I’ll give a contrary view point to most “patent trolls”.
I’m an inventor (100+ Issued patents), I develop POCs and concepts well beyond my ability to productionize. That’s not to say I couldnt create a product, just that I don’t have the resources. However, I do have the resources to develop novel techniques. Does that mean I didn’t invent the process- no, I did invent a new process. I just didn’t build them into a product.
You know what?
Apple is also inventing things and has a plethora of patents. Further, I 100% guarantee they did a patent search and knew of this patent prior to releasing their product(s).
While I don’t think patent trolling is necessarily fair, I don’t think saying “poor old Apple” for having to pay for someone else’s invention is fair either.
Do I think patent law needs reform? Yes. Right after copyright, which can be extended decades/a century after publication. That being said, this is the game. Play by the rules while you’re in it.
You dont have to publish them, keep them secret !! go sell your work as a secret if your work is so important, why do you have to publish it and then litigate anyone else who comes up with a similar techniques.
> You dont have to publish them, keep them secret !! go sell your work as a secret if your work is so important, why do you have to publish it and then litigate anyone else who comes up with a similar techniques.
Because if you simply keep it secret then the people who patented it after they independently came up with it can sue YOU!
The lesser evil is to put it into the public domain; then no one can patent it and no one can sue you either.
There’s a lot of hate in this thread, but this is the gist.
When you use a concept you have to patent it today. It’s unfortunate, but it’s reality. You can ignore patents out there, and later they will sue you (if your successful). And take a slice of your revenue.
If you have a lot of patents (like the big players). You then cross license and you’re good.
Do I think patent law needs reform, absolutely. It’s insane. Do I think you have to play the game - yes or you’re equally insane.
So why not do that? You're just creating minefields for people actually improving things. You won't get sued for having a shower thought and not doing anything with it.
I can't judge a lot of them, but a few from familiar territory are basically spam - shower thoughts turned into long technical descriptions. For example https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200137020A1/en is a joke which should've never been granted.
I had a look at the link. I do not really understand what it does (I work in IT, many years as a sysadmin) but it suspiciously looks like my code on a day I thought I had a revolutionary idea.
Then a few weeks later I have to look at it again and try to rediscover that revolutionary idea while the family is waiting for the lights to work again.
It's basically: query the database for the list of nodes, then tell the LB which of those nodes you want to send traffic to. Something you come up with in 5min if you ever need it.
Debugging I guess? If you have more logic in your LB/routing, you may want to process all of it as usual, but skip the random selection part and talk to a specific server for a single request. Or it could be used for pull-style monitoring over the same LB as traffic (GET /stats/i-0001234). Or some weird cluster selection... like HP uses numbers in the domain, for example www8.hp.com
A lot look like typical patent spam along the lines of "like X but in the cloud" or "like X but with AI"
"Automatically scaling neural networks based on load" [0] is one such example. Load balancing and scaling is nothing new. Doing it when there's a neural network as the application involved doesn't seem novel. Every flavor of software application shouldn't warrant its own patent for scaling out the computational resources involved, at least not when the supposedly novel method is so basic, but dressed up in neural network jargon. It doesn't even do that in all places. From the patent: "Allocate Processors -> receive load information from the processors -> adjust the number of processors based on the load information."
This is exactly the sort of patent I would expect a patent troll to buy up and then go after anyone (as long as they have money) that does any sort of automatic load balancing or resource scaling. Awful.
Then this one [1] is, quite literally, authenticating a user... but at an ATM machine. Ridiculous.
They aren't all this bad, but a lot of them are. However I'll note one that seems to have a least a little merit: [2] Using IR or temperature changes in keypads to obfuscate ATM pin input. (stealing PINs via thermal imagine is aparantly a real thing)
I think the legal terms may be throwing a bit of a loop. But what I can say is this is now deployed in several contexts by multiple companies (which weren’t when we submitted).
Is it “spam”, I guess you can call it what ever you want. But you’re missing the nuanced problem.
Say as a company A you never submit a patent. Companies B, C, D, E, etc... All patent a portion of your applications before they are deployed or even after their deployed (but the patent is public).
They can then sue you. Each company for the aspects you violated.
Imagine that ten fold. You need (if your a decent target), patents you can cross license. Do I think it’s good? No I don’t. Can I reasonably argue you need to patent as a corporation - yes. I also support patent and copyright reform, but I can still understand the need to protect ourselves in the meantime.
Yes, I understand that companies no longer have much choice but to amass an arsenal of patents like this to deter suits being brought against them.
The issue I took up in my comment was that you seemed to be defending this process to some extent, so I appreciate you clarifying your point of view to mean you were only defending the necessity of companies to engage in this sort of stockpiling of patents. It's not, from a less subjective viewpoint, rational: It is a net drain on the economy and innovation. However, when you find yourself in a crazy situation that you can't significantly alter, the rational response is often something that is itself irrational.
I often think of war as the prime example of this... It's insane that the US dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. Heck, it's insane that such weapons were developed to begin with. And year the entire broader context was insane. Fighting a more conventional war against Japan would have been even more crazy, costing more lives and prolonging the war even longer. It's an appropriate metaphor to call the crazy patent situation "patent wars". (It's also part of why I like things like the study of optimal strategies in iterated prisoner dilemmas... it gives a framework for how to think about rational decision making under irrational conditions.)
> Using IR or temperature changes in keypads to obfuscate ATM pin input.
A friend of mine described to me this exact idea over four years ago — well before the linked patent was issued. Does he have grounds to overturn that patent!?
It wouldn't count as prior art for the purpose of invalidating the patent unless his idea was in some way identifiable during a reasonable search for prior art. From a legal perspective, prior art is usually interpreted as the available information about the thing being patented. If your friend told you about it over drinks at a bar, that's not prior art. For that matter, trade secrets for even very old things aren't prior art either because the information is not available. If your friend wrote a blog post that hit the mainstream media, or at least the front page of HN, it gets to be a bit of a grey area.
Worse: anyone whose employer thinks they have an idea may own a patent. There's an application on my name that I refused to sign and provided prior art instead. But corps gonna corp.
Every software company in the world violates dozens to thousands of patents. If we all properly “played by the rules,” we’d be paralyzed by patents. No software could exist without a patent licensing team (internal or external), the overheads of which would make many ventures not worthwhile to pursue. Often you’d need to pay twice or more for the same concept, because most patents are vague and overlap with others. The combined patent licensing fees & terms would be crippling.
Software businesses (and others) currently exist at the mercy of patent-rights holders. As soon as they grow fat enough, the ROI on suing them makes it worthwhile. The case of PMC vs YouTube is a representative example.
The US patent system, as it is now, does not make the world a better place. It stifles innovation, where it should be fostering it.
Copyright, on the other hand, is much harder to violate. A software company can do business with much less fear of unknowingly breaching copyright. The copyright discussion is sufficiently different and unrelated to the patent discussion that raising it as an argument seems a little whataboutery.
Fully agree. It's a total mess and it needs a major reform.
It's also a by-design unfair system only for the rich - as those with ideas (especially in 3rd world countries) don't have the resources to file for patents. It really makes my blood boil.
I’m an inventor (100+ Issued patents), I develop POCs and concepts well beyond my ability to productionize. That’s not to say I couldnt create a product, just that I don’t have the resources. However, I do have the resources to develop novel techniques. Does that mean I didn’t invent the process- no, I did invent a new process. I just didn’t build them into a product.
You know what?
Apple is also inventing things and has a plethora of patents. Further, I 100% guarantee they did a patent search and knew of this patent prior to releasing their product(s).
While I don’t think patent trolling is necessarily fair, I don’t think saying “poor old Apple” for having to pay for someone else’s invention is fair either.
Do I think patent law needs reform? Yes. Right after copyright, which can be extended decades/a century after publication. That being said, this is the game. Play by the rules while you’re in it.