[HN Gopher] I received a patent infringement email for my weeken...
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I received a patent infringement email for my weekend project
(2010)
Author : federicoterzi
Score : 47 points
Date : 2022-04-26 18:18 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.royvanrijn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.royvanrijn.com)
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've had similar interaction with American companies and their
| lawyers in the past, and basically told them to sue in NL or get
| lost. They never did.
|
| Nothing more annoying than these legal parasites.
|
| https://jacquesmattheij.com/my-brush-with-a-patent-troll/
| jsiepkes wrote:
| Those patents are apparently no longer valid in the Netherlands.
| Their status is: "Lapsed by non-payment of annual fee Art. 62
| ROW" [1]. So he could publish the source I guess?
|
| [1] https://mijnoctrooi.rvo.nl/fo-eregister-
| view/#/query/KGFhbnZ...
| rektide wrote:
| The number of things someone can make patents for that take half
| a days screwing around is way too high. The system is fucking
| bogus.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| It's a real travesty that law suits cost money. It basically
| ensures the one with the deepest pockets has the largest chance
| of winning. I would love to see a country that doesn't allow
| commercial lawyers for lawsuits. But instead both parties get a
| randomly assigned lawyer from the state. The party that is suing
| also has to pay a sum of money which they get back if the case is
| deemed non-ridiculous.
| johndhi wrote:
| this isn't that far off from how some european systems work.
|
| for example, in the UK[0], if you lose a lawsuit, you have to
| pay not only your attorney's fees, but the other party's
| attorneys fees. It gets very expensive. As a result, some
| percentage of valid claims are not filed because the losing
| party cannot bear the risk of losing.
|
| 0 -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_fee...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Fortunately those fees are capped at something reasonable and
| rarely approach the actual costs. Still, it is a risk that
| you probably shouldn't take for a hobby project, it's all
| downside and very little upside.
| vasco wrote:
| > It's a real travesty that law suits cost money
|
| > The party that is suing also has to pay a sum of money
|
| How much thought have you given to this?
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I know you are joking. But if you had actually understood the
| rest of the comment you wouldn't be asking this question.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| It really depends on the country and the matter; I was part
| in several civil and criminal (as victim) cases where I self-
| represented myself, zero cost, so far I won every single
| time. The same cases in US would have costed me 6-digit
| numbers or more in lawyer fees, it is a lot more difficult to
| self-represent there.
| dontchooseanick wrote:
| In case the blog disappears
|
| * https://archive.ph/kkebe OP blog, does not seem to infringe
| anything
|
| * https://archive.ph/PjIVA Another blog, explains shazam
| xvilo wrote:
| Interesting comments on his blog of people who REALLY want the
| code for some reason.
| juriansluiman wrote:
| Part 2: https://www.royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/11/patent-
| infrigement-p... TL;DR:
|
| > I'm sorry, but I can't comply.
|
| > Good luck.
|
| The follow up around 2016:
| https://twitter.com/royvanrijn/status/788436253532426241
|
| > Nothing happened, never heard from them again...
|
| I couldn't find the code anywhere on his Github profile, so not
| sure if he actually took the step to publish the code.
| greyface- wrote:
| It would be nice if there were actual consequences for making
| empty legal threats like this.
| btrettel wrote:
| Former patent examiner here. One problem I've seen time and time
| again with respect to patents on Hacker News is that people don't
| read the patent claims, the legally enforceable part of a patent.
| They just assume that because some journalist or blogger or
| attorney or whatnot says that this patent covers something, it
| must cover all instances of that. And that would be a big
| problem, preventing people from using a technology that should be
| available to the public. But the reality often is that what the
| patent covers is quite narrow. Yes, mistakes happen in granting
| patents, but not as frequently as people here seem to think.
|
| Example of this phenomena on HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30387833
|
| The claims there don't cover as much as people think they do!
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30388857
|
| While I've never been involved on the litigation side of patents,
| if I received an email like this, I'd ask for not only the patent
| numbers but also a detailed "mapping" of how my product is
| infringing. The mapping is what I had to do as a patent examiner.
| Just show how my product infringes on the claims. That's what
| would have to be done in court, after all.
|
| If they claim A widget consisting of 3 bars.
|
| and my product has 4 bars [0] then I'm not infringing!
|
| [0] "Consisting of" in patents means exactly. If they said
| "comprising" then 4 bars would infringe as they could point to
| any 3 of the 4. You need to know a little legalese, sure, but
| it's not hard.
| nzentzis wrote:
| Can you recommend a good reference/source for translating
| legalese? I'm not sure I've ever found a good source for
| determining which words should be interpreted normally and
| which are landmines.
|
| The ambiguity about what words mean may be part of why people
| assume patents are so broad. Most people know that some words
| and phrases, when used in a legal context, have vastly
| different (more specific, broader, or even completely
| disconnected) meanings than what you'd expect in normal writing
| or speech. Without knowing what those are, the safe approach is
| to ascribe the least favorable possible meaning to _every_
| word. "Does language X mean Y" becomes "could language X
| possibly be interpreted by someone who doesn't understand the
| material to kinda vaguely reference Y," and you get the type of
| broad assumptions you're lamenting here.
| D13Fd wrote:
| The real answer is three years of law school plus a couple of
| years of work in the relevant field.
|
| If you want a taste of what it involves, for patent law, here
| is one of the seminal cases on how to construe claim terms,
| Phillips v. AWH Corp., 415 F.3d 1303 (Fed. Cir. 2005):
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=220719574132079.
| ..
| btrettel wrote:
| For an accessible introduction to patent legalese, I'd
| recommend taking a look at a recent edition of the book
| _Patent It Yourself_ by David Pressman. I can 't say it'll
| cover all that I learned as an examiner, but it's well
| written and covers a lot.
|
| Also: A lot of the legalese I encountered as a patent
| examiner was "lexicographic definitions", that is, where a
| patent applicant writes somewhere in the patent
| specifications that a certain term or phrase has a particular
| meaning. Applicants didn't always make those easy to find...
| I recall one where (as I recall) they defined "insulation" to
| including something that can cool something down, which
| strikes me as simply wrong and confusing. That definition was
| basically hidden right in the middle of the patent
| application. It was necessary to find that definition to
| understand the claims. If the term is something I hadn't seen
| before then I would have just search for it, but for
| something common in the field I examined like "insulation", I
| wouldn't normally search for that. This is really annoying
| and unfortunately okay under USPTO rules.
| yobbo wrote:
| > The two example patent numbers that I sent you are U.S.
| patents, but each of these patents has also been filed as patent
| applications in the Netherlands. Also, as I'm sure you are aware,
| your blogpost may be viewed internationally. As a result, you may
| contribute to someone infringing our patents in any part of the
| world.
|
| This seems like a gross misunderstanding of patent- and IP-law. I
| can't know this, but I strongly doubt those patents would be
| valid anywhere in Europe.
|
| Furthermore, releasing source code and information on an
| algorithm that someone claims is protected in US would still be
| akin to explaining an already published patent. Any information
| he shares beyond what is in the patent is, obviously, not
| protected. Further still, when patents are granted all
| information contained in the patent application becomes public
| domain. This is actually at the core of patent law.
| koolba wrote:
| Indeed, if the definition of patent in the EU is anything close
| to what it is in the USA, publishing an article, source code,
| or really anything else about the patent or how it works is not
| infringement. The entire purpose of a patent is to explain how
| something non-trivial works. The word means "make obvious".
|
| A patent isn't some magical license to stifle discussion of a
| topic. It's supposed to encourage it!
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| You're correct that parents provide a monopoly on working an
| invention and do not legally inhibit publicising an invention
| (as you note, that is one of their aims).
|
| >The word means "make obvious".//
|
| "Patent" means "open", it comes from a Latin phrase meaning
| "open letter". Patents were originally letters from the
| monarch to their subjects on all sorts of issues. When
| monopolies were granted on working inventions people were
| notified by the issue of a _litterae patentes_ (some people
| still style it "letters patent" in British English). This
| mode of acquiring rights stuck and the name became
| synonymous.
|
| Patents do have to disclose in detail how an invention can be
| worked ('sufficiency' in UK law).
| a-dub wrote:
| the first time i encountered this algorithm it was in a class and
| the paper was presented. i wonder if the paper existed when this
| all happened.
|
| glad to read he called their bluff. rewarding threatening
| behavior rarely leads anywhere good and only encourages more bad
| behavior.
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