
Yahoo: Patent Sell-Off Isn’t a Fire Sale - steven
https://medium.com/@stevenlevy/yahoo-our-patent-sell-off-isnt-a-fire-sale-4f3f45db56c#.um7qw2nms
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jacquesm
I posted the wsj article here a few days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11860308](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11860308)

It's obvious that patent trolls are the most likely candidates to buy out this
portfolio, IV would be one of the companies that will try to get a hand on
these.

The good engineers whose brains led to these patents had no way of knowing
that this would happen, but let it be a warning to all the good engineers in
the present whose parent companies are patenting things left, right and center
for defensive purposes only, of course.

~~~
CamperBob2
_The good engineers whose brains led to these patents had no way of knowing
that this would happen_

Being engineers and not morons, _of course_ they knew that this (meaning the
sale of the patents in question) could happen.

But it's an easy thing to get past, when you're the engineer in question. The
"patent bounty" at a typical large company often amounts to a bonus of
multiple thousands of dollars, just for sitting down for a few hours with an
attorney. It's likely that an engineer -- especially a young one -- won't
understand that they're building the intellectual equivalent of a land mine.
Something with one or two good uses and a hundred evil ones. Something that
will probably just lie buried in the sand for 20 years, but that also might
cripple someone or something that they care about. Instead, all the engineer
sees is the extra $$$$ and professional prestige that comes with their name on
a United States Patent.

Source: personal experience.

~~~
ConfuciusSay02
> Of course they knew that this could happen.

> It's likely that an engineer won't understand that they're building the
> intellectual equivalent of a land mine

You're contradicting yourself.

~~~
CamperBob2
_You 're contradicting yourself._

How so? In my own case, I knew that the patent I was helping my company's
attorneys to file was a valuable property that the company would own and
possibly sell. But I didn't contemplate what could happen _after_ such a sale,
once the patent ended up in the hands of a nonpracticing entity.

I was pretty naive about things like that, even though the XOR cursor patent
that eventually helped bring down Commodore was already on the books, and the
good folks at Unisys who bought the LZ77 patent were already running roughshod
over everyone using .GIF image files. All I knew was that I wanted a new road
bike, and the patent committee was only too happy to pay for it.

~~~
gcb0
and they make a very good argument to the kids wanting a new road bike that it
will be a defensive patent. whatever that means.

~~~
CamperBob2
True, but this was so long ago that they didn't even bother. Nobody cared
about the potential ethics issues at the time, because patents were still
largely weapons wielded between corporate superpowers.

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nailer
Note a lot of Yahoo engineers were apparently encouraged to get patents for
'defence only' purposes.

I do not know if these are among those being auctioned.

~~~
jacquesm
It doesn't even matter. In the long run everything that Yahoo owns is destined
for the auction block, if they are selling off their patent portfolio the ship
is well under way to the bottom.

------
robrenaud
And this, my fellow hackers, is why you shouldn't take part in software
patents, even when you see your employer in a very positive light. Ten years
from now, things might be much worse there, and then your wonderful "defensive
patent" is suddenly at an auction to the highest bidder, who might use it as a
weapon to extract wealth from innovators.

~~~
emmab
If they could go to some sort of common holding organization bound by contract
to never sell them and to only use them for defense that seems like it would
resolve this problem.

------
loqi
I am currently facing the grim possibility of a patent with my name on it for
a system that's basically a poor imitation of decades-old technology. (But it
works great with our other poor in-house imitations of decades-old
technology!)

Yahoo's "non" fire sale is a good counterpart to the devil on my shoulder
trying to rationalize away my participation. My job is actually pretty great
otherwise (especially for the town I live in), so I'm stressed as hell at the
prospect of quitting over this. I keep thinking of the Milgram experiment, and
how confident I was when I heard about it that _I_ wouldn't have been part of
the majority that continued shocking a human being to the point of apparent
death. Software patents are an abstract evil by comparison, but now that
there's a part of me saying "yeah it _seems_ bad, but it probably won't result
in any real harm", I can somewhat empathize with that majority.

I don't really have a point to make, this just seemed like a reasonable place
to vent my shame and frustration.

------
fhood
I would really like to see some of the major tech companies step up and make
an example of some of the more prolific patent trolls. Apple and Google should
be making a real effort to make this process more risky as they have cash
reserves deep enough to deal with any of these companies regardless of the
size and the goodwill that these actions would generate would be significant.

~~~
pkaye
I'm sure Apple and Google lawyers/engineers are reviewing the patent portfolio
with things with value and risk.

------
kahnpro
Ugh. Does anybody else just feel that patents simply shouldn't be
transferable?

~~~
cloudjacker
Nah

There is no way that my improvement to the derivatives market would have ever
been worth my time if I couldn't sell the patent to financial institutions.

People that have never had a good idea in their life imagine that patent
holders are making widgets in their woodshed, or have the ability to make said
widget in their woodshed.

But the reality is that there was no way I could ever have commercialized this
in a way that had so few risks, aside from my ability to cough up $12,000 at
the time.

Yeah let me just go recreate the financial derivatives market and lobby
Congress for the rest of my life just so that children on reddit won't call me
a patent troll.

~~~
ori_b
> _There is no way that my improvement to the derivatives market would have
> ever been worth my time if I couldn 't sell the patent to financial
> institutions._

Not even if you could grant them a license, but not ownership?

~~~
cloudjacker
It was an option.

I probably wouldn't have pursued the patent if that was the only option.
Unless the costs to filing patents were also cheaper. Lots of variables that
this simple discussion doesn't consider.

------
shmerl
Horrible. There should be some disarmament fund. I.e. one that buys such
patents and releases them for free, neutralizing their potential danger.

Imagine some state selling a pile of old nuclear weapons to the highest
bidder, no matter who that is...

 _> The best outcome, for Yahoo and all of us, would be for a company like
Google, Microsoft or Facebook to buy the whole shebang. While it might give
one of those already mighty powers even more leverage, those firms are more
likely to retain them as assets in the mutually-assured-destruction game
played by the titans of tech when they consider suits against each other._

MAD analogy doesn't really help. While two power states with nuclear weapons
are in some balance through MAD, states without them are instantly at a
disadvantage. They aren't part of MAD scheme. Same goes for someone small
pitted against such monster as MS. They simply can't defend themselves against
massive patent aggression attacks.

Plus, MS can easily sell those patents to patent trolls which serve as their
privateers with nothing to lose, thus bypassing MAD even against big opponents
(it's like big state backing mercenaries which aren't officially affiliated
with them, but really do their bidding).

So unless someone with good intentions buys these patetns and disarms them, it
will be a problem either way.

~~~
jrockway
> There should be some disarmament fund.

Get John Oliver on the case. His show released 16 million dollars in medical
debt last weekend.

~~~
cyphar
John Oliver has already done a thing on software patents, but I don't think it
resulted in much. Maybe we should email him to ask him to do a follow-up?

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jack9
It's a fire sale. Only the casually ignorant would be convinced otherwise, so
what's the point?

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briansteffens
Not really on topic, but is it possible to acquire a 'defensive' patent? Maybe
by placing a patent into public domain or otherwise promise through some legal
means not to pursue legal action against anyone who would like to use the
patent?

~~~
hurricaneSlider
In the novel Accelerando by Charles Stross one of the main characters creates
hundreds of patents and sends them to an organisation which had as it's
mandate, a responsibility to grant licences to any patents in its portfolio
for free. A similar org would be awesome.

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WalterBright
Edison spent much of his career in the courtroom - suing people who violated
his patents, being sued by others for violating their patents, and being an
expert witness in patent lawsuits.

He also spent much of his career inventing workarounds for other peoples'
patents.

------
AnimalMuppet
Please... Betteridge's Law... please be true...

~~~
throwaway60453
Betteridge's Law applies to questions in the title. I don't see a question
mark at the moment, so it doesn't apply.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
It was, though. "Will Yahoo's patents go to a troll?" or something close to
that.

