8 ms·

Wow is that a PDF of a Microsoft Word document with inline comments written by the judge? I don't think I've ever seen a document in that style in PACER before

Wow is that a PDF of a Microsoft Word document with inline comments written by the judge? I don't think I've ever seen a document in that style in PACER before (linked in the blog post at https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/home_page_posts/3/9/7/0/Altair_Logix_Nguyen_Patent_Troll_17-1.pdf https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/home_page_posts/3/9/7/0/Alta...) . I think there's a typo in the blog post ("parent" should be "patent" below): > Do you ever wonder what parent trolls tell their children they do for a job? I read a story somewhere that claimed that "Captain Planet" had to be edited to feature cartoonishly evil villains, rather than the mundane day-to-day polluters, because they were worried that kids would ask uncomfortable career questions of their parents in sectors like disposable consumer goods, plastics, petrochemical, cigarettes, etc.

yeetaccount 5y ago
If you can find a link to that Captain Planet story I’d like to read it. It sounds totally plausible.
- owlninja 5y ago
  I think this is it https://grist.org/culture/captain-planet-planeteers-real-story/ https://grist.org/culture/captain-planet-planeteers-real-sto... >That family edutainment goal affected a lot of the show’s writing. Pyle didn’t want kids to see their family members as evil, ecologically speaking. “That’s one of the reasons we made the bad guys and their plans so ridiculous,” she explained, “We tried to point the finger at behaviors rather than industries. That way, no child would go home and say, ‘Oh, daddy, you’re in a blah blah business.’ It would be horrible for some child to see their family member as a Captain Planet villain.”
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I do not see why it would be terrible for a kid to see the ramifications of their future due to their current lifestyle of a 2k+ sq ft detached single family house with an SUV and pickup truck and flights to Disney world as a villain.
    - mistrial9 5y ago
      bad idea to put adult burdens of conscience and politic on children -- let them be children for a while
      - franga2000 5y ago
        You're not putting that on the child, you're putting it on the parent. The children will put pressure on them without being hurt in the process. I've seen similar things with smoking - children are taught smoking is very dangerous and they start asking their parents why they smoke. "Are you going to get lung cancer too, dad? Please quit!" I know of several cases where the parents quit smoking in part because of their children. The children felt really proud of themselves, which is great.
        mikepurvis 5y ago
        I mean, the child is still the agent of change in that scenario— and it's perfectly possible for it to go the other way too, where no change occurs and the parent and child end up resenting each other over it. I don't know if I'm necessarily making a value judgment either way here, but I don't think "get to them through their young kids" should be considered a general-purpose strategy for effecting societal change... and fear of this kind of thing is exactly what breeds mistrust in public education, parents pulling their kids out of sex ed, etc etc.
        caf 5y ago
        It's true, but the opposite strategy - sugarcoat the truth to avoid raising uncomfortable questions about the status quo - also breeds mistrust in education and institutions. All we can really try to do is present our best view of the truth, with all the uncertainties around that. Does smoking cause lung cancer? That certainly appears to be where the weight of evidence sits, and it would be a lie of omission to avoid saying so. Should you quit smoking? That's up to you.
        5y ago
mig39 5y ago
Nah, I think they genuinely mean "trolls" who happen to be parents and have to explain to their kids what they do for a living.
dylan604 5y ago
>worried that kids would ask uncomfortable career questions of their parents such a missed opportunity. daddy, why are you trying to kill the planet?
- phoehne 5y ago
  Because mommy’s coke is very, very expensive. Now go play with your x-box.
  - MisterTea 5y ago
    Mommy usually buys coke with her vagina. Or at least that's what my ex-drug dealing friend told me who "sold" a lot of coke to rich bored house wives in NYC.
  - kjs3 5y ago
    Don't think Mommy's coke is relevant. More "do you want to upgrade to your Playstation 7 or stay with the looser with a 6".
buildbot 5y ago
This document is actually way more interesting with the comments, kind of an inside look into the legal process
- yupyup54133 5y ago
  This document is like HN in general. TLDR; the main doc and just read the comments. ;-)
Igelau 5y ago
Parent troll wisdom: No matter what he says, eat the littlest billy goat first. Don't give up the choke point at the bridge. Don't let the enemy onto the hillside behind you. I always wondered what the moral of that story was supposed to be.
- mherdeg 5y ago
  I never quite understood why they didn't just send the big goat first.
  - Enginerrrd 5y ago
    Because you don't get to become the big Billy goat by taking all the upfront risk. I've seen many a buck follow this strategy. When a group of 2 or 3 bucks enter a clearing, you'll almost always see the biggest oldest one go last.
    - stickfigure 5y ago
      Maybe not a strategy, just survivorship bias?
      - Enginerrrd 5y ago
        Maybe I don't understand, but I don't think this suggestion is quite coherent. If the bucks following this stategy are the ones that survived, how is this survivorhsip bias rather than a winning strategy?
        randomswede 5y ago
        It could be both?
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  The moral is, you can escape from bullies by offering up your classmates as more attractive targets. /s Or maybe it's that it doesn't pay to be the bully, because eventually you try to bully someone bigger than you.
wiseleo 5y ago
Comment A2 is pure gold "Commented [A2]: Whoever wrote this sentence might be the same person who writes patents. It would be helpful in the future to write and speak in plain English. You are dealing with an ordinary court, not a patent examiner.
- lelandbatey 5y ago
  I absolutely _love_ chances to read or listen in on any instance where a judge provides feedback in the US legal system. For reasons I do not understand, there seems to be a strong culture among judges of constantly dishing out statements which somehow always feel like "sick burns". The few encounters with IRL judges I've had also had this quality, where the judge would be totally willing to frame people really harshly in their questions, or just outright denounce someone. If anyone has any insight into this (I bet there are some good books about "legal culture and judge culture" that'd be real interesting) please do chime in!
  - oasisbob 5y ago
    You might enjoy this series of interviews with Supreme Court justices on writing style in _The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing_ vol 13: https://legaltimes.typepad.com/files/garner-transcripts-1.pdf https://legaltimes.typepad.com/files/garner-transcripts-1.pd... The interviews go beyond writing style into broader rhetoric, as well as dislikes and pet-peeves.
- kabdib 5y ago
  I once spent about four months going through several hundred patents of a competitor, finding a way to do a product that did not infringe. We more or less succeeded, but man it was painful. Had expert legal help (and permission of our corporate lawyers) -- don't go off on your own and read these things. A few thoughts on patents: - Don't bother reading anything other than the claims. Ignore everything else (yes, even the diagrams) unless referenced by the claims. - Yes, they do try to -- and succeed in -- patenting stuff you can pull out of a textbook. One patent was a near cut-and-paste of some stuff on Kalman filters (that one made me pretty mad). - Any time a patent lawyer makes a reference to a patent's "teachings", punch them in the nose. These things don't teach anyone anything, that's an impolite fiction for a game that's really all about obfuscation. If there was a patent that described how to nail two boards together, you wouldn't walk away from reading that patent with any useful knowledge. - The very fact that every company in the US will tell you "Please, for the love of Pete, don't go read patents on your own, without permission" again belies that these things are land-grabs that are never designed to advance the state of the art through teaching. I am not a lawyer. I do not play one on TV.
closeparen 5y ago
As a child I learned that technological progress takes the form of inventions and comes from intellectual heroes called inventors. Manufacture, distribution, marketing, business, etc. were all just details that would inevitably get worked out by one or another of the sharks in that grubby game. And the sharks would constantly be trying to screw the inventor out of his due. As a child I would have looked at someone who enforces patents for a living as a kind of hero. Once I reached the tech industry it was a total 180, ideas are worthless, the heroes are the engineers who can scale them and the founders who can make businesses out of them. But patent law didn’t get the memo, it’s still based on my elementary-school worldview.
- freejazz 5y ago
  Inventors regularly sign over their inventions to the businesses that they work for, such that the businessmen are able to make business models out of them that the engineers will scale. To be honest, I don't think you know much of how the patent system works to substantiate your comment.
  - thrashh 5y ago
    Not to mention, inventions occur in manufacturing, distribution, marketing, and business too. Just because someone doesn’t have an understanding of how things work is not a justification to be dismissive.
  - closeparen 5y ago
    I thought it was clear from my comment that I'm criticizing the viewpoint I received in 4th grade, i.e. I no longer believe in it. Crucially, the inventors in those hero stories were always lone wolf eccentric garage/basement guys. Corporate R&D labs did not appear.
breakyerself 5y ago
I think parent troll is a play on words. Patent trolls with children are parent trolls.
ineedasername 5y ago
cartoonishly evil villains Or the kids themselves. Though it would have been pretty hilarious if Captain Planet turned to the "camera" and told the kids honestly: "The toys you play with, including this show's action-figures, were made using the ancient decomposed remains of countless dead plants and animals, in a process every bit as bad as what you see in this show. And recycling isn't going to solve this problem."
leeoniya 5y ago
> I read a story somewhere that claimed that "Captain Planet" had to be edited to feature cartoonishly evil villains, rather than the mundane day-to-day polluters, because they were worried that kids would ask uncomfortable career questions of their parents in sectors like disposable consumer goods, plastics, petrochemical, cigarettes, etc. maybe here: https://grist.org/culture/captain-planet-planeteers-real-story/ https://grist.org/culture/captain-planet-planeteers-real-sto...

yeetaccount 5y ago

If you can find a link to that Captain Planet story I’d like to read it. It sounds totally plausible.

owlninja 5y ago
I think this is it https://grist.org/culture/captain-planet-planeteers-real-story/ https://grist.org/culture/captain-planet-planeteers-real-sto... >That family edutainment goal affected a lot of the show’s writing. Pyle didn’t want kids to see their family members as evil, ecologically speaking. “That’s one of the reasons we made the bad guys and their plans so ridiculous,” she explained, “We tried to point the finger at behaviors rather than industries. That way, no child would go home and say, ‘Oh, daddy, you’re in a blah blah business.’ It would be horrible for some child to see their family member as a Captain Planet villain.”
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I do not see why it would be terrible for a kid to see the ramifications of their future due to their current lifestyle of a 2k+ sq ft detached single family house with an SUV and pickup truck and flights to Disney world as a villain.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    bad idea to put adult burdens of conscience and politic on children -- let them be children for a while
    - franga2000 5y ago
      You're not putting that on the child, you're putting it on the parent. The children will put pressure on them without being hurt in the process. I've seen similar things with smoking - children are taught smoking is very dangerous and they start asking their parents why they smoke. "Are you going to get lung cancer too, dad? Please quit!" I know of several cases where the parents quit smoking in part because of their children. The children felt really proud of themselves, which is great.
      - mikepurvis 5y ago
        I mean, the child is still the agent of change in that scenario— and it's perfectly possible for it to go the other way too, where no change occurs and the parent and child end up resenting each other over it. I don't know if I'm necessarily making a value judgment either way here, but I don't think "get to them through their young kids" should be considered a general-purpose strategy for effecting societal change... and fear of this kind of thing is exactly what breeds mistrust in public education, parents pulling their kids out of sex ed, etc etc.
        caf 5y ago
        It's true, but the opposite strategy - sugarcoat the truth to avoid raising uncomfortable questions about the status quo - also breeds mistrust in education and institutions. All we can really try to do is present our best view of the truth, with all the uncertainties around that. Does smoking cause lung cancer? That certainly appears to be where the weight of evidence sits, and it would be a lie of omission to avoid saying so. Should you quit smoking? That's up to you.
        5y ago

mig39 5y ago

Nah, I think they genuinely mean "trolls" who happen to be parents and have to explain to their kids what they do for a living.

dylan604 5y ago

>worried that kids would ask uncomfortable career questions of their parents such a missed opportunity. daddy, why are you trying to kill the planet?

phoehne 5y ago
Because mommy’s coke is very, very expensive. Now go play with your x-box.
- MisterTea 5y ago
  Mommy usually buys coke with her vagina. Or at least that's what my ex-drug dealing friend told me who "sold" a lot of coke to rich bored house wives in NYC.
- kjs3 5y ago
  Don't think Mommy's coke is relevant. More "do you want to upgrade to your Playstation 7 or stay with the looser with a 6".

buildbot 5y ago

This document is actually way more interesting with the comments, kind of an inside look into the legal process

yupyup54133 5y ago
This document is like HN in general. TLDR; the main doc and just read the comments. ;-)

Igelau 5y ago

Parent troll wisdom: No matter what he says, eat the littlest billy goat first. Don't give up the choke point at the bridge. Don't let the enemy onto the hillside behind you. I always wondered what the moral of that story was supposed to be.

mherdeg 5y ago
I never quite understood why they didn't just send the big goat first.
- Enginerrrd 5y ago
  Because you don't get to become the big Billy goat by taking all the upfront risk. I've seen many a buck follow this strategy. When a group of 2 or 3 bucks enter a clearing, you'll almost always see the biggest oldest one go last.
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    Maybe not a strategy, just survivorship bias?
    - Enginerrrd 5y ago
      Maybe I don't understand, but I don't think this suggestion is quite coherent. If the bucks following this stategy are the ones that survived, how is this survivorhsip bias rather than a winning strategy?
      - randomswede 5y ago
        It could be both?
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
The moral is, you can escape from bullies by offering up your classmates as more attractive targets. /s Or maybe it's that it doesn't pay to be the bully, because eventually you try to bully someone bigger than you.

wiseleo 5y ago

Comment A2 is pure gold "Commented [A2]: Whoever wrote this sentence might be the same person who writes patents. It would be helpful in the future to write and speak in plain English. You are dealing with an ordinary court, not a patent examiner.

lelandbatey 5y ago
I absolutely _love_ chances to read or listen in on any instance where a judge provides feedback in the US legal system. For reasons I do not understand, there seems to be a strong culture among judges of constantly dishing out statements which somehow always feel like "sick burns". The few encounters with IRL judges I've had also had this quality, where the judge would be totally willing to frame people really harshly in their questions, or just outright denounce someone. If anyone has any insight into this (I bet there are some good books about "legal culture and judge culture" that'd be real interesting) please do chime in!
- oasisbob 5y ago
  You might enjoy this series of interviews with Supreme Court justices on writing style in _The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing_ vol 13: https://legaltimes.typepad.com/files/garner-transcripts-1.pdf https://legaltimes.typepad.com/files/garner-transcripts-1.pd... The interviews go beyond writing style into broader rhetoric, as well as dislikes and pet-peeves.
kabdib 5y ago
I once spent about four months going through several hundred patents of a competitor, finding a way to do a product that did not infringe. We more or less succeeded, but man it was painful. Had expert legal help (and permission of our corporate lawyers) -- don't go off on your own and read these things. A few thoughts on patents: - Don't bother reading anything other than the claims. Ignore everything else (yes, even the diagrams) unless referenced by the claims. - Yes, they do try to -- and succeed in -- patenting stuff you can pull out of a textbook. One patent was a near cut-and-paste of some stuff on Kalman filters (that one made me pretty mad). - Any time a patent lawyer makes a reference to a patent's "teachings", punch them in the nose. These things don't teach anyone anything, that's an impolite fiction for a game that's really all about obfuscation. If there was a patent that described how to nail two boards together, you wouldn't walk away from reading that patent with any useful knowledge. - The very fact that every company in the US will tell you "Please, for the love of Pete, don't go read patents on your own, without permission" again belies that these things are land-grabs that are never designed to advance the state of the art through teaching. I am not a lawyer. I do not play one on TV.

closeparen 5y ago

As a child I learned that technological progress takes the form of inventions and comes from intellectual heroes called inventors. Manufacture, distribution, marketing, business, etc. were all just details that would inevitably get worked out by one or another of the sharks in that grubby game. And the sharks would constantly be trying to screw the inventor out of his due. As a child I would have looked at someone who enforces patents for a living as a kind of hero. Once I reached the tech industry it was a total 180, ideas are worthless, the heroes are the engineers who can scale them and the founders who can make businesses out of them. But patent law didn’t get the memo, it’s still based on my elementary-school worldview.

freejazz 5y ago
Inventors regularly sign over their inventions to the businesses that they work for, such that the businessmen are able to make business models out of them that the engineers will scale. To be honest, I don't think you know much of how the patent system works to substantiate your comment.
- thrashh 5y ago
  Not to mention, inventions occur in manufacturing, distribution, marketing, and business too. Just because someone doesn’t have an understanding of how things work is not a justification to be dismissive.
- closeparen 5y ago
  I thought it was clear from my comment that I'm criticizing the viewpoint I received in 4th grade, i.e. I no longer believe in it. Crucially, the inventors in those hero stories were always lone wolf eccentric garage/basement guys. Corporate R&D labs did not appear.

breakyerself 5y ago

I think parent troll is a play on words. Patent trolls with children are parent trolls.

ineedasername 5y ago

cartoonishly evil villains Or the kids themselves. Though it would have been pretty hilarious if Captain Planet turned to the "camera" and told the kids honestly: "The toys you play with, including this show's action-figures, were made using the ancient decomposed remains of countless dead plants and animals, in a process every bit as bad as what you see in this show. And recycling isn't going to solve this problem."

leeoniya 5y ago

> I read a story somewhere that claimed that "Captain Planet" had to be edited to feature cartoonishly evil villains, rather than the mundane day-to-day polluters, because they were worried that kids would ask uncomfortable career questions of their parents in sectors like disposable consumer goods, plastics, petrochemical, cigarettes, etc. maybe here: https://grist.org/culture/captain-planet-planeteers-real-story/ https://grist.org/culture/captain-planet-planeteers-real-sto...