the patent system (not the letter of the law, but how it’s used esp by those with money) such that the right AI could be put in place to filter out the majority of bad-faith patents?

The main problem is searching for prior art. There are AI search tools but they usually aren't good in my experience. It's rare that an AI search tool will return prior art that can be used in a rejection. Usually the prior art these tools find is related but not good enough. But sometimes (perhaps through random chance), a solid reference can be found. I found a 102 reference (the strongest kind) a few weeks ago for…

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.

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

#100

Post by bombcar »

pc86 wrote: post #73
bombcar wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know you don’t know enough, demanding paper documents makes sense. It takes quite a bit of study and knowledge to determine that a “cloud document” cannot be changed or altered after submission (and by whom).

Or the ability to trust subject-matter experts who know better than you.

One thing judges know is how they can get burned by experts - and they know to whom the liability falls if something goes wrong.
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