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We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won

1675 points by eastdakota 7y ago

antpls 7y ago
Crowdsourced patent troll fight, That needs to happen more often!
wyxuan 7y ago
Wow that’s really interesting, engaging people to find prior art with a bounty. That should be a continued thing, where people can hunt for patents and receive reward for anything used in a case.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  There are a couple of services that do this. I've known about for a little more than half of the decade.
  - infogulch 7y ago
    Nice, care to name them for everyone's benefit?
    - rolltiide 7y ago
      I only recall that there are prior art search engines and have been a viable side gig for at least half a decade Seem to recall Microsoft backing one of them
    - scubbo 7y ago
      Not without a bounty ;)
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - everybodyknows 7y ago
      https://patroll.unifiedpatents.com/contests https://patroll.unifiedpatents.com/contests
egdod 7y ago
I’m a patent attorney. Honestly this is pretty impressive—total scorched earth tactics against ALL of the entity’s assets? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before, and I bet it makes some people think twice.
- mmerlin 7y ago
  Not only their assets, but also their right to practice as lawyers... the founders were reported to bar association in two states for ethics violations... "what safeguards should be put in place to make sure that attorneys who take the oath are held to a standard beyond mere greed or base opportunism" Cloudflare really is making the world a better place in this case, by fighting back against the kinds of legal weasel who exists purely to be a money leech with no benefit to anyone but themselves.
  - vesinisa 7y ago
    Unfortunately, the challenges before the bar associations were apparently not successful. Their wording is careful since "disciplinary proceedings in front of bar associations are generally confidential", but they do remark that "it will take a broader change in orientation by these professional associations" before even obvious patent trolling is considered legal malpractice.
    - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
      We already have barratry laws on the books. Someone just needs to enforce them. Advancing disingenuous arguments in court should be an automatic year's suspension.
      - rayiner 7y ago
        What is a "disingenuous argument?" Is it like reading the phrase "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" to mean something less than that based on a clearly set-off explanatory clause in front? (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) The standard for permissible arguments in court is having a good faith basis in law or fact, or a good faith argument for extending or changing the law. It's not clear to me that's wrong. Fee-splitting with non-lawyers is the bigger issue. That is impermissible for all sorts of good reasons.
phh 7y ago
Reading from afar, it feels like cloudflare gained a lot financially from this crowdsourcing. But I've already suffered from such patent trolls, and I actually think crowdsourcing is a very nice way to fight them. I think it is very interesting economically speaking. By participating into the crowdsource, people are basically selling their memories, not time actually spent on the task. (though I acknowledge it does take some time, even if it's just reading the patents). When to we get wankipatent? (short for wiki-anti-patent of course)
- jetrink 7y ago
  If I could help Cloudflare by remembering prior art, I would do it for free as the satisfaction would be enough. However, they say that they paid over $50,000 to 18 individuals, which works out to almost $3000 per person, so the crowd gained a lot financially as well.
- gyc 7y ago
  The crowdsourcing benefits not just cloudflare but any potential future targets of the patent troll.
- abraae 7y ago
  > When to we get wankipatent? (short for wiki-anti-patent of course) Warning - in some countries this has an unsavory meaning.
  - Spare_account 7y ago
    I think that was the intention
frankharv 7y ago
I like the part where they go to the state bar and try and have them reprimanded. Too bad cloudflare can't comment on those proceedings.
- LanceH 7y ago
  It's almost like lawyers made the rules to protect lawyers.
Reedx 7y ago
This is great. Kudos Cloudflare! Patent trolls really seem like a cartoonish kind of evil. I'm curious if there is any steel man argument for their existence? Do they add any value at all or are they just a pure drain?
- soneil 7y ago
  If a patent is being upheld for the right reasons, it's not a troll. The patent troll is the definition of a bad actor in this arena. There's arguments for and against patents, and especially so software patents - but there's not many arguments for the existence of bad actors.
  - egdod 7y ago
    Patent troll is synonymous with non-practicing entity, according to most people.
    - cbsmith 7y ago
      But even NPE's aren't intrinsically a bad thing. It's just the NPE space is filled with these horrid trolls. Context matters.
      - egdod 7y ago
        Exactly my point.
    - joshuaissac 7y ago
      This is the definition I have seen almost everywhere, but I do not like it. Non-practising entities like ARM and patent-owning universities I would never consider trolls just for being an NPE. On the other hand, even practising entities may engage in troll-like activities, asserting a patent beyond its scope to bankrupt a smaller competitor, because legal costs are not usually awarded in the US for such lawsuits (e.g. Nuance vs Zi). It is just that in a lot of cases, if not most, the troll is a non-practising entity.
- 7y ago
stevehawk 7y ago
Shout out to "Garrett from San Francisco" for making the best of a bad situation and helping to fight a patent troll while homeless.
- nicoboo 7y ago
  I went back to the blog article to read about Garrett. Pretty awesome attitude in this case!
- funkjunky 7y ago
  I'm Garrett. As stated in my quote, I was already in the library all day for the air-conditioning, and thought this would be a fun way to waste some time. My submission was the "Internet based resource retrieval system (No. 8996546)" highlighted in the article. It was honestly shocking how obvious of a patent it was, it basically just described an online yellow pages. I could find one of those before 2004, easy. Internet Archive wayback machine, away! I -really- could have used the winnings back then, (I made my submission ~4 years ago), but hey, it all worked out in the end. I'm an SRE living in SF now, with my own apartment in a nice neighborhood. Still no AC though.
CreepGin 7y ago
Bravo!!! This warms my heart a little. I do wonder though... what's Blackbird's mentality like when they started hitting on big players like Cloudflare? In my limited reading of past patent-troll-related posts on HN, it's almost always about preying on small entities.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  They hit on small entities to build up enough of a war chest to buy enough lawyers to make the big players think that a lawsuit is going to be costly. If the terms offered to the big player are less than the big players think the lawsuit will cost, a lot of big players will just make the economic calculation and pay up.
  - kramerdj 7y ago
    Big players see their share of cases as well, if not more. Settling or licensing the technology will generally be cheaper in the short term than litigating the case.
- magashna 7y ago
  I'm sure you don't hear about a majority of cases because they're settled out of court.
kramerdj 7y ago
Hey everyone, Doug Kramer, Cloudflare GC, here. Happy to answer any questions as we close out this chapter.
- plasma 7y ago
  Hey Doug, All in did cloudflare have to spend a modest amount of its money to retaliate in this way? I think public shaming of the layers involved by name would also be appropriate - bullies often don’t like being called out. Would be keen to hear whether the ethics inquiry had any effect.
  - kramerdj 7y ago
    As we described a bit in a previous post at the end of the litigation -- https://blog.cloudflare.com/winning-the-blackbird-battle/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/winning-the-blackbird-battle/ -- in addition to the money we paid for the crowdsourced bounty, we also had to pay considerably to litigate the case. Even though we won the underlying litigation as quickly and convincingly as possible, we still spent more in legal fees than Blackbird might have been able to recover in damages after trial. That's why settling / licensing will always make more short-term economic sense, and keep trolls alive.
    - nicoburns 7y ago
      Shouldn't blackbird have to cover your legal fees if they lose?
      - alasdair_ 7y ago
        Not in the USA, in general. That’s the core issue - it’s asymmetric warfare.
        nicoburns 7y ago
        Huh. I wonder if this is a significant factor in the US being so litigious in general.
RaceWon 7y ago
> Honestly this is pretty impressive You know what's more impressive: "Matthew Prince is co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare. CloudFlare’s mission is to build a better Internet. Matthew wrote his first computer program at age seven when his mom would sneak him into university computer science courses." Age 7 sitting in on a Uni CS course?! Holy crap
- eastdakota 7y ago
  It was a continuing education class at the University of Utah, so maybe not as impressive, but, I think the more telling point is how cool my mom was/is to give me opportunities like that.
  - ceres 7y ago
    holy shit 'tis him!
  - RaceWon 7y ago
    > It was a continuing education class at the University of Utah, so maybe not as impressive, but, I think the more telling point is how cool my mom was/is to give me opportunities like that. Still mega imo. Yes your mom seems awesome too. Congrats on that victory, sweet strategy!
  - MetalGuru 7y ago
    Yeah, that’s a helluva badass parent.
  - MobileVet 7y ago
    My daughter is six and fairly bright (as much as can be seen with the material she has been exposed to). Continuing Ed or not, I can’t imagine her sitting in a CS course in a year. Wow. And yes, kudos to your mom for providing you that opportunity.
- dang 7y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21448512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21448512.
gesman 7y ago
Patent trolls should be shot on sight. We shouldn't be dealing with that today.
briandear 7y ago
Does Cloudflare now plan to stand up to Google tracking everyone by eliminating the use of Google captcha?
- 1996 7y ago
  best question I've read so far!
- deftnerd 7y ago
  Looks like they're getting closer to using hCaptcha rather than ReCaptcha [1] for the Privacy Pass service, which could be a trial of hCaptcha before rolling it out on all of the verification pages. https://blog.cloudflare.com/supporting-the-latest-version-of-the-privacy-pass-protocol/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/supporting-the-latest-version-of...
  - aitchnyu 7y ago
    Why do they even need a third party captcha implementation? They could roll their own.
    - CodeWriter23 7y ago
      Probably a choice to focus on core competencies.
    - amirhirsch 7y ago
      I work at hCaptcha so I can't speak to any particular arrangements. We provide data labeling services and use the captcha as a means to lower costs for annotated datasets. To that end, we intend to open source most of our captcha stack and would be an obvious choice for any privacy-concerned company rolling their own captcha.
shmerl 7y ago
Patent trolls are racketeers, plain and simple. There should be jail time for it.
spectramax 7y ago
I've worked in China extensively and I feel strong about the following: A) Cloudfare can defend, but a mom-and-pop small business cannot. A startup cannot. B) China can hedge against western bureaucracy and gain unprecedented speed in innovation and new ventures - precisely because of hard pressing and blocking issues such as patent law. C) Even if there were no patent trolls, China can still manage to steal, copy, espionage or fearlessly innovate - why? Because of three things - culture, law and international relations. In my opinion, Patents need to end. Yep, completely get rid of patents. Not shorten it, not amend it, just simply stop taking new applications. Existing patents can be still be active until they expire (or better yet, shorten the expiration date). Ideas are cheap, execution is where companies need to compete. This is not a level playing field for the rest of the nations. China gives no fucks about law and the west is gonna watch China lead the way in exponential progress while we are still playing in the dirt with our little patent litigations. I wonder if people here have felt this before: Get an idea, start building a prototype, demo it to a friend, friend suggests checking google.com/patents, excitement collapses :(
- latchkey 7y ago
  Not just China though, pretty much all of SE Asia. Thanks to the trade wars, manufacturing is spreading more quickly away from China to the surrounding countries where China still has a lot of influence, but US hasn't added tariffs (yet) ... labor is cheap and quality is just as high (or bad, depending on your view of things). If you think the judicial system and 'no fucks' is non-existent in China, try Laos, Cambodia or Vietnam.
  - ouiterestos 7y ago
    And in the past East Asian countries like South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Back in the 70s, Japan had that reputation. Then South Korea and Taiwan had it in the 80s. Now that these countries produce valuable IP, they vigorously support and defend it.
  - spectramax 7y ago
    You're absolutely right. I've audited over 100 suppliers in SE Asia in manufacturing, the kind of things you see is completely, utterly insane. I've been to Pegatron (Apple supplier) to some shitty PCB supplier where the boards are running off the conveyor belt in a huge pile. No other book captures it as well as "What's wrong with China?" by Paul Middler [1]. Dejavu after dejavu as I read through it. It is amazing. I think it is safe to extend argument not just for China, but the entire SE Asia. Hell, some regions in Vietnam smells almost like those PVD coating chemical gas chambers in Guangzhou. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-China-Paul-Midler/dp/1119213711 https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-China-Paul-Midler/dp/1119...
nathcd 7y ago
On the topic of crowdsourcing prior art, I found something interesting from googling around a bit that I wonder if anyone here might know anything about: https://www.uspto.gov/page/roundtable-uspto-use-crowdsourcing-identify-relevant-prior-art-examination-application https://www.uspto.gov/page/roundtable-uspto-use-crowdsourcin... https://www.uspto.gov/patent/initiatives/uspto-led-executive-actions-high-tech-patent-issues https://www.uspto.gov/patent/initiatives/uspto-led-executive... https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/02/20/fact-sheet-executive-actions-answering-president-s-call-strengthen-our-p https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/0... In 2014 there was an executive order "focused on expanding ways for companies, experts, and the general public to help patent examiners, holders, and applicants find relevant “prior art”". (The other executive actions on that archive.gov page look interesting too.) But I can't find any info more recent than the 2014 roundtable that the USPTO held. Does anyone here know anything about this?
- bbanyc 7y ago
  I was an intern at USPTO a few years ago, during my failed attempt to become a patent attorney. What I saw and experienced there was a closed-minded agency with a very narrow bureaucratic focus. The only "prior art" that normally got searched was the database of previously submitted patent applications and issued patents. There was no room for bringing in outside experience or common sense. Search the database, stamp the application "accept" or "reject", move on to the next application, get as many done in the bi-week as possible. This, I realized, is how we got so many garbage patents on well-known, obvious software techniques - if nobody thought software was patentable at the time, they wouldn't have bothered filing a patent application. Years later, when software became patentable, the first vulture to think of filing could snatch up the patent and 20 years of exclusivity even though they didn't invent a thing. Given how hard it is to make any lasting change to organizational culture, not to mention that we're under a different administration now, I expect that absolutely nothing came of this 2014 roundtable and nothing will until somebody really powerful gets burnt.
  - vkou 7y ago
    Powerful people don't get burnt, because they have the resources to fight this in court.
kmcquade 7y ago
> "I'm pretty excited, I've never won a single thing in my life before. And to do it in service of taking down evil patent trolls? This is one of the best days of my life, no joke. I submitted because software patents are garbage and clearly designed to extort money from productive innovators for vague and obvious claims. Also, I was homeless at the time I submitted and was spending all day at the library anyway." — Garrett, San Francisco This guy is a legend.
- funkjunky 7y ago
  Hi
nautilus12 7y ago
Hey cloudflare, why don't you start a venture that productizes this process for smaller companies that can't afford to do this themselves by pooling all the companies that are being targeted by a particular troll together, for any patent troll, not just blackbird.
alasdair_ 7y ago
I still think one of the better ways to handle the patent issue is to charge a property tax of, say, 2 percent of its value per year. The owner gets to declare the value BUT they MUST sell it to the first person willing to pay the claimed value of the patent.
mikenew 7y ago
I, for one, would contribute to an ongoing "Project Jengo" type of thing, especially if it targeted the broader patent troll portfolio. I don't even think it would need a bounty system; just create something where people can submit prior art against a list of patents.
Thorentis 7y ago
Good job to Cloudflare for doing this. But wait, they were giving out thousands of dollars for submitting ... Internet links? How did I miss this? I love searching for obscure things online, and could've made some easy $ with this. Hopefully something like Project Jengo is started again with another patent troll firm.
ponsin 7y ago
As I understand, many tech companies hold onto many broad patents but don't actually enforce them. They do that as a mutual assured destruction tactic. If the competitor sues them for a violation, then the defendant enforces all of their parents against the plaintiff. I know of many companies in the autonomous vehicle field that do that. One of them (I forget who) has a patent they says that if a car on the neighboring land moves close to your lane, then move your car to the far side of your lane.
- 2rsf 7y ago
  A bit outdated but still good: https://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/articles/53157-image/Web-of-Lawsuits.jpg https://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/articles/53157-image/Web... https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fNk8E4vY6LE/W8RDptv2anI/AAAAAAAACog/v88jKVADGxAa_MboZk9_24OHq0PlUh8PgCLcBGAs/s1600/18-10-14%2BSmartphone%2BPatents%2BBattlemap.png https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fNk8E4vY6LE/W8RDptv2anI/AAAAAAAAC...
- Zarel 7y ago
  That only works for other companies, not for patent trolls that are usually holding companies that own patents but don't have any products that could infringe on patents. The company that sued Cloudflare, Blackbird, is one such company: https://www.blackbird-tech.com/about/ https://www.blackbird-tech.com/about/
  - jhloa2 7y ago
    Holy guacamole their website is extremely hypocritical
maddy1512 7y ago
Reminds me of the patent troll episode from Silicon Valley series. Good job CloudFare!
yami2yami 7y ago
Could this be an improvement? 1. Patents must cover only stuff that could be created/used at the time of the filing. 2. Patents are not transferable. 3. Patents that are not licensed and not used within a specified time are automatically released to the public.
- timvdalen 7y ago
  The second point would be very hard to enforce because you could just house the patent within a company and sell the company.
  - pluma 7y ago
    Companies don't innovate, people do. The patent may be filed by a company but the discovery must have been made by one or more human beings. So you might as well argue that it shouldn't be possible for legal entities to hold patents if patents can't be transferred. That said, the obvious flaw with that point in isolation is that it would still be possible to license a non-practicing entity to sue people on your behalf and then have a revenue sharing agreement between the holder and their employer at the time where the employer reimburses the holder for all expenses related to filing and in return receives all licensing revenue -- effectively recreating the current system but with more layers of bureaucratic indirection. The problem is patents. If you try to fix them, the market will simply adjust to work around those fixes. Much like with actual nuclear weapons, we need to get rid of them, not just write more laws about when it is okay to use them. But unlike actual nuclear weapons, we can get rid of patents without changing the laws of physics -- we can just ban new applications and let the existing patents run out.
silasdavis 7y ago
Here's a foolish idea: can we patent patent trolling? Parhaps a patent on some electronics means for discovery of targets for specious patent claims. Or a patent on some 'novel' business process that patent trolls could be argued to rely on. Something sufficiently broad that might be weaponised against patent trolls. Have I just ruined the patent trolling patent by creating prior art?
- Intermernet 7y ago
  https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/08/01/157743897/can-you-get-a-patent-on-being-a-patent-troll https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/08/01/157743897/can-...
  - silasdavis 7y ago
    Damn it's almost as if there's no such thing as an original idea....
    - Intermernet 7y ago
      Now you just need to patent the process of having an original idea...
      - narrowtux 7y ago
        Why not skip the middle man? Just patent patenting.
        Intermernet 7y ago
        My new startup: Usurpr
eriktrautman 7y ago
Don’t feed a troll, expose it to sunlight.
- pluma 7y ago
  It's more "fend it off, then crowd source enough ammunition to hunt it down and murder it", though. Everyone can expose trolls to sunlight, it just doesn't do all that much if you don't have the resources to fight them.
tacone 7y ago
Absolutely impressing. Thank you Cloudflare!
varshithr 7y ago
Looks like Raytheon acquired Blackbird technologies in 2014[0]. I honestly wonder why Raytheon let Blackbird continue patent trolling. [0]: https://www.raytheon.com/news/feature/raytheon-blackbird-technologies https://www.raytheon.com/news/feature/raytheon-blackbird-tec...
- baobabKoodaa 7y ago
  Blackbird doesn't have any other business prospects.
- eastdakota 7y ago
  Different, unrelated Blackbird. Though, fun fact, I tried for several years to get Raytheon to license their trademark in the name Blackbird to Cloudflare so we could sue Blackbird the law firm for trademark infringement. https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/995025758278963200?s=21 https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/995025758278963200?s=2... Proposed we license it for “$1 and other good and valuable consideration.” Unfortunately, the Raytheon IP counsel didn’t have a sense of humor.
  - htrp 7y ago
    Wow.... that's full on scorched earth tactics.
- whamlastxmas 7y ago
  A company that builds almost exclusively products designed to murder people also profits from patent trolling? Why am I not surprised
phil9987 7y ago
I love it how they decided to spend the money fighting the patent trolls. I started reading the article because the title reminded me of Richard in the Silicon Valley TV series. Happy to read that in the real world the patent trolls got busted!! :)
twic 7y ago
The USPTO and Stack Exchange teamed up a while ago to crowd-source prior art for 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... https://patents.stackexchange.com/?tags=prior-art-request https://patents.stackexchange.com/?tags=prior-art-request It seems like that hasn't really got off the ground. Perhaps Cloudflare etc could do their prior art appeals through Ask Patents? It would help build its profile and userbase, which would help the process of taking down bad patents become self-sustaining.
perl4ever 7y ago
We? https://www.we.co/#we https://www.we.co/#we
6d6b73 7y ago
I wonder if patents like "Internet-based proxy service for responding to server offline errors" [1] also qualify to be in the "troll" category. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=3&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=cloudfare&OS=cloudfare&RS=cloudfare http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...
youdontknowtho 7y ago
It's really weird that patent trolls ended up being drawn to a court in this weird little town in Texas called Marshall. I dated a girl from there once. What a strange place it is. I've never heard a reason for why that happened. Does anyone here know?
mannykannot 7y ago
Congratulations! I see that Project Jengo started right about the time the Supreme Court put a stop to the Eastern District of Texas Court prostituting itself as a service to trolls [1], and that this case was judged in the Northern District of California. Things are moving in the right direction, but we also need the USPTO to do its part properly. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/patent-cases-in-east-texas-plunge-more-than-60-percent/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/patent-cases-in-...
bespoke_engnr 7y ago
Their twitter account is so cringey: https://twitter.com/bbirdtech https://twitter.com/bbirdtech I'm also sad to see MIT so overrepresented in their ranks, presumably because the founder went to MIT: https://web.archive.org/web/20170511234303/http://www.blackbird-tech.com/the-team/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170511234303/http://www.blackb... Perhaps there's an ethics course missing from the curriculum?
siffland 7y ago
It would be awesome if someone would create an online database not just against blackbird, but against all patent trolls, like every time a patent trollish lawsuit is brought forth, just add the company and all their patents and go to town. oh wait does someone have a patent about "a database of prior art for patent trolls patents".......
jcmontx 7y ago
Big respect to the Cloudfare folks.
dasil003 7y ago
> Blackbird’s defense to these allegations was that it (i) was not a law firm (despite the fact it is led exclusively by lawyers who are actively engaged in the litigation it pursues) This is interesting. When we think of "law firm" it generally refers to a company providing legal services to clients. If a company comprises nothing but lawyers pursuing litigation to enrich themselves, what is the term for that, and why should it be legal?
Tepix 7y ago
Regarding the location based game patent, there is prior art from 2005 GPS::Tron, a J2ME game https://web.archive.org/web/20050204180710/http://datenmafia.org/gpstron/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050204180710/http://datenmafia... The sourcecode is also on Sourceforge in the CVS repository...
a3n 7y ago
> But we may be back at some point. Patent trolls remain a risk to growing companies like Cloudflare and nothing in this experience has persuaded us that settling a patent lawsuit is ever the right answer. We don’t plan to settle, and if brought into such litigation again at some point in the future, we think we have a pretty good blueprint for how to respond. That right there is the legal and literary equivalent of a head on a pike. Respect.
funkjunky 7y ago
I'm one of the bigger winners, for the "Internet based resource retrieval system (No. 8996546)" patent they highlighted in the article. Probably one of the coolest things I've ever participated in; special thanks to Cloudfare for organizing such a clever competition for a such a worthy cause. I hope other companies are able to follow their example to leverage the community to help solve these kinds of problems. For generous rewards, of course ;-p
myusername334 7y ago
The correct entity to bring pressure to is your Congressperson. In fact, they are fully versed in this issue and approve of it just because it keeps upstarts, who have nothing of value to offer them or their extended families, in their rightful place. OTOH, it benefits incumbents like MS and Samsung and Apple and the companies in their supply chains enormously, and those companies have all sorts of ways of benefitting Congresspeople and their families. The whole point of software patents is to keep you in your place, get it? I know. I worked on this issue for a decade starting around 2000. Congress understands EXACTLY the dynamics it gives rise to.

1675 points by eastdakota 7y ago

Crowdsourced patent troll fight, That needs to happen more often!

Wow that’s really interesting, engaging people to find prior art with a bounty. That should be a continued thing, where people can hunt for patents and receive reward for anything used in a case.

rolltiide 7y ago
There are a couple of services that do this. I've known about for a little more than half of the decade.
- infogulch 7y ago
  Nice, care to name them for everyone's benefit?
  - rolltiide 7y ago
    I only recall that there are prior art search engines and have been a viable side gig for at least half a decade Seem to recall Microsoft backing one of them
  - scubbo 7y ago
    Not without a bounty ;)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - everybodyknows 7y ago
    https://patroll.unifiedpatents.com/contests https://patroll.unifiedpatents.com/contests

egdod 7y ago

I’m a patent attorney. Honestly this is pretty impressive—total scorched earth tactics against ALL of the entity’s assets? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before, and I bet it makes some people think twice.

mmerlin 7y ago
Not only their assets, but also their right to practice as lawyers... the founders were reported to bar association in two states for ethics violations... "what safeguards should be put in place to make sure that attorneys who take the oath are held to a standard beyond mere greed or base opportunism" Cloudflare really is making the world a better place in this case, by fighting back against the kinds of legal weasel who exists purely to be a money leech with no benefit to anyone but themselves.
- vesinisa 7y ago
  Unfortunately, the challenges before the bar associations were apparently not successful. Their wording is careful since "disciplinary proceedings in front of bar associations are generally confidential", but they do remark that "it will take a broader change in orientation by these professional associations" before even obvious patent trolling is considered legal malpractice.
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    We already have barratry laws on the books. Someone just needs to enforce them. Advancing disingenuous arguments in court should be an automatic year's suspension.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      What is a "disingenuous argument?" Is it like reading the phrase "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" to mean something less than that based on a clearly set-off explanatory clause in front? (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) The standard for permissible arguments in court is having a good faith basis in law or fact, or a good faith argument for extending or changing the law. It's not clear to me that's wrong. Fee-splitting with non-lawyers is the bigger issue. That is impermissible for all sorts of good reasons.

phh 7y ago

Reading from afar, it feels like cloudflare gained a lot financially from this crowdsourcing. But I've already suffered from such patent trolls, and I actually think crowdsourcing is a very nice way to fight them. I think it is very interesting economically speaking. By participating into the crowdsource, people are basically selling their memories, not time actually spent on the task. (though I acknowledge it does take some time, even if it's just reading the patents). When to we get wankipatent? (short for wiki-anti-patent of course)

jetrink 7y ago
If I could help Cloudflare by remembering prior art, I would do it for free as the satisfaction would be enough. However, they say that they paid over $50,000 to 18 individuals, which works out to almost $3000 per person, so the crowd gained a lot financially as well.
gyc 7y ago
The crowdsourcing benefits not just cloudflare but any potential future targets of the patent troll.
abraae 7y ago
> When to we get wankipatent? (short for wiki-anti-patent of course) Warning - in some countries this has an unsavory meaning.
- Spare_account 7y ago
  I think that was the intention

frankharv 7y ago

I like the part where they go to the state bar and try and have them reprimanded. Too bad cloudflare can't comment on those proceedings.

LanceH 7y ago
It's almost like lawyers made the rules to protect lawyers.

Reedx 7y ago

This is great. Kudos Cloudflare! Patent trolls really seem like a cartoonish kind of evil. I'm curious if there is any steel man argument for their existence? Do they add any value at all or are they just a pure drain?

soneil 7y ago
If a patent is being upheld for the right reasons, it's not a troll. The patent troll is the definition of a bad actor in this arena. There's arguments for and against patents, and especially so software patents - but there's not many arguments for the existence of bad actors.
- egdod 7y ago
  Patent troll is synonymous with non-practicing entity, according to most people.
  - cbsmith 7y ago
    But even NPE's aren't intrinsically a bad thing. It's just the NPE space is filled with these horrid trolls. Context matters.
    - egdod 7y ago
      Exactly my point.
  - joshuaissac 7y ago
    This is the definition I have seen almost everywhere, but I do not like it. Non-practising entities like ARM and patent-owning universities I would never consider trolls just for being an NPE. On the other hand, even practising entities may engage in troll-like activities, asserting a patent beyond its scope to bankrupt a smaller competitor, because legal costs are not usually awarded in the US for such lawsuits (e.g. Nuance vs Zi). It is just that in a lot of cases, if not most, the troll is a non-practising entity.
7y ago

stevehawk 7y ago

Shout out to "Garrett from San Francisco" for making the best of a bad situation and helping to fight a patent troll while homeless.

nicoboo 7y ago
I went back to the blog article to read about Garrett. Pretty awesome attitude in this case!
funkjunky 7y ago
I'm Garrett. As stated in my quote, I was already in the library all day for the air-conditioning, and thought this would be a fun way to waste some time. My submission was the "Internet based resource retrieval system (No. 8996546)" highlighted in the article. It was honestly shocking how obvious of a patent it was, it basically just described an online yellow pages. I could find one of those before 2004, easy. Internet Archive wayback machine, away! I -really- could have used the winnings back then, (I made my submission ~4 years ago), but hey, it all worked out in the end. I'm an SRE living in SF now, with my own apartment in a nice neighborhood. Still no AC though.

CreepGin 7y ago

Bravo!!! This warms my heart a little. I do wonder though... what's Blackbird's mentality like when they started hitting on big players like Cloudflare? In my limited reading of past patent-troll-related posts on HN, it's almost always about preying on small entities.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
They hit on small entities to build up enough of a war chest to buy enough lawyers to make the big players think that a lawsuit is going to be costly. If the terms offered to the big player are less than the big players think the lawsuit will cost, a lot of big players will just make the economic calculation and pay up.
- kramerdj 7y ago
  Big players see their share of cases as well, if not more. Settling or licensing the technology will generally be cheaper in the short term than litigating the case.
magashna 7y ago
I'm sure you don't hear about a majority of cases because they're settled out of court.

kramerdj 7y ago

Hey everyone, Doug Kramer, Cloudflare GC, here. Happy to answer any questions as we close out this chapter.

plasma 7y ago
Hey Doug, All in did cloudflare have to spend a modest amount of its money to retaliate in this way? I think public shaming of the layers involved by name would also be appropriate - bullies often don’t like being called out. Would be keen to hear whether the ethics inquiry had any effect.
- kramerdj 7y ago
  As we described a bit in a previous post at the end of the litigation -- https://blog.cloudflare.com/winning-the-blackbird-battle/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/winning-the-blackbird-battle/ -- in addition to the money we paid for the crowdsourced bounty, we also had to pay considerably to litigate the case. Even though we won the underlying litigation as quickly and convincingly as possible, we still spent more in legal fees than Blackbird might have been able to recover in damages after trial. That's why settling / licensing will always make more short-term economic sense, and keep trolls alive.
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    Shouldn't blackbird have to cover your legal fees if they lose?
    - alasdair_ 7y ago
      Not in the USA, in general. That’s the core issue - it’s asymmetric warfare.
      - nicoburns 7y ago
        Huh. I wonder if this is a significant factor in the US being so litigious in general.

RaceWon 7y ago

> Honestly this is pretty impressive You know what's more impressive: "Matthew Prince is co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare. CloudFlare’s mission is to build a better Internet. Matthew wrote his first computer program at age seven when his mom would sneak him into university computer science courses." Age 7 sitting in on a Uni CS course?! Holy crap

eastdakota 7y ago
It was a continuing education class at the University of Utah, so maybe not as impressive, but, I think the more telling point is how cool my mom was/is to give me opportunities like that.
- ceres 7y ago
  holy shit 'tis him!
- RaceWon 7y ago
  > It was a continuing education class at the University of Utah, so maybe not as impressive, but, I think the more telling point is how cool my mom was/is to give me opportunities like that. Still mega imo. Yes your mom seems awesome too. Congrats on that victory, sweet strategy!
- MetalGuru 7y ago
  Yeah, that’s a helluva badass parent.
- MobileVet 7y ago
  My daughter is six and fairly bright (as much as can be seen with the material she has been exposed to). Continuing Ed or not, I can’t imagine her sitting in a CS course in a year. Wow. And yes, kudos to your mom for providing you that opportunity.
dang 7y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21448512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21448512.

gesman 7y ago

Patent trolls should be shot on sight. We shouldn't be dealing with that today.

briandear 7y ago

Does Cloudflare now plan to stand up to Google tracking everyone by eliminating the use of Google captcha?

1996 7y ago
best question I've read so far!
deftnerd 7y ago
Looks like they're getting closer to using hCaptcha rather than ReCaptcha [1] for the Privacy Pass service, which could be a trial of hCaptcha before rolling it out on all of the verification pages. https://blog.cloudflare.com/supporting-the-latest-version-of-the-privacy-pass-protocol/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/supporting-the-latest-version-of...
- aitchnyu 7y ago
  Why do they even need a third party captcha implementation? They could roll their own.
  - CodeWriter23 7y ago
    Probably a choice to focus on core competencies.
  - amirhirsch 7y ago
    I work at hCaptcha so I can't speak to any particular arrangements. We provide data labeling services and use the captcha as a means to lower costs for annotated datasets. To that end, we intend to open source most of our captcha stack and would be an obvious choice for any privacy-concerned company rolling their own captcha.

shmerl 7y ago

Patent trolls are racketeers, plain and simple. There should be jail time for it.

spectramax 7y ago

I've worked in China extensively and I feel strong about the following: A) Cloudfare can defend, but a mom-and-pop small business cannot. A startup cannot. B) China can hedge against western bureaucracy and gain unprecedented speed in innovation and new ventures - precisely because of hard pressing and blocking issues such as patent law. C) Even if there were no patent trolls, China can still manage to steal, copy, espionage or fearlessly innovate - why? Because of three things - culture, law and international relations. In my opinion, Patents need to end. Yep, completely get rid of patents. Not shorten it, not amend it, just simply stop taking new applications. Existing patents can be still be active until they expire (or better yet, shorten the expiration date). Ideas are cheap, execution is where companies need to compete. This is not a level playing field for the rest of the nations. China gives no fucks about law and the west is gonna watch China lead the way in exponential progress while we are still playing in the dirt with our little patent litigations. I wonder if people here have felt this before: Get an idea, start building a prototype, demo it to a friend, friend suggests checking google.com/patents, excitement collapses :(

latchkey 7y ago
Not just China though, pretty much all of SE Asia. Thanks to the trade wars, manufacturing is spreading more quickly away from China to the surrounding countries where China still has a lot of influence, but US hasn't added tariffs (yet) ... labor is cheap and quality is just as high (or bad, depending on your view of things). If you think the judicial system and 'no fucks' is non-existent in China, try Laos, Cambodia or Vietnam.
- ouiterestos 7y ago
  And in the past East Asian countries like South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Back in the 70s, Japan had that reputation. Then South Korea and Taiwan had it in the 80s. Now that these countries produce valuable IP, they vigorously support and defend it.
- spectramax 7y ago
  You're absolutely right. I've audited over 100 suppliers in SE Asia in manufacturing, the kind of things you see is completely, utterly insane. I've been to Pegatron (Apple supplier) to some shitty PCB supplier where the boards are running off the conveyor belt in a huge pile. No other book captures it as well as "What's wrong with China?" by Paul Middler [1]. Dejavu after dejavu as I read through it. It is amazing. I think it is safe to extend argument not just for China, but the entire SE Asia. Hell, some regions in Vietnam smells almost like those PVD coating chemical gas chambers in Guangzhou. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-China-Paul-Midler/dp/1119213711 https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-China-Paul-Midler/dp/1119...

nathcd 7y ago

On the topic of crowdsourcing prior art, I found something interesting from googling around a bit that I wonder if anyone here might know anything about: https://www.uspto.gov/page/roundtable-uspto-use-crowdsourcing-identify-relevant-prior-art-examination-application https://www.uspto.gov/page/roundtable-uspto-use-crowdsourcin... https://www.uspto.gov/patent/initiatives/uspto-led-executive-actions-high-tech-patent-issues https://www.uspto.gov/patent/initiatives/uspto-led-executive... https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/02/20/fact-sheet-executive-actions-answering-president-s-call-strengthen-our-p https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/0... In 2014 there was an executive order "focused on expanding ways for companies, experts, and the general public to help patent examiners, holders, and applicants find relevant “prior art”". (The other executive actions on that archive.gov page look interesting too.) But I can't find any info more recent than the 2014 roundtable that the USPTO held. Does anyone here know anything about this?

bbanyc 7y ago
I was an intern at USPTO a few years ago, during my failed attempt to become a patent attorney. What I saw and experienced there was a closed-minded agency with a very narrow bureaucratic focus. The only "prior art" that normally got searched was the database of previously submitted patent applications and issued patents. There was no room for bringing in outside experience or common sense. Search the database, stamp the application "accept" or "reject", move on to the next application, get as many done in the bi-week as possible. This, I realized, is how we got so many garbage patents on well-known, obvious software techniques - if nobody thought software was patentable at the time, they wouldn't have bothered filing a patent application. Years later, when software became patentable, the first vulture to think of filing could snatch up the patent and 20 years of exclusivity even though they didn't invent a thing. Given how hard it is to make any lasting change to organizational culture, not to mention that we're under a different administration now, I expect that absolutely nothing came of this 2014 roundtable and nothing will until somebody really powerful gets burnt.
- vkou 7y ago
  Powerful people don't get burnt, because they have the resources to fight this in court.

kmcquade 7y ago

> "I'm pretty excited, I've never won a single thing in my life before. And to do it in service of taking down evil patent trolls? This is one of the best days of my life, no joke. I submitted because software patents are garbage and clearly designed to extort money from productive innovators for vague and obvious claims. Also, I was homeless at the time I submitted and was spending all day at the library anyway." — Garrett, San Francisco This guy is a legend.

funkjunky 7y ago
Hi

nautilus12 7y ago

Hey cloudflare, why don't you start a venture that productizes this process for smaller companies that can't afford to do this themselves by pooling all the companies that are being targeted by a particular troll together, for any patent troll, not just blackbird.

alasdair_ 7y ago

I still think one of the better ways to handle the patent issue is to charge a property tax of, say, 2 percent of its value per year. The owner gets to declare the value BUT they MUST sell it to the first person willing to pay the claimed value of the patent.

mikenew 7y ago

I, for one, would contribute to an ongoing "Project Jengo" type of thing, especially if it targeted the broader patent troll portfolio. I don't even think it would need a bounty system; just create something where people can submit prior art against a list of patents.

Thorentis 7y ago

Good job to Cloudflare for doing this. But wait, they were giving out thousands of dollars for submitting ... Internet links? How did I miss this? I love searching for obscure things online, and could've made some easy $ with this. Hopefully something like Project Jengo is started again with another patent troll firm.

ponsin 7y ago

As I understand, many tech companies hold onto many broad patents but don't actually enforce them. They do that as a mutual assured destruction tactic. If the competitor sues them for a violation, then the defendant enforces all of their parents against the plaintiff. I know of many companies in the autonomous vehicle field that do that. One of them (I forget who) has a patent they says that if a car on the neighboring land moves close to your lane, then move your car to the far side of your lane.

2rsf 7y ago
A bit outdated but still good: https://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/articles/53157-image/Web-of-Lawsuits.jpg https://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/articles/53157-image/Web... https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fNk8E4vY6LE/W8RDptv2anI/AAAAAAAACog/v88jKVADGxAa_MboZk9_24OHq0PlUh8PgCLcBGAs/s1600/18-10-14%2BSmartphone%2BPatents%2BBattlemap.png https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fNk8E4vY6LE/W8RDptv2anI/AAAAAAAAC...
Zarel 7y ago
That only works for other companies, not for patent trolls that are usually holding companies that own patents but don't have any products that could infringe on patents. The company that sued Cloudflare, Blackbird, is one such company: https://www.blackbird-tech.com/about/ https://www.blackbird-tech.com/about/
- jhloa2 7y ago
  Holy guacamole their website is extremely hypocritical

maddy1512 7y ago

Reminds me of the patent troll episode from Silicon Valley series. Good job CloudFare!

yami2yami 7y ago

Could this be an improvement? 1. Patents must cover only stuff that could be created/used at the time of the filing. 2. Patents are not transferable. 3. Patents that are not licensed and not used within a specified time are automatically released to the public.

timvdalen 7y ago
The second point would be very hard to enforce because you could just house the patent within a company and sell the company.
- pluma 7y ago
  Companies don't innovate, people do. The patent may be filed by a company but the discovery must have been made by one or more human beings. So you might as well argue that it shouldn't be possible for legal entities to hold patents if patents can't be transferred. That said, the obvious flaw with that point in isolation is that it would still be possible to license a non-practicing entity to sue people on your behalf and then have a revenue sharing agreement between the holder and their employer at the time where the employer reimburses the holder for all expenses related to filing and in return receives all licensing revenue -- effectively recreating the current system but with more layers of bureaucratic indirection. The problem is patents. If you try to fix them, the market will simply adjust to work around those fixes. Much like with actual nuclear weapons, we need to get rid of them, not just write more laws about when it is okay to use them. But unlike actual nuclear weapons, we can get rid of patents without changing the laws of physics -- we can just ban new applications and let the existing patents run out.

silasdavis 7y ago

Here's a foolish idea: can we patent patent trolling? Parhaps a patent on some electronics means for discovery of targets for specious patent claims. Or a patent on some 'novel' business process that patent trolls could be argued to rely on. Something sufficiently broad that might be weaponised against patent trolls. Have I just ruined the patent trolling patent by creating prior art?

Intermernet 7y ago
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/08/01/157743897/can-you-get-a-patent-on-being-a-patent-troll https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/08/01/157743897/can-...
- silasdavis 7y ago
  Damn it's almost as if there's no such thing as an original idea....
  - Intermernet 7y ago
    Now you just need to patent the process of having an original idea...
    - narrowtux 7y ago
      Why not skip the middle man? Just patent patenting.
      - Intermernet 7y ago
        My new startup: Usurpr

eriktrautman 7y ago

Don’t feed a troll, expose it to sunlight.

pluma 7y ago
It's more "fend it off, then crowd source enough ammunition to hunt it down and murder it", though. Everyone can expose trolls to sunlight, it just doesn't do all that much if you don't have the resources to fight them.

tacone 7y ago

Absolutely impressing. Thank you Cloudflare!

varshithr 7y ago

Looks like Raytheon acquired Blackbird technologies in 2014[0]. I honestly wonder why Raytheon let Blackbird continue patent trolling. [0]: https://www.raytheon.com/news/feature/raytheon-blackbird-technologies https://www.raytheon.com/news/feature/raytheon-blackbird-tec...

baobabKoodaa 7y ago
Blackbird doesn't have any other business prospects.
eastdakota 7y ago
Different, unrelated Blackbird. Though, fun fact, I tried for several years to get Raytheon to license their trademark in the name Blackbird to Cloudflare so we could sue Blackbird the law firm for trademark infringement. https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/995025758278963200?s=21 https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/995025758278963200?s=2... Proposed we license it for “$1 and other good and valuable consideration.” Unfortunately, the Raytheon IP counsel didn’t have a sense of humor.
- htrp 7y ago
  Wow.... that's full on scorched earth tactics.
whamlastxmas 7y ago
A company that builds almost exclusively products designed to murder people also profits from patent trolling? Why am I not surprised

phil9987 7y ago

I love it how they decided to spend the money fighting the patent trolls. I started reading the article because the title reminded me of Richard in the Silicon Valley TV series. Happy to read that in the real world the patent trolls got busted!! :)

twic 7y ago

The USPTO and Stack Exchange teamed up a while ago to crowd-source prior art for 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... https://patents.stackexchange.com/?tags=prior-art-request https://patents.stackexchange.com/?tags=prior-art-request It seems like that hasn't really got off the ground. Perhaps Cloudflare etc could do their prior art appeals through Ask Patents? It would help build its profile and userbase, which would help the process of taking down bad patents become self-sustaining.

perl4ever 7y ago

We? https://www.we.co/#we https://www.we.co/#we

6d6b73 7y ago

I wonder if patents like "Internet-based proxy service for responding to server offline errors" [1] also qualify to be in the "troll" category. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=3&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=cloudfare&OS=cloudfare&RS=cloudfare http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...

youdontknowtho 7y ago

It's really weird that patent trolls ended up being drawn to a court in this weird little town in Texas called Marshall. I dated a girl from there once. What a strange place it is. I've never heard a reason for why that happened. Does anyone here know?

mannykannot 7y ago

Congratulations! I see that Project Jengo started right about the time the Supreme Court put a stop to the Eastern District of Texas Court prostituting itself as a service to trolls [1], and that this case was judged in the Northern District of California. Things are moving in the right direction, but we also need the USPTO to do its part properly. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/patent-cases-in-east-texas-plunge-more-than-60-percent/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/patent-cases-in-...

bespoke_engnr 7y ago

Their twitter account is so cringey: https://twitter.com/bbirdtech https://twitter.com/bbirdtech I'm also sad to see MIT so overrepresented in their ranks, presumably because the founder went to MIT: https://web.archive.org/web/20170511234303/http://www.blackbird-tech.com/the-team/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170511234303/http://www.blackb... Perhaps there's an ethics course missing from the curriculum?

siffland 7y ago

It would be awesome if someone would create an online database not just against blackbird, but against all patent trolls, like every time a patent trollish lawsuit is brought forth, just add the company and all their patents and go to town. oh wait does someone have a patent about "a database of prior art for patent trolls patents".......

jcmontx 7y ago

Big respect to the Cloudfare folks.

dasil003 7y ago

> Blackbird’s defense to these allegations was that it (i) was not a law firm (despite the fact it is led exclusively by lawyers who are actively engaged in the litigation it pursues) This is interesting. When we think of "law firm" it generally refers to a company providing legal services to clients. If a company comprises nothing but lawyers pursuing litigation to enrich themselves, what is the term for that, and why should it be legal?

Tepix 7y ago

Regarding the location based game patent, there is prior art from 2005 GPS::Tron, a J2ME game https://web.archive.org/web/20050204180710/http://datenmafia.org/gpstron/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050204180710/http://datenmafia... The sourcecode is also on Sourceforge in the CVS repository...

a3n 7y ago

> But we may be back at some point. Patent trolls remain a risk to growing companies like Cloudflare and nothing in this experience has persuaded us that settling a patent lawsuit is ever the right answer. We don’t plan to settle, and if brought into such litigation again at some point in the future, we think we have a pretty good blueprint for how to respond. That right there is the legal and literary equivalent of a head on a pike. Respect.

funkjunky 7y ago

I'm one of the bigger winners, for the "Internet based resource retrieval system (No. 8996546)" patent they highlighted in the article. Probably one of the coolest things I've ever participated in; special thanks to Cloudfare for organizing such a clever competition for a such a worthy cause. I hope other companies are able to follow their example to leverage the community to help solve these kinds of problems. For generous rewards, of course ;-p

myusername334 7y ago

The correct entity to bring pressure to is your Congressperson. In fact, they are fully versed in this issue and approve of it just because it keeps upstarts, who have nothing of value to offer them or their extended families, in their rightful place. OTOH, it benefits incumbents like MS and Samsung and Apple and the companies in their supply chains enormously, and those companies have all sorts of ways of benefitting Congresspeople and their families. The whole point of software patents is to keep you in your place, get it? I know. I worked on this issue for a decade starting around 2000. Congress understands EXACTLY the dynamics it gives rise to.