9 ms·

Yahoo: Patent Sell-Off Isn’t a Fire Sale

74 points by steven 10y ago

fhood 10y ago
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 10y ago
  I'm sure Apple and Google lawyers/engineers are reviewing the patent portfolio with things with value and risk.
nailer 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
jacquesm 10y ago
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.
- xyience 10y ago
  What are your thoughts on things like https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement ?
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Has that been tested in court?
  - cyphar 10y ago
    That probably hasn't been tested in court, but even if it has you shouldn't buy into the software patent system. Just make loads of prior work so that your software can be used to destroy other parents.
- bluedevil2k 10y ago
  I'm sure the engineers as Yahoo who actually created these patents got compensated, with the understanding (written though probably not verbally) that the patents were no longer theirs and the buyer could do what they want with them.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    I'm sure they were, and I'm sure they were looking at Yahoo! as their benevolent employer when they did so and never for a second thought that some patent troll might end up owning their work and suing others - more like themselves - in order to make back their 'investment'.
    - Isofarro 10y ago
      During my time working for Yahoo Europe, I refused to patent the ideas I presented in Yahoo's internal hack days. It was retro-actively declared as the way to encourage us to participate in internal HackDays. So I also stopped participating. Today, I'm satisfied I made the right call.
kahnpro 10y ago
Ugh. Does anybody else just feel that patents simply shouldn't be transferable?
- burkaman 10y ago
  Wouldn't that remove one of the major purposes of patents? Right now they provide pretty good motivation to develop something that you don't personally have the ability or desire to commercialize. If you can't sell the patent, you'll either not invent anything, or sit on your inventions for a long time until you feel like starting a business.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    The major purpose of the patent as it is exploited today in the tech world has long surpassed its original purpose. Patents are like weapons-of-mutually-assured-destruction. You engage your patents, I'll engage mine. And so, we cross-license and get on with our merry lives to the detriment of our mutual competitors. This suits large businesses very well. In the 'real' (as in physical) world there are still some good patents issued. But for computer related stuff (and that's what the bulk of Yahoo!'s patents will be about it has been quite a while since I saw a patent that made me think 'good that someone spent the years required in order to come up with this and that their rights are protected with a patent'. I'd suggest a retro-active limitation of patents that do not involve anything physical of 3 years. That should be enough of a head-start and will immediately take care of all these ticking time bombs of patent portfolios in the hands of aging and ailing Leviathans.
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  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.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
AnimalMuppet 10y ago
Please... Betteridge's Law... please be true...
- throwaway60453 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    It was, though. "Will Yahoo's patents go to a troll?" or something close to that.
jack9 10y ago
It's a fire sale. Only the casually ignorant would be convinced otherwise, so what's the point?
briansteffens 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
- richardfontana 10y ago
  Sure, you could acquire a patent and cease paying maintenance fees, or place it under a very broad license or covenant.
robrenaud 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
shmerl 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > There should be some disarmament fund. Get John Oliver on the case. His show released 16 million dollars in medical debt last weekend.
  - cyphar 10y ago
    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?
WalterBright 10y ago
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.
loqi 10y ago
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.

74 points by steven 10y ago

fhood 10y ago

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 10y ago
I'm sure Apple and Google lawyers/engineers are reviewing the patent portfolio with things with value and risk.

nailer 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

jacquesm 10y ago

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.

xyience 10y ago
What are your thoughts on things like https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement ?
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Has that been tested in court?
- cyphar 10y ago
  That probably hasn't been tested in court, but even if it has you shouldn't buy into the software patent system. Just make loads of prior work so that your software can be used to destroy other parents.
bluedevil2k 10y ago
I'm sure the engineers as Yahoo who actually created these patents got compensated, with the understanding (written though probably not verbally) that the patents were no longer theirs and the buyer could do what they want with them.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  I'm sure they were, and I'm sure they were looking at Yahoo! as their benevolent employer when they did so and never for a second thought that some patent troll might end up owning their work and suing others - more like themselves - in order to make back their 'investment'.
  - Isofarro 10y ago
    During my time working for Yahoo Europe, I refused to patent the ideas I presented in Yahoo's internal hack days. It was retro-actively declared as the way to encourage us to participate in internal HackDays. So I also stopped participating. Today, I'm satisfied I made the right call.

kahnpro 10y ago

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

burkaman 10y ago
Wouldn't that remove one of the major purposes of patents? Right now they provide pretty good motivation to develop something that you don't personally have the ability or desire to commercialize. If you can't sell the patent, you'll either not invent anything, or sit on your inventions for a long time until you feel like starting a business.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  The major purpose of the patent as it is exploited today in the tech world has long surpassed its original purpose. Patents are like weapons-of-mutually-assured-destruction. You engage your patents, I'll engage mine. And so, we cross-license and get on with our merry lives to the detriment of our mutual competitors. This suits large businesses very well. In the 'real' (as in physical) world there are still some good patents issued. But for computer related stuff (and that's what the bulk of Yahoo!'s patents will be about it has been quite a while since I saw a patent that made me think 'good that someone spent the years required in order to come up with this and that their rights are protected with a patent'. I'd suggest a retro-active limitation of patents that do not involve anything physical of 3 years. That should be enough of a head-start and will immediately take care of all these ticking time bombs of patent portfolios in the hands of aging and ailing Leviathans.
cloudjacker 10y ago
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.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

AnimalMuppet 10y ago

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

throwaway60453 10y ago
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 10y ago
  It was, though. "Will Yahoo's patents go to a troll?" or something close to that.

jack9 10y ago

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

briansteffens 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.
richardfontana 10y ago
Sure, you could acquire a patent and cease paying maintenance fees, or place it under a very broad license or covenant.

robrenaud 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

shmerl 10y ago

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 10y ago
> There should be some disarmament fund. Get John Oliver on the case. His show released 16 million dollars in medical debt last weekend.
- cyphar 10y ago
  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?

WalterBright 10y ago

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.

loqi 10y ago

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.