[HN Gopher] Patent troll Sable pays up, dedicates all its patent...
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Patent troll Sable pays up, dedicates all its patents to the public
Author : jgrahamc
Score : 1295 points
Date : 2024-10-03 13:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.cloudflare.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.cloudflare.com)
| runamuck wrote:
| I consider this a victory for creativity, freedom and
| technological progress. Let the entrepreneurs innovate and
| execute without fear of legal suffocation!
| ta988 wrote:
| It is really sad to see kost companies refused to fight. Congrats
| on that one Cloudflare, may that serve as an example to destroy
| those grifters.
| yashap wrote:
| You can see why, though. Even in this case where they
| thoroughly won, and got damages, the damages were just $225K,
| and they probably spent millions on legal fees,
| employee/founder time, etc.
|
| Ultimately, the American legal system is pretty broken. If
| someone brings a frivolous lawsuit against you, and you defend
| yourself in court, nearly 100% of the time you'll be losing
| money, often a lot of money. This is the core reason why patent
| trolls exist, why companies normally settle out of court - it's
| cheaper to do so.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| But if we'd given in to one of these trolls, others would
| have targetted us.
| yashap wrote:
| Agreed, it's a lose-lose situation really. But the reason
| most companies just settle is that going to trial is so
| expensive, and the American legal system allows these
| frivolous lawsuits while generally awarding either no
| compensatory damages, or damages far below the cost of the
| defence.
| whatshisface wrote:
| A few states have passed laws to ban abusers from the legal
| system:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation#United_St.
| ..
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Usually a "vexatious litigant" is not one of these patent
| trolls, but some nut job who spends his days at the
| courthouse.
| whatshisface wrote:
| If more companies let patent trolls go to court their
| repeated losses would fall under the first part of
| California's definition, but since they settle, trolls
| are technically not even litigants.
| throw16180339 wrote:
| Most patent trolls file in the Western District of Texas;
| it's a troll friendly district with a troll friendly
| judge. They sometimes win with garbage patents.
| krferriter wrote:
| How much does it cost to argue in court that a particular
| entity is an abuser though? Someone has to be willing to
| cover those costs up front, otherwise people will just keep
| settling if they don't want to go through that process.
| usrusr wrote:
| It's not just cost, it's cost x uncertainty of outcome. A
| settlement is _very_ tempting from cost x uncertainty
| alone. But it also has other merits: when the rich,
| powerful incumbent gives in and settles, the fragile
| thrifty upstart won 't see the slightest chance of
| winning and either beg the troll for an affordable
| licence (but they won't get a good offer) or look for a
| completely different line of business. To the incumbent,
| the settlement is a fee paid for moat-as-a-service
| provided by the troll.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| At Google I did a piece of research, along with a
| statistician, of whether it's better to settle or fight.
|
| "Better" would mean you don't get sued as much in the future,
| because you're a hard target and not easy money.
|
| They haven't released this study, AFAIK.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| your definition of "better" implies the results of the
| study, although you did not specifically say it.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| That's because it's not published, plus a conclusion
| without any supporting data and methodology is pretty
| worthless.
| singlow wrote:
| I couldn't tell from the article but it seems the $225k was a
| settlement, and the release of all patents was additionally
| part of the settlement - I doubt the court could have awarded
| that directly. So they took $225k + the release of the
| patents, and I assume that the trolls would only have agreed
| to that if they felt the court awarded cash value would have
| been significantly higher.
| aduffy wrote:
| These patent trolls are greedy, extractive, and contribute
| nothing to society while wasting vast public and private legal
| resources.
|
| Fuck. Them. Excellent work to the entire litigation team at
| Cloudflare.
| schlipity wrote:
| Are these patent trolls doing anything that normal companies
| with patents that try to monetize them don't do?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| No, but the argument would be that normal companies are doing
| something that patent trolls are: selling a product besides
| patents
| lfmunoz4 wrote:
| You would hope companies have patents based on something
| actually innovative. For software this is never the case. I
| think all software patents are bs.
| harrison_clarke wrote:
| it's what they don't do. a troll doesn't play any role in
| developing the tech they hold patents for, they just extract
| rent when someone stumbles into a similar solution
|
| if a company doesn't develop products, but they actively
| license their patents to those that do, that's still patents
| working as intended, and not trolling. they're still helping
| to get the tech developed, rather than stifling it
|
| (i think there are a lot of problems with software patents
| even when used as intended by real companies. mainly, they
| last too long)
| petesergeant wrote:
| I dunno, this line of reasoning doesn't feel right to me. A
| company making products did develop the technology. They
| were awarded a patent. That patent was an asset. That asset
| was sold presumably for the benefit of the people behind
| the original company. That the resulting asset owner wasn't
| the originator doesn't feel like it should make any
| difference here?
|
| Software patents are a scourge, I'm just not sure the
| reasoning there holds.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| from a strict logic perspective, you're right.
|
| The issue is widespread bad behavior from patent trolls,
| given that the cost of mass filing patent infringement
| claims that barely apply is so much lower than the
| expected settlement, and the cost of a successful defense
| is likely higher than the request settlement. The
| incentive is to get a portfolio of overly broad patents
| and then shake down almost entirely unrelated companies.
| petesergeant wrote:
| For sure, the whole thing sucks
| zamalek wrote:
| > Software patents are a scourge,
|
| The reason is because they aren't being used as they were
| intended: patents are _supposed_ to be a way to give
| inventors/entrepreneurs a window to build a market with
| their idea. Let's say that you have some truly amazing
| invention that frobnicates foos 50x faster than anyone
| else, and you plan to take it to market. What would
| prevent the likes of Amazon from copying your idea with
| all the resources at their disposal? Patents.
|
| Patents as an asset is exactly the problem. Your entire
| first paragraph is built on this faulted perspective -
| the assumption that how we actually use patents is
| aligned with how they were designed to be used. They are
| supposed to foster small businesses, not destroy them.
|
| Software patents are a scourge only because patents as a
| whole have become a scourge.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > The reason is because they aren't being used as they
| were intended: patents are _supposed_ to be a way to give
| inventors/entrepreneurs a window to build a market with
| their idea.
|
| If I invent something, I should surely be able to license
| its production if I don't want to be in the production
| game myself. The alternative reduces to the absurd very
| quickly. If I invent a better system for making ball
| bearings, it's not reasonable to say I should only
| benefit from it if I then personally raise the capital
| and experience to start a ball bearing manufacturing
| plant.
| zamalek wrote:
| I personally agree with this, but its more difficult to
| delineate. I suppose the key is that the patent is being
| used.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| There's a key difference though.
|
| If you invent a better system for making ball bearings
| and patent it, you could bring your system to existing
| manufacturers and say "I've invented a better system,
| would you like to license my patent and start using it to
| bring your costs down and productivity up?" That's fine
| and most people would be on board.
|
| But a patent troll is different. They're entirely
| reactive. They wait for someone else to start doing
| something that is _vaguely similar_ to what you patented,
| and then they pounce. The troll threatens legal action if
| they don 't license the patent instead.
|
| What patent trolls do is effectively extortion.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > That patent was an asset.
|
| That line of thinking is the problem. A patent is
| intended as a protection to spur development, not an
| asset to be traded.
|
| The spirit of a patent is to protect a novel solution
| while a company develops and monetizes their innovation.
| It keeps bigger fish with deeper pockets from quickly
| copying your invention and monetizing it before you.
|
| What's happened however is that Large companies with deep
| pockets are filing patents for anything and everything
| they can. These patents generally come from their R&D
| efforts but are not necessarily linked to any product
| specifically. They're also usually unenforceable junk
| that wouldn't hold up in court.
|
| The value of these junk patents isn't in the viability to
| be developed into a product, rather their value is that
| it will take time and money to invalidate them in court.
|
| When these companies are hit with a lawsuit for violating
| someone else's patent, their defense is to counter sue
| with as many junk patents as possible. The purpose of the
| counter suit is to make a settlement preferable to the
| protracted legal fight necessary to invalidate all of the
| junk patents. It's the path of least expense. You could
| argue this allows large companies to steal innovations
| from smaller players by forcing cross licensing
| agreements.
|
| Often these patent portfolios are transferred to
| companies with no interest in developing products or
| protecting their business. These companies sole purpose
| are to weaponize the patents, they're Patent Trolls.
|
| Using the same strategy as companies with defensive
| patent portfolios, Patent Trolls seek to extract
| settlements (extort money) from companies by suing them
| with all the junk patents they can. The patent trolls are
| immune to counter suit because they produce nothing. Thus
| companies must either invalidate each junk patent or
| settle. Often settling is the path of least expense.
| harrison_clarke wrote:
| if a company sells the patent to a "troll", but retains a
| license as part of the deal, i would consider that to be
| working as intended. it's basically a way to outsource
| the legal protection
|
| if a company sells it to a broker, and it eventually gets
| traded or licensed to a company that develops it, i'd
| also consider that working as intended
|
| if patents keep finding their way to companies that have
| no intention to either develop it themselves, or license
| it to others, and keep suing companies that do develop
| things, i'd consider it a failure of the system
|
| pharma patents get traded to non-developers all the time,
| but pharma patents mostly do their job of incentivizing
| innovation. there's still flaws, but the troll problem
| isn't a big issue in that space
| petesergeant wrote:
| > no intention [to] license it to others
|
| The companies that are doing the suing here are -- as I
| understand it here -- are suing to force a licensing
| deal.
| harrison_clarke wrote:
| the issue is that there's no knowledge transfer from the
| patent holder to the developer, in these cases. there's
| no causal link from the patent to the development
|
| the (forced) licensing deal comes after the development,
| and hinders it. and it's not to protect development of a
| related idea, either
| ajkjk wrote:
| yes
| hansvm wrote:
| The two normal arguments are:
|
| 1. Patent trolls don't actually produce anything. They just
| extract rent from other companies.
|
| 2. The patents they choose tend to be extremely bad -- overly
| broad, should never have been granted, had prior art, the
| tech never existed, .... They use the fact that they're able
| to sue cheaply to bully people into settling on bogus claims.
|
| Point (1) doesn't seem bad to me. It's kind of like how truck
| driving is separate from truck insurance. Having specialists
| capable of monetizing patents allows, in theory, inventors to
| invent and immediately sell for estimated lifetime patent
| value, minus a discount associated with the troll's costs and
| desired profits. Without trolls, in theory, you'd have fewer
| inventors because they'd also need to be/hire experts in
| marketing, litigation, ....
|
| Point (2) is the one that bothers me the most, and my
| impression is that it's a very common problem.
|
| Oh, and to your question, most companies use patents for
| mutually assured destruction and as a form of signalling that
| important people should want to work there, not to directly
| monetize. Monetizing patents is less common.
| cloverich wrote:
| The argument against your argument in (1) is that if the
| incentive is to patent and sell to someone who will not
| market the patented invention either, it still isn't
| promoting the development of the product. It is actually
| _hindering_ the development of the product, because now
| whoever does develop the product has to pay an additional
| tax. Its literally antithetical to the concept of patents
| (I am _assuming_ they exist to spur R&D development
| primarily).
|
| Another argument against your argument in (1), is to allow
| the scenario to exist only where the purchaser of the
| patent can prove they are marketing and selling it. That is
| still not ideal imho, but at least it eliminates outright
| patent trolls.
|
| HN is I think particularly sensitive because it has a lot
| of programmers and product development folks, who know that
| a good idea or even plan on its own isn't very valuable.
| I'd guess most of us have more good ideas floating around
| than we'll ever have the time or money to develop on our
| own. Its the execution and delivery of good ideas that is
| valuable; patents in our eyes make the easy part easier and
| the hard part harder.
| hansvm wrote:
| Except, if it really serves just to hinder development
| and as an additional tax then it wasn't a valid patent to
| begin with and falls under point (2).
|
| Valid patents have to work (couldn't patent transistors
| in 1820), be new (which, as you mention, isn't the hard
| part in turning ideas into value), _be non-obvious_ (this
| is the point that pushes your idea from (1) to (2); if
| somebody else were likely to spontaneously have the idea
| then it wasn't a valid patent to begin with, and if they
| weren't then the "additional tax" is a tax on a product
| they otherwise could never have made), and include clear
| instructions (from the patent, reasonable competitors
| ought to be able to instantiate the idea -- if they
| can't, it's yet again invalid).
|
| I do like what you're getting at though; the goal is to
| encourage actual inventions to actually be used. The
| patent mechanism attempts to do so by granting temporary
| monopolies (even with no real value via trolls), then
| guaranteeing that the invention is available for use
| afterward. You might be able to come up with another
| legislative mechanism encouraging real use of the patent
| before its expiry, and if it actually worked that'd
| probably be a good thing.
| hadlock wrote:
| >Are these patent trolls doing anything that normal companies
| with patents that try to monetize them don't do?
|
| The important distinction here, in my opinion, is that
| investors bought a dead company along with it's IP for the
| explicit purpose of suing companies as that was their profit
| motive.
|
| Had there been an existing company that was actively
| building/selling routers, then yes they would have been using
| the patents as intended - to protect their business. In this
| case the company who owns the patents, was using them in a
| weaponized fashion.
| pfisherman wrote:
| Heard an interesting counterpoint to this from a patent
| attorney. In the IP ecosystem patent trolls serve as a sort of
| check on the big companies - the apex predators - to stop them
| from willfully infringing on your patents and then bankrupting
| you in litigation.
|
| While you as a startup may not have the resources to go after
| them in court; your IP assets in the hands of a competent and
| aggressive patent troll could be a very big problem for Big Co.
|
| So in that sense they are also kind of like a parasite that
| infects the apex predators who eat tainted meat.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Nice idea, except no one you mentioned spends their time
| doing patents. It's just big companies who are told by
| consultants to beef up their patent portfolio, and when they
| fail like Caspian, the remains are snatched up by bottom
| feeders who go around harassing others, preferably of course
| startups and others with no real resources.
| pfisherman wrote:
| The big companies beefing up their portfolios is more of a
| defensive measure from what I have been told. The threat of
| a countersuit makes IP litigation among peers a game of
| mutually assured destruction. Funny quote from a VC friend
| "patents are a sport of kings."
|
| But defensive portfolios are not a concern for patent
| trolls. They can't be countered for infringement because
| they don't make anything!
|
| But you are not wrong that they can be like gnats that suck
| the blood from startups. In one car I heard of some a
| patent troll engaged in behavior bordering on criminal
| extortion - threatening mom and pops businesses for using
| printers and fax machines. All I am saying is that they
| play a role in balancing and maintaining the health of the
| IP ecosystem.
| psd1 wrote:
| Could we patent a method for extracting settlements by
| means of a patent claim?
| chuckadams wrote:
| Sorry, lots and lots of prior art there.
| noodle wrote:
| Don't think I've ever worked for a startup that had any
| patents whatsoever. I think I consulted with one IIRC, and
| they folded largely due to their hyperfocus on tech to the
| detriment of building something people actually wanted to pay
| for. Filing a patent was probably a symptom of that problem.
|
| Its more like smaller public companies trying to keep bigger
| public companies in check.
| pfisherman wrote:
| Well I think it depends on the industry. Patents tend to be
| less relevant in software. But in other capital intensive
| industries where there is some manufacture of physical
| matter - like biotech or hardware - IP is a big deal.
| noodle wrote:
| That's true, I'm mostly commenting on software because
| the article is about software, and this might be
| anecdata, but it certainly seems to me like patent trolls
| are more prevalent in software.
| nfriedly wrote:
| That kind of reminds me of people that short stock. Nearly
| everyone hates them, but they do provide a check on companies
| that are doing something bad.
| remram wrote:
| How would that work? How do I get a patent troll to protect
| my patent, when a big company starts infringing it?
| pfisherman wrote:
| By going out of business and the troll acquiring your IP
| portfolio in a fire sale?
| remram wrote:
| Sounds like it doesn't help me at all.
| Sayrus wrote:
| Aren't patent trolls called trolls because they litigate on
| broad patents, for which prior art exists in many case? If
| so, they can't protect a startup in any way unless you create
| broad and invalid patents.
|
| Your IP assets can be used to litigate by companies that
| aren't patent trolls.
| ninepoints wrote:
| > from a patent attorney
|
| This isn't an interesting counterpoint. This is the de facto
| narrative regarding patent lawyers and patent trolls
| masquerading as firms that act as though they somehow
| contribute.
| stickfigure wrote:
| I really wish this settlement included disclosing what the other
| trolled parties ("including Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point,
| SonicWall, and Juniper Networks") paid.
| rnd0 wrote:
| What does "to the public" mean in this instance? Are they going
| to an open source patent pool or something?
| jgrahamc wrote:
| From TFA: " _Sable has agreed to dedicate its entire patent
| portfolio to the public. This means that Sable will tell the
| U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that it gives up all of its
| legal rights to its patent portfolio. Sable can never again use
| these patents to sue for infringement; they can never again use
| these patents to try to make a quick buck._ "
| petee wrote:
| I'm confused that CF says they also were granted royalty free
| rights to the patents...how can they cloudflare have specific
| rights yet all the patents are public?
| pwg wrote:
| > Are they going to an open source patent pool or something?
|
| All patents are "open for public access" [1]. And once they age
| past their "expiration date" (currently twenty years from
| earliest date of filing) they become "public property".
|
| What Sable is doing is giving up the ability to restrict others
| based on the patents content's before those patents would
| normally have expired anyway. So in effect they are having the
| patents "expire early" -- which makes the contents of each
| become "public property".
|
| [1] https://www.uspto.gov/patents/search
| textlapse wrote:
| This is great. I do worry that a future more sinister malicious
| patent troll could read all the wonderful strategy Cloudflare
| used and work around them. Hopefully Cloudflare legal team got
| stronger!
|
| Kudos to the likes of Cloudflare and (yesteryears') Newegg that
| fought these trolls.
|
| I shudder at the thought of how many of the existing legacy
| industries outside the computer space are still riddled with
| these patent portfolio companies :(
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| Hopefully the powers that be will look at it from a national
| security perspective, in that other countries do not respect US
| copyright law and may be pulling ahead
| AlbertCory wrote:
| copyrights are different from patents.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| Copyright, patents, it doesn't matter. It's all IP and our
| enemies do not respect it. We need to move forward with
| that reality.
| macintux wrote:
| Patents are explicitly open for anyone to see. I don't
| know that we need more help there: you can get a product
| banned from import if someone uses your patent without
| recompense.
| namibj wrote:
| As someone in a place without pure software patents
| (algorithms can't be patented, but software/hardware
| combination systems can be), I'm willing to let US users
| use an overseas hosted instance instead of locally
| running it.
|
| Though keeping US entities from importing copies against
| US patents isn't really something I could stop.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| *laughs in amazon*
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| The US used to ignore IP laws when we were an underdog.
| josephg wrote:
| Do you think China is still an underdog compared to the
| US?
|
| I suspect the only thing that would ever convince China
| to take IP seriously is if China's own companies would
| profit more from stronger IP protection.
| wraptile wrote:
| China takes IP very seriously domestically when big
| corporations need protection. A bit of topic but I always
| found that the only "communist" country is the biggest
| infringer of copyleft licenses and has neglible open
| source culture. Shouldn't code be "for the people".
| immibis wrote:
| Totalitarian dictatorships are not communism.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Point us to a "real" communist country, either existing
| or in the past.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Why should they respect it? Software patents are and have
| always been a bad idea, blatant parasitism. They should
| never have been established, must never be taken
| seriously, and ought to be abolished.
| lionkor wrote:
| Aren't most of those "enemies" enemies by choice?
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| > I do worry that a future more sinister malicious patent troll
| could read all the wonderful strategy
|
| The "good" news is that patent trolling is, more or less by
| definition, a get-rich-quick scheme - they want to make a lot
| of money by sending a few dozen letters every year. It does not
| attract people who are interested in anything approaching due
| diligence.
|
| But also, the whole point of all of this is to get the trolls
| to _leave Cloudflare alone_ , right? This is a very deliberate
| strategy; this announcement says "don't try that stuff here ...
| but feel free to try Cisco or Juniper instead."
| scotty79 wrote:
| I was wondering if Cisco or Juniper payed them anything to
| back off or just threaten them the same thing that Cloudflare
| actually did to them.
|
| The fact that they thought they had a winnable case again
| Cloudflare makes me think that others actually paid up ... or
| that the troll was just getting desperate to finally earn
| anything.
| jdhzzz wrote:
| Or they saw rolling the dice with a jury as low risk
| potentially high reward.
| andrewjl wrote:
| How would they get around crowd sourced prior art?
| Xeoncross wrote:
| So Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, SonicWall, and Juniper Networks
| paid millions to Sable. Sable paid $225k to Cloudflare, and won't
| use them again against anyone.
|
| Sounds like they don't need to. Well played Sable. Enjoy your
| money.
|
| I really wish we could publicly shame the people behind these
| abuses or provide some other incentive to correct bad behavior
| other than speeding-ticket sized fines.
|
| In other news, as an investor, this tells me Cloudflare is
| technologically ahead of the other older companies who apparently
| were not sure they could defend against the claims.
| ivanbakel wrote:
| >In other news, as an investor, this tells me Cloudflare is
| technologically ahead of the other older companies who
| apparently were not sure they could defend against the claims.
|
| That feels like a highly specious takeaway from this court
| case. Companies settle against trolls because litigation isn't
| free to fight. It can make very good financial sense (and even
| be encouraged by investors who don't want to see a company in
| the courts for years, as Cloudflare was.)
|
| I would be highly interested to see the breakdown of what it
| cost in manhours, fees, prizes to Project Jengo, etc. versus
| the payout from Sable to fight this particular case for
| Cloudflare, and whether they even came close to breaking even
| just on this case alone. Likely their decision somewhat hinged
| on an estimate of what it might cost to settle all other patent
| disputes in the future, and the belief that fighting this case
| is actually saving them much more money down the line (but how
| much?).
| swiftcoder wrote:
| On the flip side, there's some napkin math to be done about
| the costs saved by any future patent trolls who are averted
| by going all scorched earth this time around...
| cryptonym wrote:
| While fighting trolls is morally the good thing to do, there
| is also an image/marketing benefit,. That can help balance
| risks.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > I really wish we could publicly shame the people behind these
| abuses or provide some other incentive to correct bad behavior
| other than speeding-ticket sized fines.
|
| They are beyond shame, believe me. There have already been TV
| news segments about how their "place of business" in West Texas
| is just a PO Box.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _I really wish we could publicly shame the people behind
| these abuses or provide some other incentive to correct bad
| behavior other than speeding-ticket sized fines._
|
| Right? This seems like out-and-out fraud to me.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Sable probably spent a lot of money on fighting Cloudflare. It
| seems to me like they nearly bankrupted themselves doing it,
| and $225K was all they had left to pay Cloudflare's legal fees.
| epolanski wrote:
| The money from other settlements likely ended up in
| shareholders pockets, not into sable's reserves.
|
| Thus, a company like that is likely limited to have just budget
| for legal and little less.
|
| This is also done in order so if they lose a trial and have to
| pay damages they can't.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| That's my point: It's a net win for the actual people behind
| Sable.
| throw16180339 wrote:
| > In other news, as an investor, this tells me Cloudflare is
| technologically ahead of the other older companies who
| apparently were not sure they could defend against the claims.
|
| This is the wrong takeaway. Litigation is expensive and
| uncertain, especially in the Western District of Texas. It's a
| troll friendly district with a troll friendly judge. These
| other companies paid up because it's a rational choice to do
| so. Cloudflare chose to fight, but it probably would have been
| cheaper to settle.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Cloudflare's redeemed themselves, bigtime.
|
| A lot of patent trolls have no assets, and don't own anything
| except the patents they're currently milking. Then they go out of
| business, and there's nothing to sue. Sable apparently made the
| mistake of building up a portfolio and living on.
|
| > Proving invalidity to a jury is hard. The burden on the
| defendant is high: Cloudflare needed to prove by clear and
| convincing evidence that claim 25 is invalid. And, proving it by
| describing how the claim is obvious in light of the prior art is
| complicated.
|
| You're not kidding.
|
| > Sable's damages expert, Stephen Dell, told the jury that Sable
| was owed somewhere between $25 million and $94.2 million in
| damages.
|
| "damages experts" == nice work if you can get it. The damage
| expert in the Apple v. Samsung trial that I went to was paid $2
| million. "How much are you getting paid?" is always one of the
| first things they get asked on cross-examination.
|
| > Sable has agreed to dedicate its entire patent portfolio to the
| public. This means that Sable will tell the U.S. Patent and
| Trademark Office that it gives up all of its legal rights to its
| patent portfolio
|
| Left unsaid is whether this includes anything other than the
| patents that they already lost on.
|
| Anyhow: great work, Cloudflare.
| vladde wrote:
| Could someone explain to me why it was decided that Sable will
| release the patents to the public?
| ISL wrote:
| With the verdict in-hand, Sable was probably voluntold by
| Cloudflare.
|
| If Cloudflare thought they had a shot at recovering costs,
| $225k and a patent-portfolio could be substantially less than
| whatever Cloudflare (or their insurance) had paid in defense-
| costs.
| lccerina wrote:
| They had those patents only to sue other companies and get
| money, now some of those patents were invalidated by prior art
| and to Sable are essentially toilet paper. The action is
| unlikely to be goodwill, more likely admitting defeat and
| closing the patent troll company.
| usrusr wrote:
| Could a part of the motivation perhaps be quick, clean
| liquidation, before any of the companies who settled before
| cloudflare chose resistance might try to claw back some of
| the settlement?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| As I read this, all but one of Sable's patent claims got
| invalidated in an IPR (a patent proceeding), and the last one
| got invalidated by a jury at trial. When your patents have no
| claims left, you aren't doing anything by releasing the patents
| to the public. It's been defanged anyway.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| So they can't use them to sue anyone else ever again. Basically
| they're hosed.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| Cloudflare has negotiating power. They would prefer to give up
| some of the legal cost recoup in exchange for the public
| crucifixion of the trolling firm. It's intentionally painting a
| very scary picture of what happens when you sue Cloudflare, as
| a deterrent.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| This has nothing to do with that. It's an optics win for
| cloudflare, but those patents are now worthless enough that
| Sable doesn't need them any more.
| epolanski wrote:
| Deterrence.
|
| Cloud flare wanted to send a message to other potential patent
| trolls that they would not go for money damage but into
| invalidating their patents too.
| ISL wrote:
| Has Cloudflare stated anywhere how much their defense cost them
| (or their insurance)?
| epolanski wrote:
| Why would they do so?
|
| So next time another law firm knows how much to ask and raise?
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I've read the article but I'm not sure I understand :
|
| 1. Why / how did sable give up its patent portfolio? It's
| handwaved as "lots of post trial stuff" but what's the nutshell
| of it? Is it because they're marked invalid? Is it punitive
| ruling? Something else?
|
| 2. There were 4 patents brought up against cloud flare, but sable
| gave up "its entire portfolio". Does that mean these 4 were their
| entire portfolio? Or did they have to give up patents outside of
| suit itself? If so, how and why? Did sable hang up the hat as a
| business?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Sable's patents are from a company that stopped operations in
| 2006, so most patents are probably from well before then, and
| likely either expired or will very soon.
| sbarre wrote:
| Could it be that the Cloudflare victory would basically give
| anyone in the future a very strong case to fight Sable with?
|
| And so this portfolio of patents has lost most of its value
| because of that?
|
| Maybe Cloudflare agreed to reduced damages in exchange for
| this?
|
| I agree it's unclear.
| sowbug wrote:
| Take a look at the legal doctrine of collateral estoppel.
| Once a party gets its day in court on a specific issue of
| fact, it can't keep relitigating that issue in later legal
| actions. It's possible that Cloudflare was the first to take
| Sable's claims all the way to a verdict (versus settling
| early), so Sable might have finally gotten its day in court.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_estoppel
| Lukas_Skywalker wrote:
| There's a picture of the "Dedication to the Public and Royalty
| Free License Agreement between Sable and Cloudflare" at the end
| of the article. [1]
|
| Not a lawyer, but it seems to be part of the court ruling.
| Maybe CF didn't see a chance to get their costs back and made a
| deal so Sable needed to only pay a part, but also release the
| patents?
|
| [1] https://cf-
| assets.www.cloudflare.com/slt3lc6tev37/4rpPZkNJBZ...
| bityard wrote:
| Reading between the lines, my uneducated guess is that Sable
| knew they were going out of business either way and had to
| chose between paying ALL of Cloudflare's legal fees (possibly
| in the millions) or paying a token amount and giving up their
| (now or soon-to-be worthless) patents. The latter results in
| fewer financial loses for Sable and makes for excellent
| Cloudflare PR.
|
| Edit: Also, it's entirely likely that Sable still made a tidy
| profit overall when it settled with the other big networking
| companies and decided to quit while they were ahead.
| LtdJorge wrote:
| That's what I thought, too
| phire wrote:
| More importantly, this deal allows them to avoid bankruptcy
| proceedings.
|
| In the worst case, a bankruptcy could end up clawing back any
| "tidy profits" that were previously paid out to company
| owners.
| dave78 wrote:
| Did Sable give up _ALL_ its patents, or only the patents
| involved in the Cloudflare case? The picture of the document
| refers to the "Sable Patents", which I would suspect are
| defined in the context of the court case and therefore are only
| the ones relevant to that case?
| lobsterthief wrote:
| I read it as "giving up the patents in the portfolio that
| they acquired from that other company in 2006".
|
| Still not very clear to me either. Probably intentional,
| since CF seems to want to send the message that "mess with us
| and in the end you'll give up all your patents somehow"
| glenstein wrote:
| >1. Why / how did sable give up its patent portfolio? It's
| handwaved as "lots of post trial stuff" but what's the nutshell
| of it? Is it because they're marked invalid? Is it punitive
| ruling? Something else?
|
| Great Q and I don't know the answer. My best guess from the
| article is that Sable effectively agreed to settle rather than
| continue with post-trial legal procedures (whatever those are)
| that would have been necessary:
|
| >A jury verdict is not the end of the road in a patent case ...
| there are post-trial motions, appeals, and other procedural
| hurdles to jump through before a case is truly over. Tired from
| the fight, and smarting from its loss, Sable decided it wanted
| to throw in the towel and end the fight once and for all.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Are there useful patents (i.e. worth using) in the Sable
| portfolio, or is it all trivial bullshit and obsolete hardware?
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Patents should have a triviality clause in them, so if you can
| prove that they're trivial to create and implement and be thus
| invalid if they are.
|
| On one hand, you have patents where someone needed to do
| thousands of experiments, often costly, years of research to
| invent some kind of procedure to do X and thus should have some
| protections from others just taking the implementation and doing
| it cheaper, because they don't have the development costs. On the
| other, you can patent "Page down button on the keyboard moves the
| screen down one full page (A4) instead of one screen size"
| pwg wrote:
| > Patents should have a triviality clause in them, so if you
| can prove that they're trivial to create and implement and be
| thus invalid if they are.
|
| That's already there
| (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/103)
|
| > A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained,
| notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically
| disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences
| between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that
| the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before
| the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person
| having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention
| pertains.
|
| The problem is that unless the USPTO can find the requisite
| publications to prove the "obvious" part above from the
| statute, that then knocking down the resulting issued patent in
| a court case can be a very expensive effort.
|
| > On the other, you can patent "Page down button on the
| keyboard moves the screen down one full page (A4) instead of
| one screen size"
|
| Applicant's get patents because the USPTO can't find the
| publications necessary to prove they do not deserve to get the
| patent (there's also lack of time problems that I'm ignoring at
| the moment).
|
| For your premise, often the reason why "Page Down moves by
| 'printed page'" might get patented is the lack of any findable
| publication of anything stating such. The USPTO examiner's
| don't have the ability to just say "but this is the way it
| works....", they have to find some publication, somewhere, that
| said "this is the way it works...".
|
| For things like "how much movement 'PageDown' means", finding
| publications that state "how much" is extremely difficult.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > For things like "how much movement 'PageDown' means",
| finding publications that state "how much" is extremely
| difficult.
|
| Yes .. because it's too trivial to write down.
| pwg wrote:
| Exactly. But to "prove" it in the USPTO process, they need
| that "written down" item. And if it is never "written down"
| because it is too trivial to write down, then the USPTO'
| examiner's hand are very much tied.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| USPTO has broadened "obvious" recently, partly because of
| a court ruling that held "A person of ordinary skill is
| also a person of ordinary creativity, not an automaton"
| (meaning that the total prior art doesn't need to connect
| every dot).
|
| https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/02/27/2024
| -03...
| lccerina wrote:
| In a sane law system, the existence of a company as a mere "box
| of patents" without any real product currently or previously on
| the market would be illegal, and these patent trolls won't
| exist...
| bityard wrote:
| I don't think they should be illegal... companies that don't
| "produce" anything are useful for lots of different legitimate
| reasons. But the bar for suing for damages should be a lot
| higher than just, "we happen to own the patents."
| burmanm wrote:
| Where would you draw a line for "any real product" ? ARM for
| example doesn't actually produce any "real" (physical) product,
| but they certainly do research and produce technology for other
| companies to build products on.
|
| There's a lot of "on paper" companies around the world who
| actually do produce novel technologies even if they don't
| themselves create the end product, but instead sell their
| inventions to other parties.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| This problem is already solved by a Patent License Agreement.
| I don't know why people think this is a difficult problem.
| It's not.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| So, no researcher can own a company.
|
| Why did everybody just accept the idea that what makes a troll
| is them having no product when the problem is clear the high
| costs of litigation and low quality of the patents (and the
| patents selection)?
|
| IBM is the largest and most destructive patent troll around.
| And all of that is just propaganda designed to make it and
| other companies like it rich.
| dpratt wrote:
| Well, it's nice to know that Sable's entire portfolio is going
| into the public domain, it's a shame that the likely 50-100 other
| shell companies owned by this troll still have an arsenal of
| useless, but incredibly complicated, patents to use to extort
| money.
|
| A just world would involve piercing the corporate veil and
| imposing personal consequences on the owner of this company.
| qalmakka wrote:
| Why are patent trolls allowed to exist? A company that only holds
| patents and does no productive job with them (research,
| production, ...) should not be allowed to exist. It stifles
| development and innovation for the short-lived monetary gain of a
| few people.
| pas wrote:
| The naive explanation is that it helps inventors, because
| speculative investors (the trolls!) buy up patents.
|
| One analogy is pharma research. Rights for a promising
| candidate molecule are purchased by "big pharma" and they will
| do the grunt work to validate it and extract the big money from
| its therapeutic value.
|
| Substitute "FDA market authorization after successful clinical
| trials" with "that infamous East Texas court district and
| picking the right targets" (picking a too big target might
| backfire, picking a too small doesn't really worth the costs,
| etc.)
|
| Of course the questions are: does this really help inventors?
| do inventors need help? is it good for society that inventors
| get help? is the cost of helping inventors this way not
| unreasonable to the economy? and even if the cost is "low", how
| fucking fair is it that a lot of businesses are using a given
| invention but only a lucky few get dragged to court? can we do
| better? what kind of people patent trolls are? what do they do
| with the money?
| returningfory2 wrote:
| Yeah, I think pharma is the really tricky case.
|
| I worked at a small biotech company whose business model was
| (in part) to do early stage drug discovery research and then
| sell promising leads to bigger companies, who would take the
| leads through the FDA approval process. Actually taking a
| drug through to approval is a $1 billion+ endeavor (with a
| high probability that it just won't work; e.g. stage 3 trials
| just fail). Small companies cannot do this.
|
| So a naive solution like "don't allow patents to be sold"
| actually restricts a bunch of reasonable businesses.
| ajb wrote:
| There's an actionable difference between pharma and most
| other things. Property rights should "give notice" of the
| boundaries of a property, most obviously you lose certain
| rights if you fail to mark the edge of real property with a
| fence or something.
|
| But for most patents there's no realistic way to find
| patents you might be infringing (for software this is
| impossible in the general case as a corollary of Fines
| theorem). That's why we hate patents so much: you only find
| out if there is a patent if you get sued.
|
| But for pharma there is a way; chemicals are "indexable":
| because a standard mapping from chemical structure to names
| exists, if you are using a chemical and want to find
| whether anyone patented it, you can do so easily.
|
| In an ideal world, the law would recognise this and patents
| would only be valid in areas where there is a natural way
| of indexing - which is pretty much only pharma AFAICT
| teucris wrote:
| It's an unfortunate byproduct of allowing patents to be bought
| and sold. Let's say you had a patent: you worked hard on your
| invention and you deserve to reap the financial benefits of it.
| But you do not have the legal resources to protect your right
| as the inventor. It feels fair and reasonable to me that you
| can sell your patent to a third party to license and protect as
| they see fit, so you can reap some financial reward.
|
| Now, how do you make sure that these companies buying patents
| don't become trolls? I don't think it's fair to require them to
| use the patent, because that limits who the inventor can sell
| to. Personally I think the way IP lawsuits are filed and
| considered needs significant reform.
| graemep wrote:
| We could require someone to use it - get rid of submarine
| patents.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Then you get will into issues of what use actually is. What
| is a reasonable timeline for filing a patent, and getting
| it to market? What is a slow and methodical development
| program vs. footdragging? What if the market for your
| product doesn't support profitable operation for your
| company, but someone else claims they can do it?
| toast0 wrote:
| Submarine patents is a different issue, effectively ended
| by changes in 2000 that require (most) patent applications
| to be published, and changes in 1995 that changed the term
| of patents to start from date of filing rather than date of
| issuance. There could possibly be a few unpublished patent
| applications from before 1995 that are still in the
| examination process; but case law from 2005 [1][2] makes it
| difficult to enforce patents if there has been
| 'unreasonable and unjustified' delay in the claims, and I'd
| suspect it would be hard to justify a delay of 30 years.
|
| [1] http://cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/04-1451.pdf
|
| [2] https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/appeals-
| court-con...
| hosh wrote:
| The patent laws does not require such thing. If it were, there
| may be some unforseen consequences.
|
| For example, during the late 1800s, a number of companies
| bandied together to pool their patents together for a
| commercially viable sewing machine. No single company had been
| able to develop and file patents that resulted in a working
| sewing machine. As such, they pooled the patents and negotiated
| a portion of royalties for everyone who contributed. That would
| probably have been set up as its own legal entity. With a
| requirement to be an operating company, such a legal vehicle
| would not have worked.
|
| You could argue that such an entity is considered "productive",
| but then you would have to define what that means and write it
| into the law. Any lawsuit involving patents would require
| demonstrating that.
|
| Another example is trademarks. In order to have a registered
| trademark, you must show that it is in active use, and it is
| distinct. That means that in order to keep a registered
| trademark, you must sue anyone who is infringing upon it.
|
| There is an indie author who came up on a litrpg genre concept
| combining it with a post-apocalypse setting. His book exploded
| upon the niche, progressive fantasy scene. People loved the
| idea and other authors wrote books for it. The original author
| tried to brand it and protect it with a registered trademark.
| Because the term had rapidly genericized, that author started
| sending cease & desist letters to other authors, because he was
| required to in order to keep the registered trademark.
|
| I don't know if he knew he had do that when he registered it,
| but doing so drained the goodwill he had in the community.
| Progressive fantasy is a small indie community, and the authors
| who can, gather at Dragoncon to talk, exchange ideas. This is
| similar to sending cease and desist to your neighbors. You will
| quickly find yourself locked out of the community.
|
| I am thinking of the inventor of the bear suit. Making
| something to protect yourself from a grizzly bear seems like it
| has low value for society. It is also this off the wall
| perspective that allowed him to invent a gel that can absorb
| heat (probably a non-Newtonian fluid). If we're trying to
| protect the livelihood of an indie inventor like that, would a
| requirement to demonstrate productivity help the Bear Suit
| inventor? Or would it have a chilling effect?
| grishka wrote:
| IMO patents should not be transferable. And maybe they
| shouldn't be assignable to corporate entities, only to people.
| Multiple people at once if they all contributed to the
| invention.
| jessriedel wrote:
| This would massively disenfranchise small inventors, and
| force all inventive work into large companies. There is no
| reason that the person who does the inventing should also be
| the person developing and selling a product.
|
| It is weird and unfortunate that the longstanding
| deficiencies with patent law (chiefly: issuing patents for
| things that are too obvious or numerous) are being blamed on
| transferability of property rights. It's the same broken
| intuition as over regulating housing construction and then
| blaming high housing costs on ownership by Chinese nationals.
| _nalply wrote:
| In a perfect world this is arbitrage. Arbitrage helps making
| markets more efficient. However we don't live in a perfect
| world. Judgment is too expensive and risky. If it were quick,
| cheap and safe then patent trolls won't have the chance to do
| extortion. They would be limited to ... um... arbitrage!
| acomjean wrote:
| Its a pure failure of the Patent office issuing dubious
| patents.
|
| The patent office is financially encouraged to keep issuing
| patents no matter the quality because it keeps the patent fees
| and those are payed by the applicants. The patent office seems
| to be protected financially from issuing bad patents as well (I
| can't find any record of them being sued by companies that have
| licensed patents that have been invalidated).
|
| Its gotten a little better with the Alice ruling.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Intern...
| btrettel wrote:
| As a former patent examiner, I was struck by how low the payout
| for Project Jengo was. $125,000 for _all_ people submitting prior
| art? (There were hundreds of submissions, so it 's split among
| many people.) I would like to help out with such things and I
| think I have the experience to do it well, but even being a GS-7
| patent examiner making $75,000 per year is a better deal! That's
| especially true given that Cloudflare's not only expecting people
| to find prior art, but to also write the legal arguments about
| why it reads on Sable's claims.
|
| If they're serious about their prior art bounty program, they're
| going to need to increase the bounties. Actual patent search
| firms charge a lot more money, and even lowly paid bureaucrats
| make a lot more.
| tomhallett wrote:
| While I don't disagree with any of your points, it seems like
| they are using a "platform/UGC/crowd" model to change the
| economics of the business model.
|
| In the same way that TV networks find/vet/pay for the supply of
| shows and take on the risk per-show, YouTube (at its core)
| doesn't do any of that and all of the content creators do those
| things with the hope it will take off and a share of the ad
| revenue, while YouTube's risks are related to the opex cost of
| the incoming supply/demand.
|
| Instead of cloudflare paying per examiner, they give a non-
| guaranteed slice to a bigger group of people.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Strangely, this sounds like a great use case for LLMs? To
| just grind through entire datasets attempting to surface
| prior art.
|
| Edit: Found this with a search, so it can be done:
| https://xlscout.ai/novelty-checker-llm/
|
| (also, thanks Cloudflare! Keep on grinding patent trolls!)
| btrettel wrote:
| After I quit the USPTO, I tried using ChatGPT 3.5 for some
| basic patent examining activity out of curiosity, and I can
| say that it did an absolutely horrendous job. This wasn't
| prior art search, just analyzing the text to do a rejection
| based on the text alone (35 USC 112).
|
| And the AI search technologies I used tended to not be
| particularly good. They typically find "background"
| documents that are related but can't be used in a
| rejection.
|
| I don't anticipate LLMs being able to examine patents in
| general well. Many times a detailed understanding of things
| not in the text is necessary to examine. For the
| technologies I examined, often search was basically
| flipping through drawings. I'd love to see an AI search
| technology focus specifically on patent drawings. This can
| be quite difficult. Often I'd have to understand the
| topology of a circuit (electrical or flow) and find a
| specific combination of elements. Of course, each drawing
| could be laid out differently but be topologically
| equivalent... this surely can be handled with computers in
| some way, but it's going to require a big effort right now.
| lostdog wrote:
| The patent office is also horrendous at evaluating
| novelty, so I suppose ChatGPT has already reached human
| level performance on this task!
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Similar to the way in which software developers are
| terrible at delivering quality software on-time and on-
| budget, so I suppose ChatGPT has already reached human
| level performance on this task!
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| ChatGPT is a mirror where we don't look too good ...
| jeremyjh wrote:
| My point was more that just because humans are terrible
| at something doesn't mean ChatGPT can't be much worse.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| As others have said, ChatGPT is great for writing fluff
| content that has no right or wrong answer. But it is
| still weak when a correct answer is needed, like in legal
| analysis. It can write a great 10 page summary of the
| history of the use of strawberries. But when it comes to
| telling how many r's are in the word strawberry, it's not
| very trustworthy.
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| I wonder if most people realize that your observation is
| a fundamental problem with LLMS. LLMs simply have no
| means to evaluate factuality. Keep asking ChatGPT "Are
| you sure?" and it will break eventually.
|
| The inability to answer basic facts should be a
| dealbreaker.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Then you need to go over each item with just as much care
| as you would any probably-irrelevant item pulled from a
| keyword search, because the LLM is incapable of evaluating
| it in any way other than correlation.
|
| Also, you don't necessarily have a real dataset to begin
| with: prior art doesn't need to be patented, it just needs
| to be published/public/invented sufficiently before the
| patent. Searching the existing patent database is
| insufficient.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Going over a better curated list is a significant upgrade
| and time saver.
|
| Let's not pretend that "correlation" isn't very powerful
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > Also, you don't necessarily have a real dataset to
| begin with: prior art doesn't need to be patented, it
| just needs to be published/public/invented sufficiently
| before the patent. Searching the existing patent database
| is insufficient.
|
| I would caution against making assumptions with regards
| to dataset access and size. I agree effectiveness of the
| effort I mention would be a function of not only gen AI
| engineering, but also dataset size and scope.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| There are, in fact, startups working on using AI for legal
| matters. I know one of the principals in one personally.
|
| I don't know if they're tackling this issue, though.
| btrettel wrote:
| Gene Quinn (in 2015) estimated that patent search with the
| attorney's opinion on patentability for software costs around
| $2500 to $3000 [1]. Obviously the cost is going to be higher
| now. Compare that alone against the $1000 ("at least") per
| winner that Cloudflare's offering.
|
| But Cloudflare isn't asking for an opinion on a particular
| invention. A patent searcher could come back and say there is
| no prior art that reads on the invention in that case and
| still be paid. Instead, Cloudflare's asking for invalidating
| prior art, which I think sets the bar even higher and should
| increase the payout to account for the fact that much of the
| time there won't be invalidating prior art and thus won't be
| a payout.
|
| If the platform is not taking on as much risk, the payouts
| should be higher.
|
| [1] https://ipwatchdog.com/2015/04/04/the-cost-of-obtaining-
| a-pa...
| oefrha wrote:
| I doubt the program's aimed at patent lawyers. They're
| probably casting a wide net hoping to reach people who
| happen to be close to invalidating prior art to begin with,
| skipping the search. Or maybe people who's sued by the same
| patent troll, in which case the program serves to pool
| findings. If I can write up something I already know in
| less than an hour and possibly win $1k, why not.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| At Google we did a comparison of many, many "patent search"
| firms: giving them all the same task. Unfortunately I
| couldn't tell you the results even if I remembered them
| (which I don't). Most were garbage but a couple were spot-
| on.
|
| It's more than $3,000; I can tell you that.
|
| Secondly, it's detective work; you might get the answer
| right away, and you might spend days searching fruitlessly.
| Making a claim chart is what take the time: you have to hit
| every single element.
| epolanski wrote:
| I really don't understand these posts on "it should be
| higher". Dozens and dozens of people contributed so the
| payout was either fair or irrelevant.
| eastdakota wrote:
| Thousands, technically.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| But is there any potential disproportionate upside for any of
| the group of people who are searching? The sued company
| avoids paying $100 million in damages, and my upside as a
| searcher is $1000? Correct? Like, I don't have a potential
| super high upside like a YouTube content creator.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| FOSS has almost unlimited upside and is based on
| contributors who are barely paid anything.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| Agreed. I do think, however, that FOSS contributors may
| get some "social capital" from contributing (approval
| from the cool crowd, putting it on their resume and
| walking employers through what they did) that I doubt
| would go to some dude who spent 100 hours researching and
| finding an old patent or publication that kills a patent.
| Though I may be wrong.
| epolanski wrote:
| You are being misguided for the same reason in both FOSS
| and this patent thing.
|
| You just cannot see that for many people it's their
| genuine interest.
|
| I know plenty of open source contributors and most of
| them do not give two damns about social capital or resume
| (some don't even work in software, but contribute to OS),
| they just like solving problems with code.
| javajosh wrote:
| Cloudflare is shrewdly calculating that there is a lot of
| latent, unexpressed hate toward patent trolls but that most
| people don't want to make a career out of it, but might very
| well make a little hobby out of it, and so they get to take
| advantage of people who are motivated by something other than
| money.
|
| More deeply, the very idea of a "patent examiner" has never
| made sense to me. It requires being expert in all things, which
| is impossible. It makes more sense to take someone who is an
| expert in a field, and put a "patent examiner" hat on them for
| a little while. Ideally the patent system is not so complex
| that it itself requires as much or more study to be expert in
| than the actual subjects of the patents -- this would be a very
| bad sign.
| saratogacx wrote:
| Patent Examiners do specialize in their fields. It isn't
| something that is just a common pool subject to any patent
| that comes into the pipe.
|
| From the USPTO[1]
|
| What kind of degree do I need to apply, and which vacancy do
| I need to apply to? The minimum degree required to be a
| utility patent examiner is a bachelor's degree. There are
| dozens of STEM-related bachelor's degree types that qualify,
| even if they are not the exact discipline listed in the title
| of the job vacancy.
|
| For example, professionals with bachelor's degrees ranging
| from engineering, mathematics, astronomy, space science,
| geophysics, oceanography, or hydrology could all apply to the
| "Patent Examiner (Physics)" vacancy when it is open. To see
| more details about which degrees best fit with which patent
| examiner vacancies, view this chart[1]. You can also attend
| one of our upcoming webinars or office hours to chat with a
| current patent examiner, or email us at JoinUSPTO@uspto.gov
| with your specific question.
|
| [1] https://www.uspto.gov/jobs/become-patent-examiner [2] htt
| ps://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/patent-e...
| codersfocus wrote:
| There aren't any consequences to their decisions though.
|
| Patent examiner shouldn't be a civil servant's job.
|
| Rather, it should be a "bond" process given to private,
| accredited individuals / organizations.
|
| If your issued patents are found invalid, your bond (which
| would be in the millions) is raided to pay back damages.
| svieira wrote:
| > Ideally the patent system is not so complex that it itself
| requires as much or more study to be expert in than the
| actual subjects of the patents
|
| Unfortunately, "patent law" is a complex body of laws, legal
| decisions, and specialized procedures large enough to be its
| own distinct specialization for lawyers. While it's not
| impossible to become an expert in it without _years_ of
| study, it is definitely not possible to be _excellent_ at it.
|
| Just to put it in perspective, the Manual of Patent Examining
| Procedure _alone_ weighs in at over 4K pages of text.
|
| https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/index.html
| btrettel wrote:
| > Cloudflare is shrewdly calculating that there is a lot of
| latent, unexpressed hate toward patent trolls but that most
| people don't want to make a career out of it, but might very
| well make a little hobby out of it, and so they get to take
| advantage of people who are motivated by something other than
| money.
|
| I don't think this is a good strategy. These folks tend to
| have a poor understanding of patent law in my experience, and
| you need to understand the basics to do this right. (You
| fortunately don't need to know too much law to handle 90% of
| cases.) And these folks probably aren't very effective at
| patent searching even if they understand the legal parts. I
| think most people overestimate their own search abilities. I
| certainly did. Examining patents didn't level me up as much
| as humble me in that regard.
|
| > More deeply, the very idea of a "patent examiner" has never
| made sense to me. It require being expert in all things,
| which is impossible. [...]
|
| As saratogacx pointed out, at the USPTO, the vast majority of
| examiners have a specific technology they are assigned to.
| While the matching of examiners to their "art unit" is often
| pretty bad (I could go on a rant...), the situation is not as
| bad as you described. There are some generalist examiners,
| but as I understand it, they are in (basically) QA roles and
| don't need to know the technologies as much. Unfortunately,
| USPTO upper management seems to want to make examiners into
| generalists, which I doubt will work out as they want.
|
| I agree that periodic rotations of industry folks into patent
| examiner positions is a great idea. It would help the patent
| system and give the industry folks some appreciation for what
| examiners do.
|
| If you're worried about lack of expertise, you should be more
| worried about the courts. Judges and juries almost never have
| a background in the technology of the case they are working
| on.
| the_gorilla wrote:
| >It would help the patent system and give the industry
| folks some appreciation for what examiners do.
|
| The examiners regularly approve absolute bullshit patents
| in my field that either obviously have prior work, and
| shouldn't be patentable anyway such as game mechanics. They
| clearly don't understand the work they're meant to be
| doing. Either patent law is horribly designed and needs to
| be razed to the ground, or it's being horribly applied.
| btrettel wrote:
| If you go to a hospital that lacks the resources to
| provide proper treatment, should you be surprised to
| receive poor treatment even if your doctor was highly
| competent? That's basically the situation the USPTO is
| in. Examiners are on a quota system and they don't get
| enough time to do a good quality job.
|
| With that being said, the majority of the time, the
| examiner made the right decision. You should check
| whether a patent was actually granted, for instance.
| Often when people are complaining about a dumb patent
| they're actually complaining about a dumb patent
| _application_ that the USPTO rightly rejected. You should
| be complaining about the people writing such
| applications, not the USPTO.
|
| Further, the USPTO is funded purely by fees, not taxes.
| Applicants want patents. That creates a perverse
| incentive to reduce patent quality to make it easier to
| get patents.
|
| I've elaborated on these issues at length on HN before:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36563611
| the_gorilla wrote:
| >If you go to a hospital that lacks the resources to
| provide proper treatment
|
| I don't have the energy to diffuse false analogies. We're
| not talking about a hospital.
| lostdog wrote:
| The parent clearly said that approved parents were
| bullshit, and I agree. I have several patents, and have
| seen how nonsense the process is. When lawyers obfuscate
| the text enough to confuse the patent examiner, the
| patent gets approved. I can't tell if an individual
| patent examiner is competent or knowledgeable, but patent
| decisions have nothing to do with factuality or novelty.
|
| I do remember your comments from past threads too. It
| really interesting to hear the perspective from the
| patent office's side, but the idea that the patent office
| had some secret and specialized method of evaluating
| novelty is ridiculous. Any expert can read a sample of
| _granted_ patents and tell you that. I 'd estimate maybe
| 5% of patents in my field have any novelty, and that's
| being generous.
|
| I'm sure this has more to do with incentives and the
| overall system, and that individual patent examiners
| would prefer to do a good job. But you have to admit that
| the results are atrocious.
| btrettel wrote:
| > The parent clearly said that approved parents were
| bullshit, and I agree.
|
| Just because they said it was granted, doesn't mean that
| it was. A lot of people here don't seem able to
| distinguish between a granted patent and a rejected
| patent application. Here are two examples that I bothered
| to reply to in the past:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38766101
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36563425
|
| > the idea that the patent office had some secret and
| specialized method of evaluating novelty is ridiculous
|
| I don't think they do and I never said they do. The USPTO
| follows some legal standard that I personally don't agree
| with. I agree with you that too few granted patents have
| genuine novelty.
|
| > But you have to admit that the results are atrocious.
|
| No, I don't. You've seen a small selection of what the
| USPTO outputs. Only the bad cases appear in the news. In
| contrast, I've seen a far larger and unbiased selection
| and know that the majority is fine. Most applications are
| rejected. I probably rejected over 75% myself.
| lostdog wrote:
| I have seen the results from searches of patents in my
| field, and the patents that my colleagues get granted.
| It's hard to find even a single good patent in the bunch.
|
| Is there a way to sample 5 random ML patents? I'd be
| surprised if half were any good.
| btrettel wrote:
| I think I haven't been clear on a few things.
|
| I think the quality of examination and search is
| excellent given how little time examiners have. But
| mistakes still happen too frequently, and the mistakes
| can be highly costly. Better to stop problems upstream in
| my opinion by giving examiners more time.
|
| Patent quality is related but different. I agree that
| patent quality is awful, but there's only so much an
| examiner can do to influence that. Attorneys have
| basically gamed the system to write vague legalese that's
| patentable but basically useless. And to paraphase a
| supervisor I knew at the USPTO, "Just because it's stupid
| doesn't mean that it's not patentable". I can't reject
| them if it meets the legal standards but is stupid.
|
| Anyhow, I think there might be a random sort feature that
| can do what you want in the USPTO's public search (no
| time to check, though):
| https://www.uspto.gov/patents/search/patent-public-search
| amiga386 wrote:
| What is your opinion on US20200413106A1, which was
| granted?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_numeral_systems#
| Pat...
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/13/microsoft_ans_pate
| nt/
| btrettel wrote:
| I have no personal opinion. If you want the opinion of
| the examiner, you can go here:
|
| https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/applications/16456602/ifw/
| doc...
|
| Look for "Notice of Allowance and Fees Due (PTOL-85)" and
| click on "PDF" on the right. Scroll to page 10 and look
| for the "Reasons for Allowance" section where the
| examiner describes in detail why it differs from the
| prior art.
| amiga386 wrote:
| I was more looking for your opinion on the patent in
| general.
|
| While there are minor technical differences in exactly
| how rANS has been encoded/decoded before, and how
| Microsoft does it, the fact that Microsoft was granted
| this means they now have a weapon with which they can
| cause fear, uncertainty and doubt around ANS, much to the
| chagrin of the ANS's actual inventor, Jarek Duda, who
| wanted it to be public domain and implementable by
| anyone.
|
| I'm not an expert but Duda and fellow compression experts
| looked at the claims themselves:
| https://encode.su/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-
| Stor...
|
| It seems to me like Microsoft got a patent on "doing ANS
| a little bit different" - they didn't have to, they could
| just do it the normal way, but this little bit of
| difference lets them secure a patent, and now they can
| pursue _anyone_ who implements ANS to intimidate them
| with "how sure are you don't do ANS like we do? Let's
| get our multi-billion legal team, and your legal team,
| and find out. You have a legal team, don't you?"
|
| In particular, this patent already had a final rejection
| in 2020. But Microsoft then took advantage of the "After
| Final Consideration Pilot" program, which sounds more
| like the USPTO trying to drum up trade, to get it re-re-
| re-examined.
| btrettel wrote:
| > Microsoft was granted this means they now have a weapon
| with which they can cause fear, uncertainty and doubt
| around ANS
|
| This is due more to people not understanding what the
| patent covers. The right response in my view is to
| educate people. Just because someone has a patent on a
| particular variation of X, doesn't mean that working on X
| is risky or what not. Just don't infringe their
| variation. When I was at the USPTO, I examined a lot of
| little variations of common things in my area (water
| heaters and car air vents, mostly) and I never worried
| that it would stop innovation as usually the point of
| novelty was not particularly groundbreaking, or even
| necessarily of interest to anyone aside from the
| applicant.
| the_gorilla wrote:
| I'm wonder now if people working in patent offices
| actually think they're doing something good and are just
| overworked, while being completely unaware of the evil
| they're supporting. It sure sounds like you think there's
| value in it.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| The patent office can be sued for not granting but not
| for granting. So they bias towards granting things they
| shouldn't and let the courts deal with the mess later.
| antonvs wrote:
| > my area (water heaters and car air vents, mostly)
|
| Do you feel qualified to discuss patents related to
| software? If so, why?
| eastdakota wrote:
| Proof is in the pudding, as they say. I've been astonished
| by the quality of the submissions we've received the times
| we've fired up Project Jengo. And it's helped us
| successfully beat -- and literally put out of business --
| the two patent trolls that have come after us.
| btrettel wrote:
| Did you all pay for a normal invalidation search as well?
| I'm glad it worked for you all, but I think "spray and
| pray" is typically not a good strategy. I suppose you all
| had enough scale to reach the right people.
| eastdakota wrote:
| I'm sorry we've shown that going to law school is less
| valuable than some may have thought. My parents had that
| angst too when I decided not to practice law after going
| to law school myself. It worked out.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| The proof is not in the pudding. The proof of the pudding
| is in the eating.
| eastdakota wrote:
| Having talked with several of them, most of the people who
| submit the prior art as part of Project Jengo would do so even
| if there were no payout. Several winners have actually asked
| that the payout be donated back to other organizations fighting
| patent trolls. This isn't intended to be anyone's full time
| job. It is intended to reward technical people with industry
| knowledge who may be able to help surface prior art and are as
| sick of patent trolls as we are.
| mdhb wrote:
| That's cool and all but don't lowball people. This was the
| first thing Cloudflare has done in years that I didn't
| associate with something shitty until I saw this.
|
| Just for once do the right thing rather than what you think
| you can get away with because overall this is a genuinely
| something to be celebrated.
| lolinder wrote:
| They clearly offered enough to be worth it to enough people
| to take out Sable. If being part of a successful effort to
| take down a patent troll is its own reward and Cloudflare
| successfully coordinated the work to make that happen, I'm
| really failing to see the problem.
| mdhb wrote:
| They offered enough to get some activity happening which
| viewed strictly through the lens of capitalism and
| quarter to quarter balance sheets is +10 points no
| question.
|
| That's not what I'm talking about here though.
| lolinder wrote:
| That's not what I'm talking about either, so I'm glad
| we're on the same page.
| btrettel wrote:
| Thanks for your comment.
|
| Personally, I value my own time well above my job's hourly
| rate, so I would expect to be paid more, not less, in the
| situation you describe. I suspect the same is true for many
| others as well.
|
| > most of the people who submit the prior art as part of
| Project Jengo would do so even if there were no payout
|
| I'd say this is due to selection bias. People who wanted a
| bigger payout didn't participate.
|
| You all's program is basically over now, but I think anyone
| considering a prior art bounty program in the future should
| check best practices for bug bounty programs. The two seem
| similar to me. Paying more will get more and better
| submissions, and it doesn't seem to be particularly expensive
| to me.
| mlyle wrote:
| It was obviously sufficient ;)
|
| Paying more doesn't always motivate people more or get more
| (quality) people to do a thing. Compensation and associated
| psychology is complicated, because people are complicated.
|
| e.g. I am willingly working very hard at a job where I
| could make 10x or perhaps even 100x elsewhere with equal or
| less effort. And I often spend my time on things that are
| completely irrational by your types of economic measures or
| even "pay to work."
| bsimpson wrote:
| I'm remembering the time I spent $40,000 worth of time
| saving maybe a couple grand on bike parts.
|
| (I spent a couple months between gigs building a bicycle
| from parts, and sourcing the parts was the biggest
| timesink.)
| lostlogin wrote:
| What did you build?
| bsimpson wrote:
| A 29er with a continuously variable transmission in the
| rear hub, mustache handlebars, wood fenders, and a crank
| made by a mill in Petaluma.
| lostlogin wrote:
| That sounds great. Any pictures anywhere? I need to get
| out of the 'bike must go faster' rut.
| bsimpson wrote:
| https://bikeindex.org/bikes/1035
| lostlogin wrote:
| It's definitely green, fat and delicious.
| bsimpson wrote:
| In the initial version of Bike Index you were supposed to
| give them names. This was green and brown (the girl I was
| dating at the time insisted I try brown tires), so I used
| Avocado.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| Looks like a $40k vintage bike.
| hluska wrote:
| That's a heck of a nice bike - you're very good at what
| you do. Thanks for sharing that - now I have to talk
| myself out of doing the same thing. :)
| bsimpson wrote:
| I appreciate that - thank you!
|
| Was a lot of work, but a fun project to really learn what
| goes into a bicycle. Definitely won't see another bike
| like mine on the road!
| hluska wrote:
| > Definitely won't see another bike like mine on the
| road!
|
| Exactly! It's beautiful, functional and very cool in how
| original it is. Thanks for posting that image and for the
| chat - you're very talented and have really inspired me.
| cbsks wrote:
| Never seen wood fenders before. Very cool!
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| The crazy thing about home improvement stuff is
| oftentimes you save a shitload by diy'ing it.
|
| I've saved about $162/hour on various home projects when
| compared to quotes I've been given. Considering I'm a
| relative noob when it comes to this stuff I've gotta
| imagine they're charging much higher hourly rates than
| this.
|
| This $162/hour is way more than what my salary as an
| hourly wage would be and it's also tax free to boot.
| mlyle wrote:
| There's an incredibly high overhead on getting work as a
| contractor, billing for it, etc. There's a whole lot of
| unbillable hours you need to amortize.
|
| (At the same time, people DIYing tend to underestimate
| their real opportunity costs).
|
| The best outcome is that you end up liking tinkering and
| have pride in your work. That's a very high discount to
| the real cost.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I totally understand the high overhead aspect, but I
| assume knowing what you're doing is supposed to help
| immensely with that.
|
| Pride in work is a big thing. As someone who works at a
| desk, some manual labor on the weekend is a nice change
| of pace. It's also not pointless exercise. And in my
| experience the best way to get something done right is to
| get free advice from the pros and do it yourself. Because
| the people the pros hire to do it won't care as much as
| you.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| The problem I see with people doing these cost analyses
| for home or car DIY repairs is that they always compare
| two simple things: 1) the out-of-pocket cost of the
| professional job vs 2) the hourly cost of the DIY job,
| plus parts and materials. They completely forget to
| account for the cost of their their time in scenario 1.
|
| Having your car or house fixed by someone else isn't that
| easy. Unless you have a personal butler, it's not like
| you just tell some person "fix this" in 5 minutes or less
| and walk away, then pay them when it's over. If it's a
| car repair, you have to transport your car to the repair
| place, then either sit there _while they fix it_ or find
| some alternate transportation, then you have to come back
| after it 's done. If it's a 1-hour job, how much time
| will you waste just traveling to and from the repair
| shop, plus potentially waiting around for it to be done?
| You probably could have done it yourself in less time.
| For a house repair, you don't have to travel there, but
| you probably want to stay at home while the work is being
| done unless the house is empty, or you _really_ trust the
| contractors and sub-contractors. So in either scenario,
| there 's a lot of your own time that's not being
| accounted for.
|
| And this all assumes that the professional will actually
| do the job correctly, and you won't have to deal with
| issues from them doing it poorly. This could easily end
| up taking FAR more time than the original job. And in my
| experience, the so-called "professionals" frequently do a
| shoddy job or are completely incompetent (so now you need
| to spend a lot of time trying to figure out who to hire
| so you don't get screwed).
|
| So in my view, if you mostly know how to do something
| yourself, it doesn't need a whole team of people to do,
| doesn't require expensive specialty equipment, and isn't
| highly dangerous, it's quite likely a better deal to just
| DIY.
| mindslight wrote:
| I'm also coming from a DIY-first perspective and agree
| with your point. But I've also come to see there's actual
| value in only spending your own time just
| prepping/waiting/managing rather than having to
| physically and mentally exert yourself during that time.
| It's probably a result of getting older, plus having too
| much on my DIY plate that the context switches are
| becoming a killer.
|
| Still yes, the biggest issue I have is most times I hire
| someone to do something, it often goes sideways and I
| have to get deeply involved _anyway_. This effect seems
| to be even worse for white collar work, where
| "professionals" tend to push cookie cutter solutions
| without much interactive analysis.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| You need to have all the tools it takes a lifetime to
| collect all the tools unless you are a contractor
| lesuorac wrote:
| Depends on the task I guess.
|
| You could pay 100+ for a plumber to snake a drain or just
| buy a snake yourself and do it for <50 in parts and the
| next time it's free.
|
| Perhaps for some tasks you buy so many tools it's the
| same price but the second you need to use them again it's
| a steep discount. Or you could ask a neighbor.
| weaksauce wrote:
| the tools are durable and will last a very long time
| unless you're buying poorly made items and treating them
| poorly. you can save a few hundred dollars by buying a 15
| dollar capacitor off amazon and a 11 in one multi purpose
| screw driver to fix your ac unit that doesn't startup.
| (very common fix for a very common issue) all you need is
| knowledge and a few bucks in parts and tools.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| I think this is the key point. Voluntary prior art hunts
| have been a successful strategy for defeating stupid
| patents[1] for many years now. There may be arguments in
| favor of bounties for more obscure or less stupid
| patents, but when the collective demand to fix this
| problem is so high, the price point is rather low.
|
| [1] "Stupid patents" is a technical term here -- or it
| has been since Mark Cuban funded an EFF staffer to
| challenge bad patents on the condition that the position
| was titled the "Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid
| Patents".
|
| https://www.eff.org/press/releases/staff-attorney-daniel-
| naz...
| alright2565 wrote:
| Think of this more of as public service than a job, with
| the cash prize being there to generate media excitement.
|
| I'll still pick up litter when I'm walking through a rich
| neighborhood, even though those people have groundskeepers
| to take care of it for them. No one is doing this with the
| goal of a profit.
| btrettel wrote:
| Why should I do a "public service" for a company with a
| market cap measured in the tens of billions of dollars?
| They can pay for it.
|
| And this is a much bigger ask than picking up litter.
| jstanley wrote:
| Nobody's trying to tell you that _you_ have to do this.
| They 're trying to help you understand why _other people_
| want to do it.
|
| Is there a name for the fallacy "I don't see why people
| do X", "they do it because Y", "but I don't care about
| Y!" ?
| btrettel wrote:
| Fair enough. Replace "I" with "someone" in my previous
| comment. I can see why people would do these patent
| searches, but I still think it's a bad idea for those
| folks do these patent searches for so little.
| barkingcat wrote:
| isn't this exactly the point?
|
| from the viewpoint you've presented it's a bad idea to
| volunteer for basically anything.
|
| even something like enlisting in a nation's armed forces
| is a bad idea since the risk is so high vs the monetary
| reward, and the only way people would become soldiers is
| to join mercenary armies where there is a price exacted
| that matches the performance.
|
| for many people, they value the intangible more than the
| money.
| btrettel wrote:
| Okay, I think appreciate your perspective and that of
| some others here more. If you all think it's a good use
| of your time, go ahead. Personally, I have more pressing
| concerns. And for what it's worth, (and I know this won't
| be popular here) the entire patent troll narrative is
| overblown, which seems to be the consensus opinion of
| people working in patent law. For example, see this blog
| post:
|
| https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/06/22/myths-patent-trolls-
| preven...
|
| Given that I think the narrative is overblown, I don't
| really see this as a "public service". It's a problem,
| sure, but it's not a major one.
| mlyle wrote:
| My first startup had 3 different firms with no real
| product try to shake us down using patents with obvious
| prior art at different times. It was a major distraction
| and costly in resources when we had limited capital.
|
| We did manage to convince them all to go away, but it
| might have been cheaper to just pay them off. I'm
| guessing that all they really wanted was a long list of
| capitulations and licensees before litigating against the
| big guys.
|
| I'm not surprised that the IPR industry which thrives
| upon resulting legal fees is less inclined to view things
| as trolling and any trolling that happens to be not too
| severe, though. ;)
| btrettel wrote:
| Sorry to hear about your experience.
|
| To reply to you and some others:
|
| I'm not saying that patent trolling is not a problem. My
| point is that it's not as big a problem as commonly
| believed. The real problem is poor patent quality, which
| goes beyond patent trolling but does allow trolls to
| exist in the first place. For those who want to do a
| public service, address poor patent quality as it's the
| root cause.
|
| And I'm disappointed by the comments that appear to
| assume bad faith on the part of the IP industry without
| even considering their arguments. I'll leave it at that.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > And for what it's worth, (and I know this won't be
| popular here) the entire patent troll narrative is
| overblown, which seems to be the consensus opinion of
| people working in patent law.
|
| "People working in patent law" have a conflict of
| interest. The arguments being made in that link are
| practically in bad faith, e.g.:
|
| > Google and Uber are locked in a patent battle over
| self-driving automobiles, so does that make Google and
| Uber patent trolls?
|
| The ordinary definition of a patent troll is a firm that
| sues for patent infringement as its primary business. Say
| what you will about Google and Uber, they clearly derive
| the bulk of their revenue from offering products and
| services to the public.
|
| > As we consider all of this it is also important to keep
| in mind that the U.S. tech sector spending on patent
| trolls is less than 1% of all IT spending.
|
| If you compare a smaller number to a bigger number, the
| bigger number is bigger. But the thing that matters isn't
| the size of the problem relative to the size of the
| industry, it's whether the shakedowns are net positive or
| net negative.
|
| For software patents in particular, it's the latter,
| because software is inherently and purposely abstract.
| Which is incompatible with the reasonable operation of
| the patent system, because it makes the two viable
| strategies to patent the abstraction or to patent some
| specific implementation which is required for
| _compatibility_ , so that alternate implementations can't
| be used without disrupting interoperability. Otherwise
| the number of alternate software implementations of any
| given abstraction are so large that nobody would
| purposely use somebody else's software patent, they'd
| just create their own non-infringing implementation of
| the same abstraction.
|
| But patenting the abstraction itself is not supposed to
| be allowed (even though these patents are all too often
| granted) and using a patent for the purposes of
| preventing interoperability should be an antitrust
| violation for the same reason as tying is illegal even
| when the original monopoly was lawfully obtained, because
| the value you're extracting isn't the value of the
| invention, it's the value of compatibility with the
| existing system. And then there's nothing of merit left.
| eastdakota wrote:
| You do? You've spent more time here commenting than some
| of the people who got paid under Project Jengo. #odd
| btrettel wrote:
| You're right. I do think arguing with people on the
| internet was a bad way to spend my day off.
| antonvs wrote:
| You apparently have difficulty understanding that other
| people have different experiences and priorities from
| you. This shows up in every aspect of your argument here.
| kortilla wrote:
| Of course the people deeply in the system don't see a
| problem with. You might as well have linked a "smoking is
| good for you" study from Phillip Morris.
| scbrg wrote:
| > And for what it's worth, (and I know this won't be
| popular here) the entire patent troll narrative is
| overblown, which seems to be the consensus opinion of
| people working in patent law.
|
| The consensus among lawyers who benefit from people
| unnecessarily having to hire lawyers is that the
| situation is not bad. Well, there's a shocker...
| Multiplayer wrote:
| I think the severity of this problem depends on context.
| I can share that as a small startup we had a patent troll
| come after us and it was almost fatal because it
| shattered our fund raising process.
|
| We prevailed and lived to fight another day but that was
| an incredibly unproductive and stressful time.
|
| So I see this differently as do the many team members who
| kept their jobs and made good money when we were
| acquired.
| feoren wrote:
| Wow, that is an awful article. Straw-manning everyone who
| wants patent reform as "those who prefer to take
| technologies they did not innovate rather than pay a
| reasonable royalty to innovators." Multiple paragraphs
| devoted to tearing down the straw-man argument "every
| company that tries to enforce its patents is a patent
| troll" -- which _nobody_ is claiming. An insane argument
| about how "America's technology companies" are
| hypocritical because both the trolls and the ones
| complaining about trolls are technology companies -- so
| what? That's like when people claim "Reddit" is
| hypocritical. They're different people!
|
| That author is barely even trying to hide his extreme
| slant, and you posting an obviously extremely biased
| article as some sort of evidence dramatically undermines
| your opinion on the topic and frankly calls into question
| the limits of "assume good faith".
| ordu wrote:
| It is the same with programmers who writes open source
| programs just for fun of it. And I remember in 2000x
| there were people who thought that it is a bad idea.
| There were even lawsuits filled by programmers who
| couldn't sell their programs because they were left
| without customers due to open source solutions.
| otherme123 wrote:
| Or the whole Wikipedia thing, that at first was dismissed
| by traditional publishers, whom then were bankrupted and
| buried by an army of free working amateurs.
| eastdakota wrote:
| You don't still consult your Encarta CD-ROM? How do you
| ever figure out what's what?
| intended wrote:
| For a patent search? Too little.
|
| Screwing over a patent troll? That's priceless.
|
| No amount of money can provide that satisfaction. Heck,
| I'm not even impacted and I'm gleefully happy. Whoever
| helped deserves a free beer. Patent trolls are a blight.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| The problem is there's a lot of patent tools and only a
| few make the news. Passion can't win them all.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > Passion can't win them all.
|
| If you do the numbers, yes it can. There are a lot of
| people who could do this searching.
| intended wrote:
| Patent trolls win because they are a protection racket,
| and it takes resources to fight them.
|
| This battle took 2 years, I think ?
| mlyle wrote:
| I don't think it's paying most of them to do a patent
| search.
|
| It's a way to get media attention for people to glance at
| it. It's providing a nudge for them to tell you about
| something that they know off the top of their head.
|
| Patent trolling is a big problem, and a lot of us view
| opposing it in a small way as a type of community of
| service.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| That's like saying it's a bad idea to contribute to Open
| Source. It's a similar motivation: people want to do good
| in the world and don't necessarily need to be paid for
| it.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| I think I see his point though, and it's not quite the
| same as working on FOSS. He made a sibling comment about
| helping a "multi-billion dollar" corporation (CloudFlare)
| for so little reward. So in his view, this volunteer
| effort didn't really help regular people that much, and
| instead benefited a huge company mostly.
|
| People usually work on FOSS because they have a personal
| interest in a project, and want to share that with
| everyone. So we end up with stuff like device drivers for
| hardware where the mfgr couldn't be bothered to make a
| Linux driver, or various useful utilities, a whole OS
| (which everyone can use), etc. What we _don 't_ see much
| in FOSS is "enterprise software": stuff that's only
| really useful if you're a huge company. Where's the FOSS
| alternatives to proprietary human resource management
| systems, supply chain management systems, etc.?
| Generally, stuff like that doesn't exist, because no one
| wants to spend their free time working on things that
| they personally have no use for, and no one's found a
| good business case to make a company producing an open-
| source version.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Taking out patents is like FOSS, though, in that the
| effect is that, once the patent is gone, anyone can work
| in that area without worrying about infringing that
| patent. So, even if the occasion might be a threat to a
| multi-billion dollar company, this is a case where
| helping such companies is well-aligned with the needs of
| the FOSS movement.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >once the patent is gone, anyone can work in that area
| without worrying about infringing that patent.
|
| I agree, and that's a great point I think the patent
| examiner person was missing. These patents are a hazard
| for everyone, big or small.
| the_gorilla wrote:
| You clearly don't understand how much people hate patent
| trolls and software patents in general. It's all a cruel
| joke, and getting paid some token sum of money to
| invalidate a bunch of worthless patents is just a nice
| bonus. You wouldn't do it for free because generating
| these patents is your job.
| btrettel wrote:
| You are mistaken. I'm a _former_ patent examiner as
| pointed out in the third word of my first comment here.
| So I have no conflict of interest. And I think I have a
| solid understanding of how much people hate patent trolls
| and software patents in general, which is why I added the
| qualifier about how I know my comment would be unpopular
| in some other comments here.
| the_gorilla wrote:
| Conflicts of interest don't really work like that. You
| are a patent examiner even after you stop working as one,
| and for as long as your loyalties and ideas remain with
| your former job.
| jon_richards wrote:
| I'd say the conflict of interest has gone away, but the
| years of rationalizing cognitive dissonance have
| solidified certain opinions.
| dpe82 wrote:
| "I'm going to say something you hate"
|
| > Says something we hate
|
| "Why do you hate what I said?"
| malfist wrote:
| I don't know that it's a fallacy that has a name, but it
| could be considered an appeal to authority (person is
| claiming authority on what other should care about) or
| ignoratio elenchi (irrelevant conclusion) since the
| conclusion (nobody should care about this) obviously
| doesn't follow (I don't care about this).
| ggm wrote:
| It's inductance from the particular (me) to the general
| case
|
| Since I hate crab, all people hate crab and confronted by
| a crab meat liker I have no capacity to imagine why,
| since I hate it and therefore everybody should and
| therefore you're wrong.
|
| In reality, it's the exception proving (testing) the case
| and showing it's flaw: all people do not hate crab
| therefore my generalisation is specious. Instead of
| doubting why anyone likes crab I should ask why I hate
| it.
| immibis wrote:
| Projection?
| nfriedly wrote:
| > _Why should I do a "public service" for a company with
| a market cap measured in the tens of billions of dollars?
| They can pay for it._
|
| It's right there in the name: _public_ service. Yeah, it
| benefits cloudflare, but it _also_ benefits nearly
| everyone else. Some people just want to improve the
| world, even if they 're not fairly compensated for it.
| Some people see living in a world with one less patent
| troll as compensation enough.
| btrettel wrote:
| The alternative is that Cloudflare pays a patent search
| firm to get the same result, albeit at a higher cost to
| Cloudflare. That would benefit everyone else too as the
| prior art would be on legal record. Why can't Cloudflare
| do a "public service" by paying a patent search firm like
| most other companies would?
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| >Why can't Cloudflare do a "public service" by paying a
| patent search firm like most other companies would?
|
| I'm sure they did that too, like any other major company
| sued by a troll. This isn't an either/or situation.
|
| Jengo draws from many, many people across the industry.
| They can surface all sorts of prior art, not just earlier
| patents, and they know where to look due to their
| experience.
|
| As I said, every large company that gets sued by trolls
| pays patent search firms to find prior art. I can't
| imagine that Cloudflare didn't do the same. Why wouldn't
| they, there is a lot of money at stake? They added to
| that through the search program because the yield from
| patent search firms is often poor.
| eastdakota wrote:
| "You didn't pay enough to my view of experts, but you
| won, but you could have won and paid more, and that'd be
| better." That's your argument? Just to be clear?
|
| And, note, this strategy has worked pretty (cost)
| effectively for us before:
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/winning-the-blackbird-battle/
|
| But you'd suggest we do what everyone else does and hire
| expensive "experts"? K. Good luck with that.
|
| Oh, forgot, that's your profession... expensive expert.
| Carry on.
| btrettel wrote:
| I do think that you all should have paid more. But I'm
| fine with the bounty program, as long as it's fairly
| compensated. I don't like the compensation of you all's
| program, but from the discussion I've had here, it's
| clear to me that many folks are fine with it. Fair
| enough, they can participate if they want to.
|
| Also: I'm not saying that patent search firms are
| perfect. Albert Cory had a comment here about how the
| quality of search firms varies dramatically. But I do
| think that searching is a skill which can be developed.
| Many of the examiners I worked with at the USPTO were
| outstanding searchers who could find information in their
| area very quickly. It can be hard for someone looking to
| purchase patent search services to know who is good,
| unfortunately.
| eastdakota wrote:
| And your profession is...?
| btrettel wrote:
| I'm a mechanical engineer. I mostly run and write fluid
| simulation code for a living. Much better paid and much
| lower stress than patent examining.
| eastdakota wrote:
| :-p
| thayne wrote:
| It isn't that uncommon to see patents were subject matter
| experts can easily point to unpatented prior art. I doubt
| such patents were filed without first paying experts to
| search for prior art. But such experts are experts in
| patents, not in the technology being patented, so they
| might not know the best places to look.
| btilly wrote:
| Why should a company that is doing a public service for
| the rest of us, at their own expense, pay more than it
| needs to to do that service?
|
| If Cloudflare was to behave rationally, it would simply
| pay the troll to go away. Trolls are very good at making
| that the logical choice, which is why virtually everyone
| else just pays up. Cloudflare fights because the act of
| taking a stand fits with their values.
|
| You're clearly not civic minded enough to appreciate why
| Cloudflare does what it does. And so you don't understand
| why other people, who share Cloudflare's values, would be
| motivated to help them accomplish their good deeds.
| eastdakota wrote:
| Yup!
| thayne wrote:
| > If Cloudflare was to behave rationally, it would simply
| pay the troll to go away.
|
| Well, maybe.
|
| Cloudflare is a company that sells to developers. A lot
| of developers hate patent trolls. Fighting back against a
| patent troll is a good way to gain respect and goodwill
| from those developers. So it could effectively be an
| advertisement campaign, and for the target audience,
| probably a lot more effective than paying for banner ads.
| It could also benefit recruiting, and moral of developers
| who like seeing someone stand up to patent trolls.
|
| Also, by setting a precedent of fighting back, they might
| deter future attempts at shakedowns from other patent
| trolls.
|
| That's not to say that their motives are completely
| selfish. I'm sure there were altruistic motivations as
| well (and motivations no doubt varies among individuals
| involved in this). But it isn't irrational.
| mcherm wrote:
| If the patent trolls were only harming CloudFlare then I
| would not be so concerned. But it is my impression that
| they mostly try to go after very small, independent
| companies because those can be guaranteed to not have
| enough funds to fight in court, so they will either pay
| up or go out of business.
|
| I consider it a public service to try and drive these
| patent trolls out of business because the harm they do is
| done to the the entire industry, especially the most
| vulnerable companies in that industry.
|
| Of course, I would much prefer to change the law so that
| patent trolling was not allowed or was not profitable.
| btrettel wrote:
| For what it's worth, and I know this won't be popular
| here, the entire patent troll narrative is overblown.
| Patent trolls are not as big a problem as big tech
| companies want you to believe. See what people working in
| patent law actually think, for instance, I found this
| blog post in a minute or so:
|
| https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/06/22/myths-patent-trolls-
| preven...
|
| I think it's good that Cloudflare didn't pay this
| particular troll, but even if they had, it's not that big
| a deal.
|
| And the best way to stop patent trolls would be to
| prevent bad patents from being granted in the first place
| by giving examiners more time. The USPTO is funded solely
| by fees, not taxes, creating a perverse incentive to
| grant invalid patents. Fix that, increase patent fees,
| and give examiners more time.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| > For what it's worth, and I know this won't be popular
| here, the entire patent troll narrative is overblown.
| Patent trolls are not as big a problem as big tech
| companies want you to believe. See what people working in
| patent law actually think, for instance, I found this
| blog post in a minute or so:
|
| Nothing in the article you cited says patent trolls _aren
| 't_ a problem. It claims (without really supporting it)
| that modern patent trolling is the fault of the
| technology industry, which I can almost believe, but "the
| technology industry" is large, and non-practicing
| entities which are commonly identified as "trolls" are
| very different than entities that actually do R&D.
| moomin wrote:
| To explain the thought process: most people doing this
| aren't doing this to help CloudFlare. They're doing this
| because they want to hurt patent trolls. Their time might
| be better spent forming a lobbying group and calling
| their representatives, but CloudFlare's role in this is
| to provide them with a way to do what they wanted to do
| in the first place.
|
| Not saying CloudFlare shouldn't reward them better.
| delfinom wrote:
| Because it isn't just helping the one company when you
| invalidate patents. It's helping future startups and even
| mom & pop operations in some cases.
|
| Shit, why does anyone even work on open source software,
| it's just going to help some company with a market cap
| measured in billions.
| stavros wrote:
| As someone who didn't participate (because I didn't have
| any prior art), I'd donate a few hours of my time (a few
| thousand dollars' value) to fight patent trolls.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I always thought of it as a way to get input from people
| who can see the patent application and say "hey that's just
| the same as X" off the top of their head.
| neutronicus wrote:
| > Personally, I value my own time well above my job's
| hourly rate
|
| I think it would be pretty tough for me to sell my marginal
| hours for more than my hourly rate.
|
| I'm sure if I shopped around aggressively I could find a
| richer buyer for the 40-hour bundles I'm currently selling,
| but people aren't really beating down the door for a couple
| hours of C++ dev time here and there. Especially once you
| factor in time spent on lead generation, negotiation,
| dealing with collecting payment, etc, I think the market
| value of my free time is probably way less than my hourly
| rate.
| trogdor wrote:
| > I think the market value of my free time is probably
| way less than my hourly rate.
|
| GP's comment was about how _they_ value their own free
| time, not the market value of that time.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| It depends; we (small company/team) do emergency work,
| especially on legacy software including c++. We usually
| are at 300-500$/hr but $1000 has happened if the client
| is desperate and the work is hard. If a company is losing
| or not making the million$+/day they normally make, they
| don't care about the hourlies for the fix. We typically
| go in for a few hours to a few days; we don't take long
| term projects. Still we have pretty high utilisation.
|
| For collecting the payments we use a factoring agency; it
| costs a % but whatever; we are always cashed up. And lead
| generation, well, people find us. I have been 'giving
| away' this 'business plan' for decades and no one is
| doing it. Probably because everyone wants to focus on
| something long term, not jump from php to c++ to cobol to
| java etc and because of the _great_ resume driven dev
| strategy. I am for one looking forward to fixing the
| misery that is nextjs and its 'ecosystem' for the coming
| decades; please continue! I will have to up the hourlies
| to 1500+ for that miserable experience though; give me
| cobol or java any day.
| JackeJR wrote:
| I have not found an employer that values skills in
| multiple languages + quick at learning new ones. I assume
| these are the basic req for your type of work. Please
| share if you can how you got started .
| anonzzzies wrote:
| At first we searched on twitter/linkedin for companies
| that seem to get into trouble more than once; hacked,
| downtime etc. Also down adsense links of big companies
| (click on the link -> they pay -> result page is 404,
| 500, or just dead); I have found these for Pepsi, Nike
| etc and then send them our proposal. When we started, the
| hourly was 150E/hr and one of the first we emailed (in
| London this was) came back and asked if we do entire
| projects as 150/hr was less than he paid the current
| people.
| wpietri wrote:
| > Paying more will get more and better submissions, and it
| doesn't seem to be particularly expensive to me.
|
| They might get more, but will they get better? The most
| passionate people I know are pretty insensitive to pay
| rate. Whereas the people I know who are most sensitive to
| $/hour tend to be more skilled at the business of the thing
| rather than the thing itself.
| sim7c00 wrote:
| bug bounty programs always get you less money than what you
| could earn optimising for money... look how much bugs go
| for on bounty programs vs. selling them to companies who
| want the bugs for other purposes. (not talking illegal
| here, though maybe shady/gray area, kinda like patent
| trolls?). generally, working at a company as a fulltime dev
| will also net you more than working on bug bounties. sure
| there's big bounty payouts, but its really rare for someone
| to consistently get such payouts. a lot of bugs filed to
| bounties are also found just working with thinga daily and
| stumbling upon them rather than specifically looking for
| them. I know a few old colleagues who worked on drivers for
| a security tool hit a lot of Microsoft kernel bugs. they
| got nice paydays and went up the list/hall of fame of prime
| bug finders not because of the bounty program but merely
| because their dayjob yielded them results to submit... i
| think this cloudflare program is in similar vein. people
| who already know or stumble upon prior art can submit it
| easily, and get a few bucks for it.... its imho not meant
| for people to scower all patents searching for it in their
| free time... though some might do that. (god what a tedious
| thing to do... "in one embodiment..." all day long :D)
| lolinder wrote:
| You're clearly not the target audience for this program,
| which is fine, but that's not in itself a problem with what
| they did.
|
| Cloudflare found a model that successfully distributed the
| cost of killing a patent troll between many passionate
| volunteers who were in it for the pleasure of taking down a
| troll. They succeeded, and in the process put other patent
| trolls on notice that our collective hatred for them is
| enough to raise an army of volunteers that's cheap to
| motivate and extremely effective. The low budget _is part
| of the success story here_!
|
| A patent troll's whole game is for it to be more expensive
| to fight back than to cave, and you're complaining that
| Cloudflare managed to flip the economics.
| btrettel wrote:
| I'm skeptical this made that big a difference in terms of
| total cost. The biggest cost (maybe overwhelming
| majority) is probably the attorneys, which I'm confident
| Cloudflare didn't skimp on. Anyone from Cloudflare with
| hard data is welcome to correct me if I'm wrong.
| eastdakota wrote:
| You're... wrong. Massively wrong. And I say that
| literally as the guy who approved the comparative
| budgets.
| btrettel wrote:
| I stand corrected.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I think the part of it being a contest is what makes the
| whole damn thing so much more exciting. As a person who has
| no prior experience in this area, I would love to submit a
| report on it and stake my claim as an expert if I was
| selected.
|
| I reckon many of the submitters have the same vision. The
| name/fame is enough. The money is a show off and a
| legitimizer.
| eastdakota wrote:
| I've not encountered another critter like you. But here you
| are: a lawyer cum HN poster who believes there are infinite
| opportunities for your skills and that your skills are
| infinitely accretive. Odd.
|
| Perhaps you are this magical being I can't imagine exists.
| In the meantime, and regardless, irregardless even, facts
| are: a whole bunch of people submitted prior art that
| helped us defeat a patent troll that was a net drain on
| society. As if, mission matters more than money in some
| cases. Many cases? Most cases? All cases?
|
| I wish you luck rationally optimizing your time. If you
| figure that out, being the market maker probably will prove
| more lucrative than being a participant. But, I'm getting
| ahead of myself. Hope you find lots and lots of
| opportunities for you to... search Google? Good work if you
| can find it.
| abduhl wrote:
| The poster claimed to be a ex patent examiner. Most USPTO
| examiners aren't lawyers, they're people with technical
| degrees and most of them are there because they couldn't
| make it in industry right out of school and are trying to
| bulk up their resume before trying to pivot.
|
| Otherwise I agree with your snark.
| njbooher wrote:
| I found this comment funny. Have an upvote.
|
| But finding a critical security issue on Cloudflare in
| 2020 while doing testing for one of your customers, and
| then learning what the bounty for breaking that large of
| a chunk of the internet was, was still disappointing.
|
| It's nice to see that it's gone up since then. But your
| company isn't the literary Robin Hood.
| Ecco wrote:
| > Personally, I value my own time well above my job's
| hourly rate
|
| Would you mind elaborating? Because I would argue that, by
| engaging daily with your employer in a trade of your time
| for money, you value your time _exactly_ your job's hourly
| rate.
| btrettel wrote:
| Sure: My willingness to work more hours decreases as the
| number of hours I work increases. My marginal hourly rate
| could be viewed as the amount of money I require to work
| an additional hour. My employer pays an effective hourly
| rate. If I worked more hours, the effective hourly rate
| would be higher.
| tripzilch wrote:
| Regardless of whether your employer is a patent troll, or
| not.
| eastdakota wrote:
| It'll be back when we get sued by a troll again. We'll get
| as many submissions. We'll kill another troll. We'll pay
| another round of bounties. We'll not pay patent search
| agents like you. And life will go on.
|
| Don't worry. Your job is safe. Most firms are too scared to
| engage in our strategy.
| btrettel wrote:
| Good luck.
|
| And for what it's worth, I'm not an attorney, and I
| haven't worked in patents since leaving the USPTO.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I was a "technical advisor" in Google's patent lit dep't.
| Searching prior art was my favorite thing to do, but not
| the whole job by any means.
|
| (If you're wondering: my _least_ favorite task was
| finding the sections of code that supposedly infringed
| someone 's patent, and then getting the PM's approval to
| turn it over to the other side. They can't actually say
| No, but they can be a PITA.)
|
| I killed this patent:
|
| https://searchengineland.com/google-maps-might-be-banned-
| in-...
|
| after many, many people failed to find the prior art that
| I found. It's only easy once someone tells you.
|
| Interestingly, now I can't find it! Maybe they took it
| down. It WAS the first result on scholar.google.com if
| you searched "client-server maps." This is the same
| project:
|
| https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20040006300/downloads
| /20...
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Your former role Google must have many great stories and
| experiences. Did you ever blog about it? I am sure HN
| crowd would love to read and discuss!
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Well, legal matters are a different kettle of fish, as it
| were. They tend to be a little touchy about what you say
| in public.
| TheDong wrote:
| [flagged]
| mistercheph wrote:
| You'll be receiving a bill from me soon for me giving you
| my time to read and respond to this remark.
| dang wrote:
| It's against the site guidelines to post like that, so
| please don't.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| chmod775 wrote:
| > I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate
|
| And you can do with your own time whatever you want.
|
| If you want to go to the beach, you go the beach, and you
| wouldn't expect the beach to pay you for the privilege.
|
| If you want to fight patent trolls...
| kortilla wrote:
| Wait until you find out how much open source contributors
| get paid. Haven't you ever worked with people passionate
| about something?
| tripzilch wrote:
| Honestly you sound like someone who would as easily try to
| stop one patent troll only to help another one, depending
| who pays you most.
| bawolff wrote:
| This is no different than security bug bounties. The pay
| out for those are generally way way below industry rates.
|
| The reason they are succesful is because they signal to
| people that the person on the other side actually cares
| about the report somewhat. If they are paying for it, even
| just a little, they are unlikely to immediately throw your
| report in the garbage or threaten to sue you. Its not
| really about the money.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yeah. This sort of thing isn't about it being a job. It's
| a thank you for letting them know you stumbled on
| something they might be interested in and that you can
| expect a friendly reception in telling them about it.
| You're not being paid for the stumbling on, but for
| taking the time to tell them what you stumbled on.
| hluska wrote:
| I'm perfectly willing to spend some time in an area I enjoy
| to make the world better for other entrepreneurs. If you
| always need money to use your talents, that's saying an
| awful lot about you. And if you feel to keep ripping on
| someone else's program that does achieve good, well that
| says even more.
| winternewt wrote:
| The people who do this value making the world a better
| place. I find the blatant selfishness and arrogance of your
| comment offensive.
| pg_bot wrote:
| It seems like it worked out quite well for Cloudflare. You
| typically only increase bounties if you aren't seeing the
| results you want.
| dsjoerg wrote:
| There is an aspect of collective contribution to a collective
| good here. Patent trolls impose costs on everyone, not just
| Cloudflare. Making life difficult, expensive and unprofitable
| for patent trolls benefits everyone, not just Cloudflare. I
| expect that many of these people didn't see themselves as
| helping Cloudflare, but the community of everyone who might be
| targeted by patent trolls.
| eastdakota wrote:
| The fascinating thing for me about this comment, and why I find
| myself weirdly obsessing over it, is how wrong it is about
| human nature and why we do things. There's a small set of
| things we get paid for. There are a lot of other things we do,
| and even derive value from, that we don't get paid anything
| for. Does that mean they have no value? Absolutely not. Every
| job I've taken is not the one that, on paper, I'd make the most
| from. Every term sheet I've accepted didn't have the highest
| implied market cap. Am I an idiot? Perhaps. But it's worked
| out. Lots of reasons people do things. Sometimes it's about
| money. But those tend to be the most boring. Certainly in the
| short/medium term. I used to think missions were bullshit. Now
| I can't imagine how you could ever possibly run a company
| without one.
|
| PS - we killed a patent troll. A bunch of you helped. How cool
| is that??! Thank you.
| btrettel wrote:
| I think you're extrapolating a lot from my comment that
| wasn't intended.
|
| You should try searching for prior art some time to get an
| idea about why I'm not happy about the payment being low.
| Patent examining's a real grind, and by far the hardest job
| I've ever done. It's boring and extremely time consuming. I
| doubt many people do it for pleasure or a higher calling.
|
| If some people want to volunteer to find invalidating prior
| art, more power to them. I won't be joining them, though.
| costco wrote:
| This comment is an example of why people are hesitant to
| publicly do good things. If a company donates to open source
| and writes a blog post about it, but it's not "enough," then
| they get a bunch of hate. If they never donated to open source
| in the first place, then there'd be no hate. Likewise, I've
| never heard of a company paying random people on the Internet
| to help fight patent trolls, yet Cloudflare did, won,
| neutralized the patents, and it's still not enough.
| cryptonym wrote:
| The capitalistic view is that a company low-balled folks with
| knowledge to win a case.
|
| Both views are valid. It mostly depends on the intent of the
| company and you can't know that for sure. As their interest
| in that program is quite obvious, it's understandable that
| some people interpret this in two ways.
|
| Now it's not like they forced people into that program. You
| are free to not participate.
| tripzilch wrote:
| OP is not being genuine, this is their real motivation:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41734018
| btrettel wrote:
| Thanks. I upvoted your comment because it's a valid point
| that I had not considered that was stated without aggression.
| Many of the other comments here strike me as particularly
| aggressive or making false assumptions about what I believe
| and who I am.
| goric wrote:
| There's an interesting blog post[0] that calls this concept
| The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics.
|
| [0] (the original no longer loads for me, so here's an
| archive) https://web.archive.org/web/20230105070226/https://b
| log.jaib...
| scotty79 wrote:
| "I could contribute to open source project that benefits
| millions, but I'm better off writing Java for a one mid sized
| company. I'm struck how corporate funded bounties for OS
| contributions are."
|
| Valid stance to take but not exactly unique. That's just the
| world we are living in.
| mikaeluman wrote:
| Given the result, it seems 125k was a bit too high since they
| got so many submissions so easily.
|
| The market sets the price, regardless of what we personally
| think is "fair".
| benreesman wrote:
| I have this stubborn cognitive bias that CloudFlare is a good
| thing, I think it's because OG hackers from HN started it:
| jgrahamc and that lot are the real deal.
|
| Time and time again it's like: "CloydFlare discovers way to be
| evil that even Google didn't figure out! News at 10."
|
| Dear Jesus, all I want for Hanukah is that fly.io doesn't end
| up like that.
| neelm wrote:
| The payments could increase in the future as this approach
| becomes more successful and the ROI is better understood.
| Before this most companies would give into the trolls. Now
| there may be an increasing incentive to fight back. Few
| companies have the time, capital and governance freedom to do
| so.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Note that this is the kind of reasoning that would also stop
| resources like wikipedia from existing. Why do for free what
| could be done for (good) pay instead? So it feels like you're
| telling people to not participate because a good payday is more
| important than doing good.
|
| That reasoning might work for your dayjob (why put in effort
| that your employer doesn't reward?), but this is not an
| employment situation, that line of reasoning simply does not
| apply to volunteer work: these folks did not put in the work to
| draw a check, they put in the work to combat patent trolling.
| And it worked: _everyone_ who helped won.
|
| But then some folks even won an extra prize without any
| expectation of a reward beyond the one they did it for. How
| nice is that?
| red_admiral wrote:
| Someone messed with the wrong guy.
|
| If you don't mind the language, the first minute of
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLLt9bnRdlE comes to mind for how
| to deal with incompetent trolls. Comedy gold.
| abetancort wrote:
| Hum... Doesn't clouldfare have patents of their own? Don't they
| enforce them? Did they turn them to the public domain? You have
| to love hypocrites.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I don't know, do they?
|
| There's an important difference between patenting something
| that you've invented and built, and a patent troll which has
| done neither.
| abetancort wrote:
| The patent troll buys patents from inventors and then spend
| money enforcing it. Not much different from Cloudfare paying
| salaries to the inventors to become the patent holders and
| then enforcing it against third-parties.
|
| Tech patents exist because companies like Clouldflare want to
| because they make money with them (suing people). If
| companies like Cloudfare did want all tech patents to be
| gone, they would be gone and no patent troll would be able to
| do anything about.
|
| And they try lure you with $5.000 to do the work to get them
| off the hook? They are cheap and bunch hypocrites.
| sophacles wrote:
| Do you have any evidence of Cloudflare suing people for
| violating their patents. Seems like you'd be able to back
| up this claim since it's a core component of your argument.
|
| Also, your reasoning seems to leave out a world of
| possibilities for why someone would hold a patent - its
| worth looking up the thinking around defensive patent
| portfolios.
|
| These exist for a few reasons.... patents might be
| strategically filed to:
|
| * have prior art on the record to keep a market open...
| e.g. preventing a competitor from monopolizing a space.
|
| * have patents available for counter-suit against
| competitors suing over patent violation of some bit of tech
| that uses both.
|
| * impress investors
|
| * provide recognition to employees. At least in the US
| patents are filed by individuals, and the rights of the
| patent are then assigned to the company. Granted patents
| usually come with bonuses, as well as a nice resume padding
| that helps the engineers involved get higher salaries in
| the future.
| mnemotronic wrote:
| Agreed. Tech companies with patents might be more
| interested in licensing their technology to others for a
| fee.
| sophacles wrote:
| > Doesn't clouldfare have patents of their own?
|
| Looks like it. Not all patents are the same - sometimes a
| patent is erroneously granted for something that is not a novel
| invention. The judge and jury ruled that the patents involved
| in this case were in that category... and therefore invalid
| patents.
|
| There is no hypocrisy in holding patents (presumably ones you
| believe are valid) while pointing out that some other patents
| are invalid. I don't understand how this could equate to
| hypocrisy in any scenario short of the patent holder declaring
| all patents except theirs must be invalid on the principle that
| all patents are bad.
|
| > Don't they enforce them?
|
| Feel free to prove me wrong, but I've never seen anything about
| Cloudflare going after people for patent violations. I believe
| they subscribe to the modern tech patent strategy of having a
| big patent portfolio that only really gets used as part of a
| counter-suit if someone sues them for patent infringement.
|
| Additionally, I presume Cloudflare's patents are related to the
| tech they develop and sell, which is categorically and
| qualitatively different than a law firm that does literally
| nothing of value buying up old patents and suing everyone who
| has ever used a word that also is present in the patent.
|
| Given that the usage, purpose, and means of obtaining a patent
| are different between cloudflare and the troll - I don't
| understand how a hypocrisy claim can be leveled here... it
| defies all reason and logic to do so.
| bithavoc wrote:
| Thank you Cloudflare (there, I said it for you)
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| patent trolls have a special place in hell, next to the boiler
| room
| mnemotronic wrote:
| _inside_ the boiler
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Good on ya!
|
| _> the Western District of Texas against patent trolls_
|
| That means they had _really_ good lawyers.
|
| I had a friend that lived in that area, many moons ago.
|
| He showed me a few of their local newspapers. They were _filled_
| with stories about "plucky innovators," fighting against
| "corporate vested interests."
|
| It seems they have a fairly well-prepped jury pool, thereabouts.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| It used to be the _Eastern_ District of Texas, with Justice
| Rodney Gilstrap. I never went to Marshall or Tyler, but I knew
| a lot of people who did. They 're small towns.
|
| I don't know when it shifted to the _Western_ District. Waco is
| not nearly as rural as East Texas; it 's halfway between Dallas
| and Austin.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm not that familiar with the area. I know that he said the
| nearest large town was Dallas.
|
| Those papers were a hoot, though...
| robterrell wrote:
| It's thanks to Judge Albright:
| https://www2.law.temple.edu/10q/how-the-west-became-the-
| east...
|
| Plaintiffs file in Waco to get Albright -- if they filed in
| Austin, they wouldn't get him. Then they make a motion to
| move it to Austin, which he grants if he can based on
| schedules, and if it can move there, he still presides over
| it.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Great, thanks. Taking over from Judge Gilstrap the Darth
| Vader role.
| bilater wrote:
| Good news! There should be a rule that you have to use a patent
| in X years (much less than the lifetime) so its harder to do this
| behavior of hoarding a patent.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| There is a rule that you have to build the thing that you
| patent. Most of the time this sort of trolling happens, a
| company that built the thing went bankrupt, possibly due to the
| infringement (but not in this case).
| xp84 wrote:
| Can you explain/cite? I wasn't aware of this requirement.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| "Reduction to practice" is the requirement. You have to
| either build the thing or describe it in enough detail that
| proves that you have built the thing.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > Sable agreed to pay Cloudflare $225,000, ... and to dedicate
| its patents to the public, ensuring that Sable can never again
| assert them against another company.
|
| Makes me wonder if Cloudflare could have sued to "life the
| corporate veil" and go after the people who owned / operated the
| company. (IE, sue them so they loose their homes.)
|
| Also makes me wonder if this is in the playbook the next time a
| patent troll comes sniffing around.
|
| Somewhat related: In MA, to fight NIMBY-ism, we passed a law that
| people suing new housing developments can be forced to put up a
| deposit, without requiring proof that the case has merit. I
| wonder if a similar law could help with patent trolls: IE, making
| it easier that the plantiff put up a deposit when suing for
| violating their patent.
| mnemotronic wrote:
| That payout to Cloudflare seems really, really low, considering
| the claims postulated by sable ip. I think $225M would be a
| more convincing way of de-incentivizing patent trolls.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Piercing the corporate veil usually only happens when there's
| both criminal malfeasance involved and personal resources are
| intermingled with the company's so that individual and
| corporate actions are largely indistinguishable. Sable might
| have been a fetid pond of rancid scum, but they were still a
| legal operation.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| The excerpts from the Borchers testimony are a riot.
|
| > The responsible business people in this business actually sit
| down and talk to folks before they sue them, fair?
|
| > Fair.
|
| > And you don't do that, do you, sir?
|
| > No.
|
| I'm not a fan of Cloudflare in general. I think "Browser
| Integrity Check" is banal malware, the McAfee of the Web 2.0 era.
| But this? I _love_ this. Settling with a patent troll out of
| court is cowardly.
| Spivak wrote:
| But in the settlement they got to ask for something the court
| can't grant them. Cloudflare could have settled in court and
| got more money but this is better, no?
| anentropic wrote:
| I think parent comment is referring to the other companies
| before Cloudflare who settled out of court with Sable, not
| Cloudflare who just destroyed them in court.
| eob wrote:
| A Project Jengo grant for using Agents/LLMs to identify prior art
| could be a fantastic experiment..
| breck wrote:
| Thank you cloudflare! Fighting patents is god's^god work.
|
| Patents are poison. Patenting your invention is like poisoning
| your children. Never do it.
|
| We need to abolish these things.
|
| They were a great way to build a centralized public library of
| all new inventions in the early days of the Union at no cost to
| the government, but now are purely a drag on innovation and
| society and create horrible incentives that lead to things like
| the Opioid crisis.
|
| ^god feel free to find/replace this with nature/universe/humanity
| etc.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Kudos to Cloudflare. Patent trolls are parasites. The sooner they
| are all put out of business, the better.
| silexia wrote:
| Please please please banish the patent system already. It is
| solely used by corrupt lawyers to persecute and rob successful
| entrepreneurs.
| epolanski wrote:
| This is a very bad take.
|
| Patents most important goal is to protect entrepreneurs and the
| resources they spend in R&D and to promote entrepreneurship and
| innovation.
|
| Imagine spending millions on developing, say, a new method to
| produce something at 1/10th a cost.
|
| Now imagine a world without patents, where competitors can just
| copy your process.
|
| Who's gonna invest and innovate?
|
| Apply that to everything from batteries to telecom from
| anything healthcare to car engines, etc.
|
| Without patents we would not have the same technological
| evolution.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| We seriously need patent reform. I propose all patents should
| require a prototype to be demonstrated that embodies all claims
| in the patent.
| gleenn wrote:
| While noble, the immediate strategy with that is that
| prototypes can be overwhelming expensive in time and money to
| produce. Patents are supposed to protect inventors, but if
| that's the bar then right out the gate you are favoring the
| corporate behemoths who have the resources and can then just
| snatch the idea and weasle out the not-so-resource laden
| inventor. This is the type of thing where there seems like
| there should be easy solutions to the problems but a little
| nuance reveals that these things are very lucrative and some
| level of corporate apparatus will find a way to abuse the
| system and reap potentially hefty winning at the expense of the
| actual people coming up with stuff.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| Would a better approach be to limit the amount of damages
| that can be claimed to some multiple of whatever the patent
| generates in revenue?
|
| A patent that's only sitting in a war chest and not being
| used to actually enrich the owner would be able to claim
| damages of zero if somebody else was found to be infringing
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| No, inventions that are never produced have no value and do
| not need protection. For most things prototypes are cheap and
| production is expensive. The patent system already gives you
| a provisional year if you're not quite ready but want to
| stake a claim.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| I get why it doesn't immediately need a prototype (I feel
| like there's a pretty obvious situation where someone has an
| idea and needs funding but wouldn't get funding without a
| patent). I don't get what the benefit is of _never_ requiring
| one
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| People with ideas should be allowed to obstruct others that
| also have ideas but also the means to implement them. The
| world is improved by new inventions, not new theoretical
| inventions. The intent of the patent system is increase
| commerce and benefit the public.
| nashashmi wrote:
| You know, something far less intensive would be if any patent
| was used in an official lawsuit, it would have to be added to
| the record of the patent.
|
| This way the corp suing first and asking questions later would
| have disclose everyone it has sued. It would also open the door
| for many many disputes and ripples.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Lawsuits are public and so are patents.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| Exactly, patents used to be for inventors. Now they're for
| "idea men" MBAs that spitball some bullshit idea with the half-
| listened-to assistance of a couple tech people.
|
| I feel like there are so many patents in the pool that are just
| companies waiting for a technology to be actually invented by a
| clever engineer - but bc the company had the "idea" they have
| the rights to it. At that point we may as well automate it by
| having an LLM spit out ideas en masse.
| zoom6628 wrote:
| Would love to see results of all such prior-art research work
| going to EFF and patent offices to build a database for troll-
| crushing by anybody who needs it. Once refutation is made much
| easier and far less expensive then is much harder for trolls to
| operate.
| ggm wrote:
| Are patent trolls a uniquely American disease or do they just
| thrive in a patent rich environment which America is?
|
| I don't recall any famous European patent trolling cases.
| robertclaus wrote:
| I would love more details on how the case transitioned to the
| counter-suit. I feel like going from Cloudflare owing millions to
| dissolving all the troll's patents was more complex than the
| article implies.
| scotty79 wrote:
| It's amazing that they got them to admit, "yup, we are patent
| trolls, nothing we do is reasonable, suing people is our entire
| business, you got us, we are giving our patents so we can't do
| this again".
| jb1991 wrote:
| This is a small win for a company, but one giant win for mankind.
| khafra wrote:
| Lotta proposed solutions to the patent troll problem in this
| comment section, and they all have bad unintended consequences.
| So here's mine:
|
| Institute a new tax on rent-seeking. Tax rent-seekers for close
| to 100% of the value they extract (basically a version of
| Georgism generalized to everything, instead of just real estate).
|
| This would require basically a second IRS, and they would
| occasionally get things wrong and stifle value-producing
| businesses, but if it was at all effective it would be a net
| benefit to the economy instead of a net drag on it, and it could
| easily pull in enough revenue to let us eliminate income tax.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Ok, and what do you define as rent-seeking?
| khafra wrote:
| Wikipedia: growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the
| social or political environment without creating new wealth.
|
| Obviously, we have to also tax people who are free-riding on
| the social or political manipulations of others--not every
| real estate owner profiting from a 5x increase in property
| value was actually involved in NIMBY political actions, and
| not every patent troll worked toward creating judicial
| conditions conducive to their trolling.
| saagarjha wrote:
| No, you misunderstood. What do you define as rent-seeking,
| _in a way that can be enforced_? Clearly everyone hates
| patent trolls. But even here it is hard to come up with
| rules that affect them but not "legitimate investors" or
| whatever. Yes, everyone wants the evil to be punished. But
| how are you to decide who they are?
| khafra wrote:
| Yes, that's why we need a new 80,000 person agency to
| work out the details of enforcement.
|
| It's not like it's hard to pick out many, many instances
| of this. Licensing requirement for hairdressers? Rent-
| seeking. Blocking the demolition of an abandoned gas
| station for high-rise construction? Rent-seeking.
| Longshoremen prohibiting automation of ports? You'd
| better believe that's a rent-seeking.
|
| Will there be edge cases and mistakes? Of course. But
| there'll be an incredible economic surplus from which to
| compensate any such victims, with all the progress
| enabled by removing the rent-seekers.
| samuelec wrote:
| Today the world is a better place.
|
| Thank you!
| RantyDave wrote:
| Can someone explain what a "line card" is that a network card
| isn't?
| thrance wrote:
| Kudos to Cloudflare. The mere existence of patent trolls should
| be enough to see how sick our current intellectual properties and
| copyright laws are.
| bartread wrote:
| Yeah, hats off to them. That was a great read, and I certainly
| appreciate their efforts to give these kinds of "businesses"
| the absolute kicking they deserve.
|
| _Somebody_ or _some organisation_ had to start standing up to
| patent trolls for the situation to change and kudos to
| Cloudflare for choosing to be that organisation. Hopefully it
| will encourage others to do likewise.
| barfingclouds wrote:
| I think companies small and large should pay for an insurance
| that will obliterate patent trolls with legal fees. They
| often win by bullying individual small companies. But if
| there's a collective response then maybe they can't get so
| far?
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Lawsuit insurance is a thing for companies. But the
| policies probably only pay if you take the cheaper option
| of settling.
| tmtvl wrote:
| Is there a list of the patents being dedicated to the public
| somewhere? I would love to know if there's anything useful among
| them.
| mattferderer wrote:
| Congratulations to Cloudflare! Stepping up as the Newegg of the
| 2020s! Proud to be a customer.
| SideQuark wrote:
| > We do this by asking the public to help identify prior art that
| can invalidate any of the patents that a troll holds
|
| It's easy to split patents into separate companies for lawsuits,
| so it's harder or impossible to find these other patents.
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