
Pushback Derails Company That Thrived on Patent Lawsuits - seibelj
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pushback-derails-company-that-thrived-on-patent-lawsuits-11544972671
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reitzensteinm
The "inventor" hasn't stopped, this year filing this junk patent for
monitoring appliances, which you couldn't take a stroll through the Arduino
community without tripping over a piece of prior art for.

Hey Martin Kelley Jones - fuck you. Get a real job.

[https://patents.justia.com/patent/20180285834](https://patents.justia.com/patent/20180285834)

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neotek
I just don't understand how the US patent system works, if you can even use
that word in relation to such a fundamentally broken thing.

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raverbashing
Are we supposed to feel sorry?

I have more sympathy for drug dealers than patent trolls.

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rjmunro
I think we're supposed to be celebrating. That was my reaction to the
headline. It's just one troll of many, but it's a great start.

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dcsommer
It would be interesting to introduce a stipulation that patents are enforcable
only if the owners of the patent are doing meaningful R&D in the area related
to the patent. As I understand it, the original purpose of patents is to
encourage innovation. If no innovation is being done, the patent should have
no power.

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abraae
I can't even imagine how one would legally define the concept of "meaningful
r&d". Since many SV companies started out literally in a garage, it would be a
very low barrier to clear.

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todd8
Yes, I think the problem isn’t patenting things without R&D but is patenting
things that aren’t really novel, are obvious to someone skilled in the field,
or are ideas where there is already existing prior art.

While an employee at IBM we were instructed to submit ideas to our IP lawyers
whenever they were novel and of possible commercial importance. A number of my
ideas were patented, these were generally important ideas IBM wanted to
protect, some were published to establish that IBM had already invented the
idea to prevent subsequent inventors from preventing IBM from using the idea,
and some were so outside of IBM’s business that they chose not to protect
them.

My point was that sometimes I would think of things that were closely related
to my work (e.g. cookies), sometimes they were unrelated to a project I was
waiting on but occurred to me because I was working in an area (low latency
network encryption by using counter mode encryption), and sometimes I just saw
a problem at work and thought of a novel solution (security cameras with
fisheye optics and software dewarping of distorted image).

In some cases I wasn’t doing R&D in the area, but the ideas were still
original and not obvious and I believe they deserved patents or at least
publication in IBM’s Invention disclosure journal to prevent other subsequent
inventors from blocking IBM from using an idea with a bogus patent.

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neurotech1
Non-Paywall: [https://outline.com/N9tBpS](https://outline.com/N9tBpS)

