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Vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology
- slivym 8y agoThis is so typical in technology now, large corporations patenting everything they can possibly think of, including things that they've blatantly copied. It absolutely doesn't surprise me that a technology as fundamentally simple and foundational as LIDAR is covered by a load of bullshit patents. As the article notes what this is really about is using your patents to litigate competitors either to slow their progress or force them into expensive fights that drain their resources. Frankly, patent reform is yet another case where the large players have built themselves a moat.
- megaman8 8y agoUsing Patents to patent trivial stuff and then getting a monopoly from the government as reward is just rent seeking evil and wrong on so many levels.
- hirundo 8y agoWhat if patent applications required a fee that was added to a bounty fund to reward people that could demonstrate prior art during the examination period? Engineers like Swildens would then be more than interested bystanders, but have skin in the game and therefore incentive to do what he did just out of interest. Bounty claims could also require an accompanying fee, to be refunded if the claim succeeds. The fees would discourage low quality patent applications and bounty claims.
- Skunkleton 8y agoI don't think this would work. If the fee was too high, then smaller companies and individuals would be locked out of patents. If the fee is too low, then it doesn't matter and large companies will continue business as usual.
- rfrey 8y agoMake the bounty $10000 * sqrt(# patents owned by applicant)
- Skunkleton 8y agoThat isn't a bad idea. That would disincentivize patenting everything under the sun too.
- Retric 8y agoTrolls will often have one patent per company all owned by a 2nd company. That's really hard to stop.
- franga2000 8y agoHow about making it travel up the tree? Find the "root" company, then count the patents of all of the companies directly or indirectly under them. (yes, I like graph theory. Is it that obvious?) Use that to increase the fee. It would not only make trolling harder, but make it easier for small companies/inventors to have one or two crucial patents, which is what the system was designed for. Of course, as with most things that make sense to me, it would never pass as law.
- true_religion 8y agoNot really. Perversions of the intent of law are easy to stop... just make it clear that the intent is what matters, and judges will force people to declare their corporate heirarchy or be held in contempt of court. No lawyer will play games when intent is more impprtant than the letter, sonce you cam be held in jail for contempt indefinitely based solely on the judges reputation.
- petre 8y agoAlso adjust that $10k with inflation yearly.
- DominikPeters 8y agoThe important part is the payout to people finding prior art, less so the disincentive to file patents that don't hold up. So this could be financed through insurance: patent filers could insure against bounty payments.
- rb808 8y ago> He then spent $6,000 of his own money to launch a formal challenge to 936. Either he has a lot of spare time and money or this isn't the full story.
- tyingq 8y agoIt appears he has lots of spare time and money, and perhaps a grudge about big companies and patents. https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-lawsuit-patent/ https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-lawsuit...
- devy 8y ago> Either he has a lot of spare time and money. He probably has! https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-lawsuit-patent/ https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-lawsuit... And previous discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15875685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15875685
- sgift 8y agotl;dr for those who don't want to read devys link (though you should. Good article): > After a three-year battle in which he spent up to $1000 an hour on lawyers, Swildens ended up selling Speedera at a discount to Akamai for $130 million. He can probably do this a few more times.
- Chyzwar 8y agoEveryone needs a hobby.
- raverbashing 8y agoPeople spend more on cars, fancy PCs and such, I don't think 6k would be hard for someone making, let's say 100k/yr if they were really determined
- sitkack 8y ago
- bigmit37 8y agoThis is really pissing me off as they can essentially patent anything and everything and squash all completion. It’s now an arms race of patents among the tech giants. I remember reading here how Google was patenting neural network layers such as dropout etc.
- ganoushoreilly 8y agoIt is tough for the small guys. It's not uncommon for a patent application to cost you upwards of 30k or so to file which is a definite barrier to entry to start with.
- ohazi 8y ago> describes how a laser diode can be configured to emit pulses of laser light using a circuit that includes an inductor and a gallium nitride transistor. Did they seriously try to patent an oscillator? Galium nitride FET or a vacuum tube, this design is at least 100 years old. WTF.
- vibrolax 8y agoYou can't claim to have invented the oscillator, but you can claim the novel use of an oscillator for a particular application.
- franga2000 8y agoThe very least the courts could do here is make the patent owner pay back the 6000$ the engineer spent on the challenge. Of course, IMO they should get a big fine to go with that too.
- tychomaz 8y ago“Waymo's lidar firing circuit showed current passing along a wire between the circuit and the ground in two directions—something generally deemed impossible. ” It’s almost as if science said, “Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.”’17 The one free miracle was the sudden appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, with all the laws that govern it. Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry