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A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit
- jsmthrowaway 9y agoNice. 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.
- realityking 9y agoAre you thinking of Ask Patents? https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/09/20/askpatents-com-a-stack-exchange-to-prevent-bad-patents/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/09/20/askpatents-com-a-stack...
- jsmthrowaway 9y agoThat is indeed what I’m thinking of, but for some reason I thought it was something USPTO did. Looks like it’s just Q&A now, too, sadly.
- realityking 9y agoAt the time it was a joint effort between StackExchange, the USPTO and the Google Patent Search team. I just spend a couple of minutes to see when the USPTO gave up but couldn’t find anything. Maybe someone here knows?
- cma 9y agoIt is cheap/free to do it when it is first filed (pre-issuance submission), it's only more expensive after it is granted.
- jsmthrowaway 9y agoAh, that makes more sense. You had your chance, but we granted it.
- halter73 9y agoDoes 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?
- cma 9y agoPre-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?
- dsjoerg 9y agoReminds me of the Hulk Hogan situation
- dougb 9y agoMakes 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 9y agoI'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 9y agoWired 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 9y agoWhy 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.
- frenchie14 9y ago> 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 9y ago> Swildens ended up selling Speedera at a discount to Akamai for $130 million You’re not the only one.
- frenchie14 9y agoWell if he'd sold below valuation (and in the middle of a lawsuit to his prosecutors no less!) it would be plausible that he didn't make out well. But I don't see how one can live in Los Altos Hills without having a lot of wealth. EDIT: The comment below points out that Speedera took $51M in funding
- stevenwoo 9y agoMaybe not in this particular case, but I know someone about that age who grew up about 30 years ago off of Page Mill in the hills and he said their house was at least 20 times less than they are going for now, but sadly for him, his parents had to sell it when his family moved out of the area. This might have been before even 280 was built IIRC.
- CalChris 9y agoTotal funding on Speedera was $51M. So assume a liquidation preference takes at least $51M off the top. He was an engineer and not a founder or an exec. So yeah, I’ll take him at his word. He probably didn’t clear anywhere near a $1M. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/speedera-networks https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/speedera-networks
- frenchie14 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- aeleos 9y agoI 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?
- jay_kyburz 9y agoYeah, I just assume there is more to the story. It's fun to speculate what it might be.
- asabjorn 9y agoWhen 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 9y agoI 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?
- asabjorn 9y agoSelf driving cars is an existential threat to Uber if others have accesss to it while Uber doesn’t, or others have cheaper access. Why don’t you think helping Uber fighting off parent claims without merit would help?
- jlgaddis 9y agoThere 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.
- ebbv 9y agoI smell more bullshit here than when I drive past my local farms on fertilizing day.
- iamthirsty 9y agoYears of doing that killed my smell so I'm surprised you can even smell at all.
- defen 9y agoTravis 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.
- thisisit 9y agoIs 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?
- iamthirsty 9y ago> becoming I've found it already is the new norm.
- Deimorz 9y agoIt'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.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoAlso a good reason to disable autoplay in your browser.
- a3n 9y agoIn Firefox 57, shockwave allows disabling autoplay, but H264's plugin only gives you Always or Never; Ask is there but greyed out. ?
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoSet media.autoplay.enabled to false in about:config.
- stickfigure 9y agoI 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.
- matt4077 9y agoWaymo 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/Waymo-v.-Uber.Alsup-order-on-SJ-1.pdf?et=editorial&bu=Law&cn=20171117&src=EMC-Email&pt=Skilled%20in%20the%20Art http://www.almcms.com/contrib/content/uploads/documents/1/Wa...: 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 9y agoYes, 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 9y agoAh, 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.
- StreamBright 9y agoThis 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.
- kilburn 9y agoI 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?
- JFFalcon 9y agoMaybe because then you could pick on small patents that a competitor isn't really using to hit them for 6k/60k a pop? Of course, that would only work if they have several dodgy patents, so you argue they should just be more careful. Disclaimer: I'm just speculating and know nothing about patent law.
- acomjean 9y agoWhy 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 9y agoIf 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)
- eganist 9y agoUSPTO acts as the gate. If a patent is overturned, in theory the USPTO should be the institution paying for their diligence failure. Up until the patent is issued, all costs are on the applicant. Why should the costs of an error by a regulator also be on the requestor?
- eXpl0it3r 9y agoOr just send an email to the Uber lawyers.
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoIn 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.
- throwawayyx96 9y agoSo 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 9y agoDoesn't the USPTO basically rubber stamp every patent claim that is written properly?