
How broken is the USPTO: How is this a patent - scabarott
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8392585B1/en?oq=US8392585B1
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bm3719
Sometimes I think we'd be better off just doing away with patents altogether
and letting corporations be responsible for guarding their own secrets.
There's lots of downsides to that approach, of course, but the amount of harm
that patents do seems to far outweigh them.

At least in tech, corporations generally don't patent their secret sauce
anyway. They surround their critical trade secrets with a screen of patents,
building up a defense (or offense) against rivals.

~~~
mcphage
> and letting corporations be responsible for guarding their own secrets

The point of patents is that we don’t _want_ corporations guarding trade
secrets, we want them to make their secrets public so that others can benefit
from them. And in exchange, they get some time where nobody else can use it.

Getting rid of patents will just lead to trade secrets getting lost, like so
many have been through history.

~~~
dantheman
There are still trade secrets all over the place. Patents are an idea that has
through evidence been proven to be more harmful than good. The rate of
horsepower in the world exploded once the original steam engine patents
expired.

The case for patents needs to be made empirically -- lets see where they
actually drove innovation. In general you will see massive innovation as soon
as a patent expires.

~~~
tofof
> The rate of horsepower in the world exploded once the original steam engine
> patents expired.

An invention exploding throughout the world upon the expiry of a patent is the
_primary feature_ of patents, not evidence that patents are bad. The whole
point of patents is that after a brief monopoly period, the entire invention -
detailed in the patent to a level sufficient to recreate it from scratch -
becomes the public's to use.

Your example is evidence of patents successfully driving progress everywhere
and working as intended.

I'd much rather things protected by trade secrets had been protected by patent
instead. If that was the case, for example, I could buy coca-cola for the
price of the store brand. But I can't, because the formulas are still secret
and not held by the public, even after more than 100 years. The formula being
secret serves only to benefit an entrenched multinational corporation and
_reduce_ competition - rewarding neither the public nor the original inventor.

~~~
dantheman
There are normally many people on the verge of a discovery. The rewards should
go to those who are able to effectively leverage their technology into useful
products. Not artificially retard progress so that the 'first' person can milk
the rewards.

Patents have a long history of abuse and very little evidence that they drive
innovation. The case has to be made that their benefit outweighs their harm.
My argument is that it doesn't.

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vegetish
It has surely gone through quite a paper trail. "Final rejection" dated
13.07.2012, but that wasn't the end of it:

[https://register.epo.org/ipfwretrieve?apn=US.201113244836.A&...](https://register.epo.org/ipfwretrieve?apn=US.201113244836.A&lng=en)

~~~
oneplane
I wonder if the people causing and writing that nonsense lead a happy life
knowing they are just creating nonsense. Who does this kind of stuff? People
who hate their job? Or hate themselves?

~~~
maxxxxx
A lot of them probably have nice cars and big houses. There are plenty of
people who do BS in business and have happy lifes.

~~~
oneplane
As far as I know, a nice car and a big house does very little to increase your
happiness. Once you meet nominal needs of living, all the 'extra' stuff does
very little to make you 'more' happy. It also usually comes in balance with
the work or other parts of your existence you have to perform which usually
comes with a higher price, offsetting the 'extra' stuff you think you have,
because you don't just get 'extra' of the 'nice' parts of life, also 'extra'
of the bad parts.

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pnw_hazor
Um. If the critics of this patent knew how to read claims they would not be
concerned.

This is a garbage patent that has claims that are extremely narrow.

The attorneys that signed the last amendment introduced an extremely limiting
amendment that makes the patent essentially useless. The examiner recognized
this and allowed it.

The attorneys that prosecuted this case have life science/chem/pharma
backgrounds and used claim language common in life science cases. Such claim
language is never used in computer/software patents because it is so
narrowing.

However, not having read the spec, narrow claims may be all that that are
available. Though a good patent prosecutor with experience in
computer/software arts would never draft them this way.

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anfilt
Uhh, that's basically any application that a network connection is critical to
its function...

Yea, how on earth was this patened. (－‸ლ)

~~~
CamperBob2
This happens because the USPTO has no incentive not to rubber-stamp everything
that comes across their desks. For some time now, their position has been to
accept claims at face value and let the courts (read: the taxpayers) deal with
the fallout.

~~~
daveguy
Except look at vegetish's post. It _was_ rejected as obvious with a notice of
final rejection. And they fought it tooth and nail to get it pushed through
regardless of that rejection.

Hopefully that at least means it will be easy to overturn if they try to
enforce the patent.

~~~
CamperBob2
(Shrug) They had the option to do the right thing and maintain their final
rejection. So why didn't they?

It's hard to escape the conclusion that they just couldn't be bothered.

~~~
anfilt
Agreed. The fact they were allowed to resumbit such a broad patent with
obvious prior art is ridiculous.

~~~
pnw_hazor
They amended the claims which required the examiner to do another search.

As mentioned above, Final Rejection just means you have to pay more money to
continue the patent prosecution. This is called a Request for Continued
Examination. RCEs are common.

Generally, the initial filing fees provide for two rounds of examination -- a
non-final rejection and then a final rejection.

If the applicant re-filed the same claims that were rejected in the final
rejection (w/o amending them), the examiner can issue an immediate final
rejection on a subsequent RCE if he disagrees with the argument the applicant
might have supplied.

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anonIPcoward
There are good insights in this exchange:
[https://register.epo.org/documentView?number=US.201113244836...](https://register.epo.org/documentView?number=US.201113244836.A&documentId=11-7-US++132448360FP1+)

The invention pings both an IP address of a first server, and a URL of a
different server; The patent examiner found an earlier disclosure of very
basic pinging (the document is referred to as "Sinha"); no mention of IP+URL
pinging (at least according to Theranos), or switching network providers as a
result.

You may read this and think how obvious it is to ping both a domain and an IP
address, and switch providers based on that; but unless you can find it in an
earlier reference with this (before Sept 2011), or convince a court it's an
abstract idea ("101" in patent parlance), this is what's patent-worthy
according to present laws..

If you spend 200-800k, this patent can be invalidated _easily_. These patents
get granted because examiners have less than a day to evaluate them, and the
PTO survives off the maintenance fees (it receives _zero_ tax dollars), and
the cost of invalidating them later.

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famil
Arstechnica had a good piece on how patent reform was killed in Congress:

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/how-the-
patent-t...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/how-the-patent-
trolls-won-in-congress/)

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greesil
Not just USPTO, it looks like there's a European grant, as well as others.

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miguelrochefort
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I'm convinced we should get rid of all
patents and copyrights.

I genuinely can't see anything good with artificial scarcity.

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ohiovr
Theranos.. funny stuff

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froogie
I had never heard of Theranos before.

Amazing what people can pull off.

~~~
corerius
I think a patent is only worth something to the extent that it is enforceable.

~~~
froogie
Sorry, I wasnt clear. What I find amazing is not the patent, but the company.
As I understood it, behind the company was the youngest female billionaire,
and turns out it was all a scam all along. Valuation in billions for
essentially vaporware. Poof. All gone.

The same company behind _this_ patent of course.

Its saddening. Like wtf now.

