
Vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology - moh_maya
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/lone-engineer-spanks-waymo-in-lidar-patent-battle/
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slivym
This is so typical in technology now, large corporations patenting everything
they can possibly think of, including things that they've blatantly copied. It
absolutely doesn't surprise me that a technology as fundamentally simple and
foundational as LIDAR is covered by a load of bullshit patents. As the article
notes what this is really about is using your patents to litigate competitors
either to slow their progress or force them into expensive fights that drain
their resources. Frankly, patent reform is yet another case where the large
players have built themselves a moat.

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megaman8
Using Patents to patent trivial stuff and then getting a monopoly from the
government as reward is just rent seeking evil and wrong on so many levels.

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hirundo
What if patent applications required a fee that was added to a bounty fund to
reward people that could demonstrate prior art during the examination period?
Engineers like Swildens would then be more than interested bystanders, but
have skin in the game and therefore incentive to do what he did just out of
interest.

Bounty claims could also require an accompanying fee, to be refunded if the
claim succeeds. The fees would discourage low quality patent applications and
bounty claims.

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Skunkleton
I don't think this would work. If the fee was too high, then smaller companies
and individuals would be locked out of patents. If the fee is too low, then it
doesn't matter and large companies will continue business as usual.

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rfrey
Make the bounty $10000 * sqrt(# patents owned by applicant)

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Retric
Trolls will often have one patent per company all owned by a 2nd company.
That's really hard to stop.

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franga2000
How about making it travel up the tree? Find the "root" company, then count
the patents of all of the companies directly or indirectly under them. (yes, I
like graph theory. Is it that obvious?) Use that to increase the fee. It would
not only make trolling harder, but make it easier for small
companies/inventors to have one or two crucial patents, which is what the
system was designed for. Of course, as with most things that make sense to me,
it would never pass as law.

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rb808
> He then spent $6,000 of his own money to launch a formal challenge to 936.

Either he has a lot of spare time and money or this isn't the full story.

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devy
> Either he has a lot of spare time and money.

He probably has! [https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-
lawsuit...](https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-lawsuit-
patent/)

And previous discussion on this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15875685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15875685)

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sgift
tl;dr for those who don't want to read devys link (though you should. Good
article):

> After a three-year battle in which he spent up to $1000 an hour on lawyers,
> Swildens ended up selling Speedera at a discount to Akamai for $130 million.

He can probably do this a few more times.

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Chyzwar
Everyone needs a hobby.

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bigmit37
This is really pissing me off as they can essentially patent anything and
everything and squash all completion. It’s now an arms race of patents among
the tech giants.

I remember reading here how Google was patenting neural network layers such as
dropout etc.

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ganoushoreilly
It is tough for the small guys. It's not uncommon for a patent application to
cost you upwards of 30k or so to file which is a definite barrier to entry to
start with.

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tychomaz
“Waymo's lidar firing circuit showed current passing along a wire between the
circuit and the ground in two directions—something generally deemed
impossible. ”

It’s almost as if science said, “Give me one free miracle, and from there the
entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.”’17 The one
free miracle was the sudden appearance of all the matter and energy in the
universe, with all the laws that govern it. Rupert Sheldrake, The Science
Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry

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ohazi
> describes how a laser diode can be configured to emit pulses of laser light
> using a circuit that includes an inductor and a gallium nitride transistor.

Did they seriously try to patent an oscillator? Galium nitride FET or a vacuum
tube, this design is at least 100 years old. WTF.

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vibrolax
You can't claim to have invented the oscillator, but you can claim the novel
use of an oscillator for a particular application.

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franga2000
The very least the courts could do here is make the patent owner pay back the
6000$ the engineer spent on the challenge. Of course, IMO they should get a
big fine to go with that too.

