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Saying that "patent troll" is synonymous with "NPE" is more restrictive than its common usage; for example, wikipedia defines it as "a person or company that at

Saying that "patent troll" is synonymous with "NPE" is more restrictive than its common usage; for example, wikipedia defines it as "a person or company that attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or contribution to the prior art". If you take a minute to read the patent in question (https://www.google.com/patents/US8683296 https://www.google.com/patents/US8683296), it's like a caricature of "what's wrong with the patent system". It describes using matrix blocking and vector instructions to do the matrix mulitplication step of (e.g.) Reed-Solomon. It's a very old matrix multiplication speedup. If a particular technique for a problem isn't novel, then using that technique when you encounter that problem in a particular domain shouldn't count as novel. By contrast, the Usenix paper described an actual mechanism of implementing the arithmetic using vector instructions for table lookups, something the StreamScale patent never did. After reading the StreamScale patent, I came away with no new insights on implementing ECC. After reading the Usenix paper, I did. The arguments you make for why StreamScale's things don't make any sense to me. It seems like they are: - No one's fought the patent legally - The author was threatened into issuing a notice with a super weak statement that StreamScale is sometimes faster than his one-man-shop academic code. - One of the authors of the paper (though not the software in question as far as I can tell) works for a StreamScale competitor? Not really sure why that was relevant. But of course no one wants to get into an expensive legal battle merely to advance the public good in this instance; no one is incentivized to. The fact that no one has doesn't mean that the patent is a good thing. Of course the author can be threatened into a non-apology apology with vague wording. That he did so doesn't mean all of those statements should be accepted uncritically. A lot of times with patents, copyrights, trademarks, we get into a weird sort of cognitive dissonance. We (society) create a new type of property right (here, ownership of IP) in order to incentive people to engage in some type of behavior (here, inventing things). It's then easy to forget that the property right isn't necessarily the thing society wants to protect; it's a means to and end. But in cases like these, it's plainly obvious that the patent is stifling rather than encouraging innovation. The world is a worse place with Professor Plank threatened into removing his code.

CalChris 10y ago
I didn't say troll => NPE. But I will say that NPE => troll and StreamScale isn't an NPE. You might be able to say they're a troll via some other approach, just not NPE. The University of Tennessee Knoxville isn't a one man shop. The paper even has three authors. What I'm freaking amazed about is that the UofT intellectual property office didn't send back a registered letter saying: You don't fuck with them. You fuck with us. As for the Wikipedia definition, they also go on to say: Patent troll is currently a controversial term, susceptible to numerous definitions, none of which are considered satisfactory from the perspective of understanding how patent trolls should be treated in law. > If a particular technique for a problem isn't novel Ok, if you're going to attack the patent on novelty grounds, you have an easy case to make: produce an example from before the priority date Obviousness is harder; you can argue obviousness both ways. But I think the Usenix paper (6 years after Intel's announcement) makes an obviousness attack harder and not easier.
- davidtgoldblatt 10y ago
  I don't totally follow the conclusion you're trying to draw w.r.t. the definition of a patent troll; clearly there's a lot of people who think that filing and then attempting to enforce a bogus patent applies (though people differ in which patents they think are bogus). Is this some sort of prescriptivist/descriptivist thing? > The University of Tennessee Knoxville isn't a one man shop. I mean, sure; but so what? Clearly they were unable or unwilling to fight this battle. Maybe you're right that they should have better protected Plank and society from StreamScale, but I think it makes more sense to put the blame on StreamScale for engaging in this behavior, and our broken patent for encouraging it. Likewise, the paper has multiple authors, but that doesn't really affect the argument at all. > Ok, if you're going to attack the patent on novelty grounds, you have an easy case to make I feel like you're deliberately missing the point. Where do you think I'll make this case? I'm certainly not going to spend tens of thousands of dollars fighting the good fight in court. "Technique" in the quote referred to the use of blocking and vector instructions for matrix multiplication. Lots of matrix libraries had such techniques well before the priority date of the patent. The patent is on using those existing techniques for matrix multiplication, when that matrix multiplication happens to be a part of an error correcting code. I don't think those sorts of patents should exist. (The "matrix multiplication" here is tricky because it's multiplication in a Galois field, but that's not what the patent claims cover).

CalChris 10y ago

I didn't say troll => NPE. But I will say that NPE => troll and StreamScale isn't an NPE. You might be able to say they're a troll via some other approach, just not NPE. The University of Tennessee Knoxville isn't a one man shop. The paper even has three authors. What I'm freaking amazed about is that the UofT intellectual property office didn't send back a registered letter saying: You don't fuck with them. You fuck with us. As for the Wikipedia definition, they also go on to say: Patent troll is currently a controversial term, susceptible to numerous definitions, none of which are considered satisfactory from the perspective of understanding how patent trolls should be treated in law. > If a particular technique for a problem isn't novel Ok, if you're going to attack the patent on novelty grounds, you have an easy case to make: produce an example from before the priority date Obviousness is harder; you can argue obviousness both ways. But I think the Usenix paper (6 years after Intel's announcement) makes an obviousness attack harder and not easier.

davidtgoldblatt 10y ago
I don't totally follow the conclusion you're trying to draw w.r.t. the definition of a patent troll; clearly there's a lot of people who think that filing and then attempting to enforce a bogus patent applies (though people differ in which patents they think are bogus). Is this some sort of prescriptivist/descriptivist thing? > The University of Tennessee Knoxville isn't a one man shop. I mean, sure; but so what? Clearly they were unable or unwilling to fight this battle. Maybe you're right that they should have better protected Plank and society from StreamScale, but I think it makes more sense to put the blame on StreamScale for engaging in this behavior, and our broken patent for encouraging it. Likewise, the paper has multiple authors, but that doesn't really affect the argument at all. > Ok, if you're going to attack the patent on novelty grounds, you have an easy case to make I feel like you're deliberately missing the point. Where do you think I'll make this case? I'm certainly not going to spend tens of thousands of dollars fighting the good fight in court. "Technique" in the quote referred to the use of blocking and vector instructions for matrix multiplication. Lots of matrix libraries had such techniques well before the priority date of the patent. The patent is on using those existing techniques for matrix multiplication, when that matrix multiplication happens to be a part of an error correcting code. I don't think those sorts of patents should exist. (The "matrix multiplication" here is tricky because it's multiplication in a Galois field, but that's not what the patent claims cover).