4 ms·

If it's just as easy why doesn't it happen? From what I've seen, companies seem to only challenge patents in court.

• brl 18y ago
  Well, it does happen sometimes. It's very cheap and easy to file a patent reexamination. You just need to dig up some prior art, pay about $2000 and you're good to go. You can even do this as a defense against an infringement allegation and if you're lucky the court will suspend proceedings pending the outcome of the reexamination. The hard part is knowing in advance what frivolous bullshit patent the trolls are going to throw at you.
• anamax 18y ago
  > If it's just as easy why doesn't it happen? From what I've seen, companies seem to only challenge patents in court. Why do you think that what you see of the US patent system is representative of how it works? If you're relying on news, you don't have a chance. News is almost always a conflict account, typically written by someone who doesn't understand the system. When a patent holder sues someone, that's a court case. At that point, the sued may well file a reexamination request, but they're also likely to make an in-court invalidation request. (The RIM case has some interesting twists having to do with the combination of these factors.) You'll hear about the latter but the former isn't part of the case. FWIW, there are some fairly prominent reexamination cases that folks who follow the US patent system would be aware of. One is Amazon's one-click patent.