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New USPTO Memo Makes Fighting Patent Trolls Even Harder

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Re: New USPTO Memo Makes Fighting Patent Trolls Even Harder

#91

Why do we keep moving toward a system where being ahead is the most viable way to get ahead?

It's always been this way. The "rags-to-riches" stories are fabrications to keep the average worker thinking they have a chance. You have a better chance of winning the lottery, which coincidentally, is another psyop to keep people believing that they have a chance.

Re: New USPTO Memo Makes Fighting Patent Trolls Even Harder

#92

Why do we keep moving toward a system where being ahead is the most viable way to get ahead?

It's always been this way. The "rags-to-riches" stories are fabrications to keep the average worker thinking they have a chance. You have a better chance of winning the lottery, which coincidentally, is another psyop to keep people believing that they have a chance.

> You have a better chance of winning the lottery

You are off by several orders of magnitude - a person starting in wealth quintile 1 (numbered poorest to richest) has an ~18% chance to reach quintile 4 or 5, and starting from quintile 2, that rises to 25%.

Source: Figure 1, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/stuck-on-the-ladder-wealt...

Re: New USPTO Memo Makes Fighting Patent Trolls Even Harder

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's trivial. But law has so many edge cases and seemingly it always favor either powerful or wealthy individuals. Plus, poor people cannot afford the litigation costs...

> seemingly it always favor either powerful or wealthy individuals Reality is in favor of the powerful and wealthy. It's practically a tautological statement that powerful people are more powerful than those who are not. Poor people do have the option of seeking pro bono, contingency (lawyers paid from winnings or settlements), or other means, but they will still not have things like daycare / nanny for children, fre…

Might as well buy a lottery ticket hoping to win enough money to fund your own case rather than cling to the faint hope of finding a pro bono attorney or even one working on contingency. My bitter experience stems directly from my father’s death, caused by gross, willful negligence at the hands of those entrusted with his care. Despite a formal DHHS investigation, which unequivocally substantiated my claims, and over 300 hours of undeniable audio, video, and documented proof illustrating the horrifying ordeal he endured, no one stepped forward to help. Justice wasn’t served, not in this life, nor, it seems, in any other.

It’s not that lawyers told me there wasn’t a case. Instead, they said it was “too complicated.” One attorney spent a week supposedly weighing my meticulously prepared case, only to dismiss it with a curt email: “Regrettably, we have too many other cases to manage additional workloads at this time.” After that, my emails went unanswered, my pleas seemingly silenced by convenience.

Apparently, lawyers today prefer the ripest, lowest hanging fruit, the easy cases promising easy profits. In our society, drowning in incompetence, there’s no shortage of simpler, safer bets. Yet, you’d think there would still be at least a few brave souls seeking justice, not only easy money, who would choose righteousness over profit, integrity over convenience. But I learned the hard way that righteousness rarely outweighs the bottom line.

I handed them an almost complete case, indexed, transcribed, painstakingly timestamped. They didn’t even bother to read it. Beyond the injustice, what wounds me most deeply is the realization that my father’s profound decency, the quiet dignity and unwavering ethics that defined his life, ultimately meant nothing in a system indifferent to such virtues. His goodness didn’t offer him protection or redemption in death. Perhaps it was naive to believe that it ever could.

This realization doesn’t just hurt, it isolates, minimizes, and disillusions. It deepens the bitterness of loss. Forgive me for venting my frustration this way, but it’s all I have left.

I’m sorry, Dad. I truly tried. Turns out, you were right about lawyers, too. I’m writing this with just a few weeks remaining in the statute of limitations. It doesn’t have to be like this, but all indications are that decency simply costs too much for those in power.

Re: New USPTO Memo Makes Fighting Patent Trolls Even Harder

#94
post #64
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is that if an LLM trained prior to the patent date can reproduce the invention, then either the idea is obvious or there was prior art in the training set; either way the patent is invalid.

Yes that's the idea, and now I'm wondering why I'm being downvoted. Maybe the patent trolls don't like it.

Good idea but poorly stated.

Re: New USPTO Memo Makes Fighting Patent Trolls Even Harder

#97

Why do we keep moving toward a system where being ahead is the most viable way to get ahead?

Power accumulates the same way rivers flow into the ocean If there is no continuous effort to tax rich people and split up political power, democracy will fall back into feudalism

Asking someone who knows history better than I do:

Is it the case that every time a society has developed extreme wealth concentration, that concentration gets diffused only via violence? E.g., by internal revolution or by takeover by another country?

Re: New USPTO Memo Makes Fighting Patent Trolls Even Harder

#98
post #14

We dealt with some patent trolls back in the 2010-2020 era, for those who have not experienced it, it is absurd. In our case, the patent "troll" was an LLC w/ ~5 members - 2 lawyers, 1 person who owned the original patent, and some spouses. The only "asset" of the LLC was the patent. I think it was around scrollbars or some CSS overflow thing - they sent us a demand/cease-desist letter saying they will sue for $1M an…

I just enjoyed another story about fighting similar legal shenanigans higher up on the HN front page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43442178
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