
A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit - kynthelig
https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-lawsuit-patent/
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kilburn
I am a bit surprised that most comments here focus on whether the guy's
genuine or not.

What surprised me, in a bad way, is that to challenge a patent you have to
have 6k USD to throw away plus the expertise and time (which the article
estimates at 60k USD).

IMHO, if the patent ends up overturned, the patent holder should be liable for
those costs. In fact, I can't think of _any_ reason why it shouldn't be that
way. Can you?

~~~
acomjean
Why is the US Patent Office not liable for these obviously bad patent grants?

I think this patent mess ends when the Patent Office isn't self funded and
thus doesn't have the perverse incentive to grant as many patents as possible.

~~~
ric2b
If the patent office is liable it can still be self-funded and not have an
incentive to grant as many patents as it can. Make the liability some multiple
of what they charge for the filling and there you go. Vary the multiple as
needed to increase/decrease how careful you want them to be (leading to less
patent grants overall)

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throwawayyx96
So Waymo was trying (and succeeding) to patent a basic electronic circuits
designs that has existed for decades. This is not surprising at all as the
grandiose claims of innovation coming out of SV, perpetuated by unscrupulous
and mostly clueless tech news writers who don't understand the technology
they're writing about, haven't had any substance behind them for a long while.
The USPTO should be embarrassed as well for rubber stamping these applications
coming from big companies.

~~~
sobani
Doesn't the USPTO basically rubber stamp every patent claim that is written
properly?

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dougb
Makes me wonder if Travis has a connection to Eric through Akamai. Eric's
company, Speedera, was also acquired by Akamai in 2005. Travis's company,
RedSwoosh, was acquired by Akamai in 2007.

~~~
ajross
I'm thinking the same thing. I mean... this whole article just smells off.
It's a press hit about one patent claiming that somehow this invalidates the
Waymo case in a dispute that is fundamentally about trade secrets anyway. I
mean, he found prior art on a LIDAR patent. Good. But... why do we care?

~~~
golfer
Wired fell for this guy's story. This feels incredibly fishy. A random guy
feels sorry for Uber, the lovable plucky underdog of all companies... and
invests lots of time and $6K to invalidate patents?

It just doesn't compute. There must be a tie between this guy and someone at
Uber. Or it's VC backers.

~~~
asabjorn
Why would it benefit Uber or its backers to hire him unofficially instead of
hiring experts directly?

It seems like he was able to make a solid case for invalidating the patent,
and hiring experts to investigate patent claims is pretty standard in patent
lawsuits. It makes me wonder why Uber didn't hire such experts, or if they did
and this guy beat them to the punch.

~~~
rhino369
You don’t have to invalidate the patents at the USPTO. You can argue
invalidity in court. Uber almost certainly looked for prior art.

And in most cases uber wouldn’t use ex parte re-examine. They’d do an inter
partes review, which would them to stay in the proceeding and argue for
invalidity.

~~~
asabjorn
What is the difference between inter partes review and ex parte re-examine?

~~~
rhino369
The biggest difference is ex parte re-exam doesn't allow the requester to
participate. It's just the patent owner and the examiners. If the patent owner
makes an incorrect statement to try to keep the patent there is nothing you
can do. An IPR is a full hearing on the validity. With evidence, depositions,
briefing, and oral arguments.

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matt4077
Waymo has already dismissed the patent claims in its initial lawsuit, after
getting serious pushback on it from the judge over the last year.

See, for example Footnote 2 on page 2 of
[http://www.almcms.com/contrib/content/uploads/documents/1/Wa...](http://www.almcms.com/contrib/content/uploads/documents/1/Waymo-v.-Uber.Alsup-
order-on-SJ-1.pdf?et=editorial&bu=Law&cn=20171117&src=EMC-
Email&pt=Skilled%20in%20the%20Art):

 _Defendants also moved for summary judgment of noninfringement of Waymo’s
United States Patent No. 9,368,936, but Waymo’s dismissal of its patent claim
moots that part of the motion_

~~~
Buge
Yes, that's what the article says. The article says Waymo dismissed their last
patent claims after they heard that this guy was contesting them.

~~~
matt4077
Ah, you're right. But I'm pretty sure I read some extremely
sceptical/dismissive comments by judge Alsup months ago, so I'd hesitate to
infer causality.

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aeleos
I don't really understand why this guy would feel like he needed to use a lot
of his own time and $6000 to try and help Uber. In the article it says that he
felt like it was a larger competitor attacking a larger competitor, but its
not like Uber is some small plucky startup. With revenue in the billions, its
not like they couldn't even afford millions in legal fees easily. Or is it
that its not helping Uber, but fighting against what he feels are predatory
practices from Alphabet?

~~~
asabjorn
When a lawsuit without merit took your startup from success to a below-
valuation firesale, any similar situation might feel personal to you and it
must feel good to do something about it.

~~~
aeleos
I would understand if it was a small small startup like his that was in
trouble, but even if Uber got in trouble for violating the patents, its still
just research for developing self-driving cars that isn't critical to their
day to day business. I am not asking why bother helping a company in a similar
situation, but why bother helping a company that didn't really need helping?

~~~
jlgaddis
There are many people who believe that this trial is very important to the
survival of Uber. If they lose -- or otherwise can't develop self-driving cars
-- they are 100% permanently screwed.

They are burning through way too much money and it's simply not sustainable
long term. If they can bring self-driving cars to market -- allowing them to
not have to pay drivers -- they'll be able to survive and may even do quite
well.

~~~
Baeocystin
Serious question- what is it that Uber does that requires such a burn rate?
They've offloaded fleet costs on to the people that drive for them. Their
mobile client apps don't need to do much. Whatever they need to run server-
side isn't going to be rocket surgery, either.

(I understand that trying to develop self-driving cars is going to be a huge
R&D expense. I'm talking about their day-to-day operational costs.)

~~~
raiyu
The largest cost will be in sales and marketing. They offer large incentives
to get drivers to sign up, such as offering cash for becoming an Uber driver.
They also want to provide the best price possible to consumers, so that
sometimes that means selling below cost, or at least selling below the cost
when all sales and marketing expenses are included.

Growing so quickly in a short period of time there is also typically some
level of over staffing as well as generally not being 100% diligent with use
of funds.

There was an article before how they were spending over $100MM with an ad
agency only to realize the numbers were inflated and eventually dropping them,
but that is just one example of ineffective spend.

That's not to imply that they are 50% ineffective, but even being 10%
ineffective when budgets are in the billions adds up.

The thought process is that the cost of switching between providers is very
low when it comes to Uber/Lyft, when the cost of switching is low to consumers
you want to establish your dominance in that market as rapidly as possible
otherwise if you move slowly, then a competitor can steal market share away
from you.

If there are any network effects to market penetration then that begins to
create a bit of a moat. So if you think about the availability of cars/drivers
at any time of the day to meet the demand, then having a large marketshare is
beneficial to getting a ride for a customer quickly. That couple with
marketing and lowering the cost of the ride as much as possible to establish
the market is where the majority of that money goes.

~~~
Baeocystin
You raise a good point about how the cost of switching on the consumer side
being low implies that establishing a dominant mindshare becomes that much
more important. Thanks for the answer.

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JoeAltmaier
In my experience, patent lawyers just keep writing claims until they feel they
cover enough to be likely something novel in there. Not a lot of expertise on
anybody's part. Lots of software patents in particular wander around making
tiny claims for bits and pieces of the system, probably in the hope that
something will stick. Not a fan of the process.

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thisisit
Is auto playing embedded video is becoming the new norm?

I opened the link on iPad and the video on the page auto plays but on mute.
Anyone else having this problem?

~~~
Deimorz
It's absolutely the new norm. Most news sites have an autoplaying video on
almost every article now.

Sometimes the video will even follow you down the page as you scroll. Even
worse, sometimes the video isn't even about the same story. I guess they just
desperately need to show you a video even if they don't have a very relevant
one.

It's terrible, and yet another reason to block almost everything by default
with something like uMatrix.

~~~
stickfigure
I thought I was the last holdout, but I finally added a Chrome plugin that
disables javascript on a domain-by-domain basis.

At this point I have JS disabled for pretty much every single news-related
site - cnn, nytimes, bloomberg, sfgate, wsj, salon, etc... and dozens of less
notable ones. It's _incredible_ how much more usable these websites are
without JS. No autoplay, no popups, no "CPU goes to 100% and scrolling takes
5s to respond". And usually it disables the paywall.

These sites are quite literally training their audience to disable Javascript.

~~~
jlgaddis
OT: WRT CNN, you might prefer "CNN Lite" [0]. I certainly do. I can't even
stand to view their home page anymore.

[0]: [https://lite.cnn.io/](https://lite.cnn.io/)

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StreamBright
This is epic. Just shows that now even the patent office has the resources to
understand the work submitted to them. I am wondering if could automate this
and flag all the patents that are granted by error.

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dsjoerg
Reminds me of the Hulk Hogan situation

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eXpl0it3r
Or just send an email to the Uber lawyers.

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frenchie14
> He then wrote a $6,000 personal check for the reexamination fee... “It’s
> definitely not a drop in the bucket for me,” he says.

> Swildens tells me from his home in Los Altos Hills, near Mountain View.

I can't help but feel that he's not being totally genuine here

~~~
saagarjha
> Swildens ended up selling Speedera at a discount to Akamai for $130 million

You’re not the only one.

~~~
asabjorn
I think we are getting stuck on his smallest investment. Even for a middle
class person spending the time to research and write a 101-page challenge of
the patent far outweighs investing $6k.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Most middle class people can find the time to dedicate to things that are
important to them (even if those things are a 100 patent challenge). Wringing
$6k out of your budget is a different story.

~~~
asabjorn
From personal experience it was different. When I did my PhD and was very low
income I did invest more than 6k in projects, and writing the 120 page thesis
was way harder even after my research was done.

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jsmthrowaway
Nice. Lawyers _love_ ex parte and amicus curveballs.

Wasn’t there some kind of prior art project set up to coordinate a large part
of work like this? I seem to recall a big splash about crowdsourcing citations
of prior art a few years ago, and now I’m wondering how this process and that
are related. Was someone filing to challenge patents once enough people
claimed prior art through that system or something?

Seems strange to make it so expensive to call bullshit, particularly since it
sounds like the examiner erred on something so basic as the presence of an
inductor.

~~~
cma
It is cheap/free to do it when it is first filed (pre-issuance submission),
it's only more expensive after it is granted.

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halter73
Does the cheap/free pre-issuance submission really matter when you have to
spend thousands of dollars on a reexamination fee whether or not the patent
gets invalidated or modified in the end?

I get that this is to help cover the USPTO's reexamination costs. But whatever
the reason, it's still really expensive to call bullshit. And as the
grandparent comment laments, this is a real shame given the low quality of
many patents that are granted.

In this case a third party did the job the USPTO should have done when the
patent was first filed by actually reading the patents citations and finding
that the new patent wasn't a novel innovation on the cited patent.

Wouldn't it be nice if the USPTO paid the third party his $6000 back if they
determine that he's right the patent should have never been granted in the
first place?

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cma
Pre-issuance submission goes to the examiner before it is granted. You don't
have to pay a reexamination fee I don't think? Any link to that?

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ebbv
I smell more bullshit here than when I drive past my local farms on
fertilizing day.

~~~
defen
Travis resigned June 20. Technically at that point he's not part of Uber,
right? Maybe he tipped this guy off and then he has 40 days to prepare the re-
exam docs. Even if it's true, though, I don't know nearly enough about the
subject to know why or whether it would matter if a "3rd party" challenged the
patent instead of Uber, though.

