
My Brush With a Patent Troll - ivancdg
http://jacquesmattheij.com/my-brush-with-a-patent-troll
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davyjones
"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve
it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be
legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years
ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying."

\- John Carmack

~~~
tomjen3
It would not be a problem if lawyers wouldn't take the case.

So the question is, how do we make sure lawyers don't want to? (without going
to jail).

~~~
Chris_Newton
_So the question is, how do we make sure lawyers don't want to? (without going
to jail)._

Don’t get caught. ;-)

But seriously, there only seems to be one answer that is likely to work in
practice: change the risk/reward structure so that patent trolling isn’t
profitable any more.

One obvious approach would be making fewer things subject to patent protection
in the first place. You could explicitly exclude whole categories like
software or business method parents, assuming you could define them clearly
enough. You could raise the general bar for granting/defending patents in
terms of originality and non-obviousness. You could leave the standards the
same in principle but apply more robust checking for prior art and/or a more
thorough consultation to determine obviousness before awarding a patent. Each
of these has costs in different places: principally, the legislature, the
courts, and the patent office, respectively.

Another approach would be to look at the types and magnitudes of consequences
that result if you lose a patent case, either by being found to infringe
someone else’s patent or by claiming that someone infringes your patent and
failing to win the case. For example, what if the remedies available to
someone who owned a patent but who was not actively working to exploit that
patent in some reasonable way themselves were made dramatically less than the
remedies available to someone who was using the patent system “properly” to
secure exclusive rights while they worked hard to exploit a real invention?
What if there were a meaningful cost to bringing a patent case and losing not
just because the court invalidated your original patent but also because the
court actively determined that the original patent had been [some legal
specification of “obviously abusing the system”], a kind of patent case
analogy for dismissing with prejudice?

~~~
luriel
The simplest solution is to abolish patents, the government has no business
going around handing out monopolies.

~~~
mogrim
So you spend millions (or billions, even) on research, then someone can just
come along and copy that work? Where's my incentive to do all that R&D?

~~~
mbell
Who said you have to release your method? If what you found through 'R&D' can
be quickly reproduced through reverse engineering it's highly unlikely it was
complex to figure out. On the other hand if your development is complex, and
requires a great deal of time and effort to reverse engineer then your R&D has
paid for itself by giving you a dramatic lead in time to market. If a company
can't win the market with such a lead they don't really deserve protection.
Lets also not forget copyright still exists to protect exact copies of the
ultimate product.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Drugs are very easy to reverse engineer and it would kind of defeat the point
if you created them and then didn't release them.

You have drugs at one end of the spectrum and software and business processes
at the other. There is a huge cost associated with medical research due to the
inherit complexity of the human body and the requirements governments put on
proper testing. Any patent solution has to address that problem as well.

(And, yes, drug companies are doing a horrible job at doing real research, but
that doesn't alter the substance of the argument.)

~~~
moultano
Fine. Make patents a side effect of the FDA's requirements rather than
infecting every other industry with it as well.

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ZeroGravitas
Has anyone got a theory as to why video and video streaming seem particularly
prone to patent trolls? A few years ago people might have accepted the answer
that "they're really complicated", but I think we all accept now that patents
are pretty much BS. So there must be some other incidental business reason why
so many people went and filed patents on these ideas. Because Hollywood has
lots of money and a reliance on video but no tech understanding maybe?

~~~
Tipzntrix
My best answer is...Youtube blew up. The market for it went through the roof,
anyone's posting videos all over the internet, and obviously the trolls
weren't using their patent to make money themselves, they were using it to
ride on the backs of the real developers.

~~~
tisme
Your best answer doesn't hold water. YouTube was started in 2005, which means
it was founded _after_ the first round of these lawsuits had started. These
patents are about live content, Youtube was about stored content.

~~~
Tipzntrix
I didn't read up on the patent, and you are mostly right with regards to
credit card processing and video chat, but streaming media isn't always live.
Were there quite as many of these lawsuits in the first round?

Honestly, the porn industry was always making large sums of money in this type
of field, so perhaps Youtube was a little short-sighted. For a more general
statement, they started the lawsuits when it became economically viable to,
i.e. the companies using the "infringing" patented methods made enough money
to sue for / strike a license deal.

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a-priori
So I had an idea the other day for a patent reform: property tax on patents.

As long as a company wants to keep the monopoly rights over a patented
invention, they are taxed a percentage of the patent's market value each year.
They can choose either to pay that tax or sell the patent to someone else.

The government would offer to buy any patent for its market value, using tax
revenue gathered from other patents, in doing so putting the invention into
the public domain.

This would discourage companies from building large 'defensive' patent
portfolios, since they'd be expensive to maintain. It works for the 'lone
inventor' scenario too, since the market value of a new, untried invention
would be low.

Once a patent's value is proven by developing the patent, its value will rise.
At some point, the benefit derived from the patent's monopoly rights will no
longer be worth the cost, and the rational thing to do is sell the invention.

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easy_rider
This guy literally "saved" GeoCities hah. (dutch)
[http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/64140/nederlander-redt-
geocities....](http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/64140/nederlander-redt-
geocities.html)

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macchina
I can see allowing a patent on software to the extent the invention
incorporates a truly novel and interdependent physical component. But plain
software patents are, for the most part, bogus and ought to be outright
eliminated. There is no dearth of software innovation, and the litigation is
twice as expensive as development.

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denzil_correa
The Stack Exchange "Ask Patents" sound a very good idea for such cases. People
can be more aware like the OP.

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shasta
Just to clarify, the _idea_ of video in the browser wasn't novel. Your
implementation was novel and might even have been the first instance of the
general idea, but the only way you could claim such an obvious idea as novel
would be to have invented the browser.

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Tipzntrix
I'm glad we have such staunch defenders here and at the head of the Patent
Office. This is nice to read, and Ask Patents is a great concept that perhaps
you can be a part of.

