HN Reader

Before I discovered HN (of which I'm on daily), I was a frequent reader of Groklaw[0]- a site primarily devoted to covering the fragile intersection of the technology sector and legal system; where the two are often at odds with one another. We're more than a decade beyond it's voluntary closure after the Snowden revelations and it's left a large void on substantive coverage of these issues. The site was the blog of an anonymous tech reporter named Pamela Jones that did detailed deep-dives into the parties & issues involved in high-profile lawsuits between tech companies, like Apple vs. Samsung on the issue of design patents for rounded corners, over what have often been patents containing broad language that resulted in hindrances to innovation ranging from being unwilling to license to extortion of revenue streams for entire product lines. Part of why I find the technology industry to be continually interesting is its desire to innovate instead of litigate- there needs to be a check on bad faith actors whose goal is capture of a niche through regulatory means instead of fair competition; else we get these cases relegated to the infamous eastern district of Texas which has historically played favor towards non-practicing patent trolls. I'll be submitting my comment and suggest others do the same.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groklaw

The real problem is just that patents are way too long for software. Long patents make sense for things in a slow changing industry. If it takes 10 years in pharma for research and another 5 years to pass trials, then 20 years of protection seems reasonable to recoup the investment. But for software, I'd argue that most patents are granted on things that are pretty obvious, and in many cases, I'd suspect probably writing up the patent takes longer than actually coming up with the idea and implementation. Certainly, if an engineer is churning out multiple patents a year, then I don't think it's likely that they have enough value to society to warrant issuing a patent for.

Let's not even forget the original motivation for patents, which was to increase knowledge sharing so that companies didn't keep their technology secret, and conferring an advantage on companies who chose to share their methods for others to copy and build upon. That's clearly a totally different outcome to when patent trolls are suing people for accidentally infringing a patent they didn't even know existed.

I am surprised this hasn't gotten more attention. I feel like HN used to love nothing more than complaining about patent trolls. Anyway, this article suggestions an action through regulation.gov which, based on the content of the page, seemed worth doing to me.

I submitted a comment on Regulation.gov, and if any of you actually give a shit about tech, I suggest you do it too.

I believe that by now patents have transformed from a tool to protect little guy and encourage research and creativity to a dick wielded by big corps to stall the rest of the world.

If it was up to me I would probably eliminate patent enforcements against small entities completely. If they grow over some certain size then sure, let 2 big gorillas fight each other

Who wants this? Is it just patent troll regulatory capture?

So... If you were a patent troll, you would get a friendly party to file a complaint that you know you will win, then nobody will ever be able to challenge your patent again?

Um, the public comment form lists first and last name as required fields (with address and phone number optional), then at the bottom includes this warning:

"Do not submit personally identifiable information through this form."

Could someone make an LLM that is only trained up to the day before a patent was filed, then ask it to solve the problem at hand.

Hopefully it would come up with the patented idea and thus 'prove' it is obvious and thus not able to be patented. Then you could make different vintage LLMs and basically spam them at trolls to invalidate the patents.

...just a thought from a lurker

The deadline for comments was November 17.

Am I crazy or was there a strategy reason that inter partes review at USPTO was disfavored over trial? Like the legal standards are easier for the patentholder at USPTO or something like that?

I submitted a comment.

And this just after the USPTO gained some good karma for re-examining a bad patent from Nintendo in the Palworld vs Pokemon feud:

https://www.sportskeeda.com/mmo/news-nintendo-vs-palworld-po...

This is critically important and I filed a comment on behalf of my 250 full time employees at Coalition Technologies. We have been harassed by patent trolls and it is a nightmare.

If you want the patent holders to lose, NPEs or otherwise, then you want to fight through litigation and not the incredibly high bar set by the IPR. IPRs are expensive, time consuming and difficult. I've mainly seen them used strategically to encourage the court to grant a stay. Continuing litigation by focusing on invalidity contentions in response to infringement contentions is a better path forward.

A successful IPR will most likely need multiple forms of prior art. Each prior art must cover every independent and dependent claim of the patent in question, either through anticipation or combined obviousness.

Typical infringement contentions will not cover every claim and are therefore easier to defend.

Did you notice that LFP batteries became more prevalent and much cheaper recently? That's because some key patents expired.

The same thing happened with 3D printing a while ago. It only took off after the patents expired.

Patents are a pest. They're just another mechanism to pump money from below to above.

honestly i think the whole patent framework is quite literally ready for the dumpster. the spirit of a patent is quite worthy, but the execution over the years has been pretty piss poor and I think the bad is almost out weighing the good; perhaps we only heard about the bad bits. Surely readers of hacker news can chime in good parts of patent? living off fruits of of your knowledge labour and earning that sweet sweet patent licencing fees into the sunset days of leisure?

Ah, more IP sclerosis. Great.

Thank you EFF.

IPR's are generally used by Big Tech companies and I have no idea how EFF's position could be construed as in the interest of the general public at all.