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Patent troll Sable pays up, dedicates all its patents to the public
- samuelec 2y agoToday the world is a better place. Thank you!
- RantyDave 2y agoCan someone explain what a "line card" is that a network card isn't?
- thrance 2y agoKudos to Cloudflare. The mere existence of patent trolls should be enough to see how sick our current intellectual properties and copyright laws are.
- bartread 2y agoYeah, hats off to them. That was a great read, and I certainly appreciate their efforts to give these kinds of "businesses" the absolute kicking they deserve. Somebody or some organisation had to start standing up to patent trolls for the situation to change and kudos to Cloudflare for choosing to be that organisation. Hopefully it will encourage others to do likewise.
- barfingclouds 2y agoI think companies small and large should pay for an insurance that will obliterate patent trolls with legal fees. They often win by bullying individual small companies. But if there’s a collective response then maybe they can’t get so far?
- colejohnson66 2y agoLawsuit insurance is a thing for companies. But the policies probably only pay if you take the cheaper option of settling.
- tmtvl 2y agoIs there a list of the patents being dedicated to the public somewhere? I would love to know if there's anything useful among them.
- mattferderer 2y agoCongratulations to Cloudflare! Stepping up as the Newegg of the 2020s! Proud to be a customer.
- SideQuark 2y ago> We do this by asking the public to help identify prior art that can invalidate any of the patents that a troll holds It's easy to split patents into separate companies for lawsuits, so it's harder or impossible to find these other patents.
- artursapek 2y agoWhat a massive waste of human effort. Patent trolls should be publicly executed.
- Kim_Bruning 2y agoWeren't folks lobbying for new laws to make these defenses stop working again?
- Cort3z 2y agoWhy is patent trolls even a thing? I thought you had to have a clear intention of using the patent in a product for it to be valid. How is it not a 5 minute court case showing how the patent trolls have no employees other than lawyers, which shows clearly that there is no intent to make a product?
- anakaine 2y agoGo Cloudflare! Public good! Now, hopefully this emboldens others who have been suffering from patent trolls or ADA claims to fight back. Bambu Labs vs Stratasys would be another wonderful fight that would push community driven development forward.
- runamuck 2y agoI consider this a victory for creativity, freedom and technological progress. Let the entrepreneurs innovate and execute without fear of legal suffocation!
- ta988 2y agoIt is really sad to see kost companies refused to fight. Congrats on that one Cloudflare, may that serve as an example to destroy those grifters.
- yashap 2y agoYou can see why, though. Even in this case where they thoroughly won, and got damages, the damages were just $225K, and they probably spent millions on legal fees, employee/founder time, etc. Ultimately, the American legal system is pretty broken. If someone brings a frivolous lawsuit against you, and you defend yourself in court, nearly 100% of the time you’ll be losing money, often a lot of money. This is the core reason why patent trolls exist, why companies normally settle out of court - it’s cheaper to do so.
- jgrahamc 2y agoBut if we'd given in to one of these trolls, others would have targetted us.
- yashap 2y agoAgreed, it’s a lose-lose situation really. But the reason most companies just settle is that going to trial is so expensive, and the American legal system allows these frivolous lawsuits while generally awarding either no compensatory damages, or damages far below the cost of the defence.
- whatshisface 2y agoA few states have passed laws to ban abusers from the legal system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation#United_St...
- AlbertCory 2y agoUsually a "vexatious litigant" is not one of these patent trolls, but some nut job who spends his days at the courthouse.
- aduffy 2y agoThese patent trolls are greedy, extractive, and contribute nothing to society while wasting vast public and private legal resources. Fuck. Them. Excellent work to the entire litigation team at Cloudflare.
- schlipity 2y agoAre these patent trolls doing anything that normal companies with patents that try to monetize them don't do?
- s1artibartfast 2y agoNo, but the argument would be that normal companies are doing something that patent trolls are: selling a product besides patents
- lfmunoz4 2y agoYou would hope companies have patents based on something actually innovative. For software this is never the case. I think all software patents are bs.
- harrison_clarke 2y agoit's what they don't do. a troll doesn't play any role in developing the tech they hold patents for, they just extract rent when someone stumbles into a similar solution if a company doesn't develop products, but they actively license their patents to those that do, that's still patents working as intended, and not trolling. they're still helping to get the tech developed, rather than stifling it (i think there are a lot of problems with software patents even when used as intended by real companies. mainly, they last too long)
- petesergeant 2y agoI dunno, this line of reasoning doesn’t feel right to me. A company making products did develop the technology. They were awarded a patent. That patent was an asset. That asset was sold presumably for the benefit of the people behind the original company. That the resulting asset owner wasn’t the originator doesn’t feel like it should make any difference here? Software patents are a scourge, I’m just not sure the reasoning there holds.
- stickfigure 2y agoI really wish this settlement included disclosing what the other trolled parties ("including Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, SonicWall, and Juniper Networks") paid.
- rnd0 2y agoWhat does "to the public" mean in this instance? Are they going to an open source patent pool or something?
- jgrahamc 2y agoFrom TFA: "Sable has agreed to dedicate its entire patent portfolio to the public. This means that Sable will tell the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that it gives up all of its legal rights to its patent portfolio. Sable can never again use these patents to sue for infringement; they can never again use these patents to try to make a quick buck."
- petee 2y agoI'm confused that CF says they also were granted royalty free rights to the patents...how can they cloudflare have specific rights yet all the patents are public?
- bean-weevil 2y agoYou're right, it's redundant. Cloudflare gets the sane rights under the dedication as they do from the license.
- pwg 2y ago> Are they going to an open source patent pool or something? All patents are "open for public access" [1]. And once they age past their "expiration date" (currently twenty years from earliest date of filing) they become "public property". What Sable is doing is giving up the ability to restrict others based on the patents content's before those patents would normally have expired anyway. So in effect they are having the patents "expire early" -- which makes the contents of each become "public property". [1] https://www.uspto.gov/patents/search https://www.uspto.gov/patents/search
- textlapse 2y agoThis is great. I do worry that a future more sinister malicious patent troll could read all the wonderful strategy Cloudflare used and work around them. Hopefully Cloudflare legal team got stronger! Kudos to the likes of Cloudflare and (yesteryears’) Newegg that fought these trolls. I shudder at the thought of how many of the existing legacy industries outside the computer space are still riddled with these patent portfolio companies :(
- ikekkdcjkfke 2y agoHopefully the powers that be will look at it from a national security perspective, in that other countries do not respect US copyright law and may be pulling ahead
- AlbertCory 2y agocopyrights are different from patents.
- zeroCalories 2y agoCopyright, patents, it doesn't matter. It's all IP and our enemies do not respect it. We need to move forward with that reality.
- lionkor 2y agoAren't most of those "enemies" enemies by choice?
- chgs 2y agoTrademarks help the user. If I buy a can of brown sludge I want to know it’s sold by the Coca Cola company. If anyone could sell their stuff as “coca cola” that would harm me, the consumer, as it takes information away from me.
- macintux 2y agoPatents are explicitly open for anyone to see. I don't know that we need more help there: you can get a product banned from import if someone uses your patent without recompense.
- Xeoncross 2y agoSo Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, SonicWall, and Juniper Networks paid millions to Sable. Sable paid $225k to Cloudflare, and won't use them again against anyone. Sounds like they don't need to. Well played Sable. Enjoy your money. I really wish we could publicly shame the people behind these abuses or provide some other incentive to correct bad behavior other than speeding-ticket sized fines. In other news, as an investor, this tells me Cloudflare is technologically ahead of the other older companies who apparently were not sure they could defend against the claims.
- ivanbakel 2y ago>In other news, as an investor, this tells me Cloudflare is technologically ahead of the other older companies who apparently were not sure they could defend against the claims. That feels like a highly specious takeaway from this court case. Companies settle against trolls because litigation isn't free to fight. It can make very good financial sense (and even be encouraged by investors who don't want to see a company in the courts for years, as Cloudflare was.) I would be highly interested to see the breakdown of what it cost in manhours, fees, prizes to Project Jengo, etc. versus the payout from Sable to fight this particular case for Cloudflare, and whether they even came close to breaking even just on this case alone. Likely their decision somewhat hinged on an estimate of what it might cost to settle all other patent disputes in the future, and the belief that fighting this case is actually saving them much more money down the line (but how much?).
- cryptonym 2y agoWhile fighting trolls is morally the good thing to do, there is also an image/marketing benefit,. That can help balance risks.
- swiftcoder 2y agoOn the flip side, there's some napkin math to be done about the costs saved by any future patent trolls who are averted by going all scorched earth this time around...
- AlbertCory 2y ago
- AlbertCory 2y agoCloudflare's redeemed themselves, bigtime. A lot of patent trolls have no assets, and don't own anything except the patents they're currently milking. Then they go out of business, and there's nothing to sue. Sable apparently made the mistake of building up a portfolio and living on. > Proving invalidity to a jury is hard. The burden on the defendant is high: Cloudflare needed to prove by clear and convincing evidence that claim 25 is invalid. And, proving it by describing how the claim is obvious in light of the prior art is complicated. You're not kidding. > Sable’s damages expert, Stephen Dell, told the jury that Sable was owed somewhere between $25 million and $94.2 million in damages. "damages experts" == nice work if you can get it. The damage expert in the Apple v. Samsung trial that I went to was paid $2 million. "How much are you getting paid?" is always one of the first things they get asked on cross-examination. > Sable has agreed to dedicate its entire patent portfolio to the public. This means that Sable will tell the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that it gives up all of its legal rights to its patent portfolio Left unsaid is whether this includes anything other than the patents that they already lost on. Anyhow: great work, Cloudflare.
- vladde 2y agoCould someone explain to me why it was decided that Sable will release the patents to the public?
- ISL 2y agoWith the verdict in-hand, Sable was probably voluntold by Cloudflare. If Cloudflare thought they had a shot at recovering costs, $225k and a patent-portfolio could be substantially less than whatever Cloudflare (or their insurance) had paid in defense-costs.
- lccerina 2y agoThey had those patents only to sue other companies and get money, now some of those patents were invalidated by prior art and to Sable are essentially toilet paper. The action is unlikely to be goodwill, more likely admitting defeat and closing the patent troll company.
- usrusr 2y agoCould a part of the motivation perhaps be quick, clean liquidation, before any of the companies who settled before cloudflare chose resistance might try to claw back some of the settlement?
- pclmulqdq 2y agoAs I read this, all but one of Sable's patent claims got invalidated in an IPR (a patent proceeding), and the last one got invalidated by a jury at trial. When your patents have no claims left, you aren't doing anything by releasing the patents to the public. It's been defanged anyway.
- psunavy03 2y agoSo they can't use them to sue anyone else ever again. Basically they're hosed.
- thrtythreeforty 2y agoCloudflare has negotiating power. They would prefer to give up some of the legal cost recoup in exchange for the public crucifixion of the trolling firm. It's intentionally painting a very scary picture of what happens when you sue Cloudflare, as a deterrent.
- ISL 2y agoHas Cloudflare stated anywhere how much their defense cost them (or their insurance)?
- NikolaNovak 2y agoI've read the article but I'm not sure I understand : 1. Why / how did sable give up its patent portfolio? It's handwaved as "lots of post trial stuff" but what's the nutshell of it? Is it because they're marked invalid? Is it punitive ruling? Something else? 2. There were 4 patents brought up against cloud flare, but sable gave up "its entire portfolio". Does that mean these 4 were their entire portfolio? Or did they have to give up patents outside of suit itself? If so, how and why? Did sable hang up the hat as a business?
- glenstein 2y ago>1. Why / how did sable give up its patent portfolio? It's handwaved as "lots of post trial stuff" but what's the nutshell of it? Is it because they're marked invalid? Is it punitive ruling? Something else? Great Q and I don't know the answer. My best guess from the article is that Sable effectively agreed to settle rather than continue with post-trial legal procedures (whatever those are) that would have been necessary: >A jury verdict is not the end of the road in a patent case ... there are post-trial motions, appeals, and other procedural hurdles to jump through before a case is truly over. Tired from the fight, and smarting from its loss, Sable decided it wanted to throw in the towel and end the fight once and for all.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoSable's patents are from a company that stopped operations in 2006, so most patents are probably from well before then, and likely either expired or will very soon.
- sbarre 2y agoCould it be that the Cloudflare victory would basically give anyone in the future a very strong case to fight Sable with? And so this portfolio of patents has lost most of its value because of that? Maybe Cloudflare agreed to reduced damages in exchange for this? I agree it's unclear.
- sowbug 2y agoTake a look at the legal doctrine of collateral estoppel. Once a party gets its day in court on a specific issue of fact, it can't keep relitigating that issue in later legal actions. It's possible that Cloudflare was the first to take Sable's claims all the way to a verdict (versus settling early), so Sable might have finally gotten its day in court. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_estoppel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_estoppel
- HelloNurse 2y agoAre there useful patents (i.e. worth using) in the Sable portfolio, or is it all trivial bullshit and obsolete hardware?
- ajsnigrutin 2y agoPatents should have a triviality clause in them, so if you can prove that they're trivial to create and implement and be thus invalid if they are. On one hand, you have patents where someone needed to do thousands of experiments, often costly, years of research to invent some kind of procedure to do X and thus should have some protections from others just taking the implementation and doing it cheaper, because they don't have the development costs. On the other, you can patent "Page down button on the keyboard moves the screen down one full page (A4) instead of one screen size"
- pwg 2y ago> Patents should have a triviality clause in them, so if you can prove that they're trivial to create and implement and be thus invalid if they are. That's already there (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/103 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/103) > A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. The problem is that unless the USPTO can find the requisite publications to prove the "obvious" part above from the statute, that then knocking down the resulting issued patent in a court case can be a very expensive effort. > On the other, you can patent "Page down button on the keyboard moves the screen down one full page (A4) instead of one screen size" Applicant's get patents because the USPTO can't find the publications necessary to prove they do not deserve to get the patent (there's also lack of time problems that I'm ignoring at the moment). For your premise, often the reason why "Page Down moves by 'printed page'" might get patented is the lack of any findable publication of anything stating such. The USPTO examiner's don't have the ability to just say "but this is the way it works....", they have to find some publication, somewhere, that said "this is the way it works...". For things like "how much movement 'PageDown' means", finding publications that state "how much" is extremely difficult.
- pjc50 2y ago> For things like "how much movement 'PageDown' means", finding publications that state "how much" is extremely difficult. Yes .. because it's too trivial to write down.
- lccerina 2y agoIn a sane law system, the existence of a company as a mere "box of patents" without any real product currently or previously on the market would be illegal, and these patent trolls won't exist...
- bityard 2y agoI don't think they should be illegal... companies that don't "produce" anything are useful for lots of different legitimate reasons. But the bar for suing for damages should be a lot higher than just, "we happen to own the patents."
- burmanm 2y agoWhere would you draw a line for "any real product" ? ARM for example doesn't actually produce any "real" (physical) product, but they certainly do research and produce technology for other companies to build products on. There's a lot of "on paper" companies around the world who actually do produce novel technologies even if they don't themselves create the end product, but instead sell their inventions to other parties.
- wildrhythms 2y agoThis problem is already solved by a Patent License Agreement. I don't know why people think this is a difficult problem. It's not.
- MrDrMcCoy 2y agoIt actually is a difficult problem. Not only could the patent holder want to charge too much for the license, they may not want to grant a license at all. The problem is that patent holders have a monopoly when they should not. Licensing should be compulsory, at reasonable rates.
- marcosdumay 2y agoSo, no researcher can own a company. Why did everybody just accept the idea that what makes a troll is them having no product when the problem is clear the high costs of litigation and low quality of the patents (and the patents selection)? IBM is the largest and most destructive patent troll around. And all of that is just propaganda designed to make it and other companies like it rich.
- dpratt 2y agoWell, it's nice to know that Sable's entire portfolio is going into the public domain, it's a shame that the likely 50-100 other shell companies owned by this troll still have an arsenal of useless, but incredibly complicated, patents to use to extort money. A just world would involve piercing the corporate veil and imposing personal consequences on the owner of this company.
- 20after4 2y agoI guess it's safe to assume that the public domain gained roughly zero (or perhaps negative) value from this portfolio of garbage.
- qalmakka 2y agoWhy are patent trolls allowed to exist? A company that only holds patents and does no productive job with them (research, production, ...) should not be allowed to exist. It stifles development and innovation for the short-lived monetary gain of a few people.
- pas 2y agoThe naive explanation is that it helps inventors, because speculative investors (the trolls!) buy up patents. One analogy is pharma research. Rights for a promising candidate molecule are purchased by "big pharma" and they will do the grunt work to validate it and extract the big money from its therapeutic value. Substitute "FDA market authorization after successful clinical trials" with "that infamous East Texas court district and picking the right targets" (picking a too big target might backfire, picking a too small doesn't really worth the costs, etc.) Of course the questions are: does this really help inventors? do inventors need help? is it good for society that inventors get help? is the cost of helping inventors this way not unreasonable to the economy? and even if the cost is "low", how fucking fair is it that a lot of businesses are using a given invention but only a lucky few get dragged to court? can we do better? what kind of people patent trolls are? what do they do with the money?
- returningfory2 2y agoYeah, I think pharma is the really tricky case. I worked at a small biotech company whose business model was (in part) to do early stage drug discovery research and then sell promising leads to bigger companies, who would take the leads through the FDA approval process. Actually taking a drug through to approval is a $1 billion+ endeavor (with a high probability that it just won't work; e.g. stage 3 trials just fail). Small companies cannot do this. So a naive solution like "don't allow patents to be sold" actually restricts a bunch of reasonable businesses.
- ajb 2y agoThere's an actionable difference between pharma and most other things. Property rights should "give notice" of the boundaries of a property, most obviously you lose certain rights if you fail to mark the edge of real property with a fence or something. But for most patents there's no realistic way to find patents you might be infringing (for software this is impossible in the general case as a corollary of Fines theorem). That's why we hate patents so much: you only find out if there is a patent if you get sued. But for pharma there is a way; chemicals are "indexable": because a standard mapping from chemical structure to names exists, if you are using a chemical and want to find whether anyone patented it, you can do so easily. In an ideal world, the law would recognise this and patents would only be valid in areas where there is a natural way of indexing - which is pretty much only pharma AFAICT
- btrettel 2y agoAs a former patent examiner, I was struck by how low the payout for Project Jengo was. $125,000 for all people submitting prior art? (There were hundreds of submissions, so it's split among many people.) I would like to help out with such things and I think I have the experience to do it well, but even being a GS-7 patent examiner making $75,000 per year is a better deal! That's especially true given that Cloudflare's not only expecting people to find prior art, but to also write the legal arguments about why it reads on Sable's claims. If they're serious about their prior art bounty program, they're going to need to increase the bounties. Actual patent search firms charge a lot more money, and even lowly paid bureaucrats make a lot more.
- tripzilch 2y ago[flagged]
- btrettel 2y agoYour comments throughout this thread strike me as particularly off base. Both I and Gene Quinn agree that patent trolls are bad, but think that the problem has been exaggerated in the media. That doesn't make me a shill. I'm happy to see trolls defeated in court. And I don't work for a patent troll, or work for the highest bidder. (First job I took after quitting the USPTO was in academia and paid significantly less than the USPTO.) As I said in other comments, I haven't worked in patents since leaving the USPTO.
- mikaeluman 2y agoGiven the result, it seems 125k was a bit too high since they got so many submissions so easily. The market sets the price, regardless of what we personally think is "fair".
- benreesman 2y agoI have this stubborn cognitive bias that CloudFlare is a good thing, I think it’s because OG hackers from HN started it: jgrahamc and that lot are the real deal. Time and time again it’s like: “CloydFlare discovers way to be evil that even Google didn’t figure out! News at 10.” Dear Jesus, all I want for Hanukah is that fly.io doesn’t end up like that.
- carowl 2y ago[flagged]
- red_admiral 2y agoSomeone messed with the wrong guy. If you don't mind the language, the first minute of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLLt9bnRdlE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLLt9bnRdlE comes to mind for how to deal with incompetent trolls. Comedy gold.
- abetancort 2y agoHum... Doesn't clouldfare have patents of their own? Don't they enforce them? Did they turn them to the public domain? You have to love hypocrites.
- pjc50 2y agoI don't know, do they? There's an important difference between patenting something that you've invented and built, and a patent troll which has done neither.
- abetancort 2y agoThe patent troll buys patents from inventors and then spend money enforcing it. Not much different from Cloudfare paying salaries to the inventors to become the patent holders and then enforcing it against third-parties. Tech patents exist because companies like Clouldflare want to because they make money with them (suing people). If companies like Cloudfare did want all tech patents to be gone, they would be gone and no patent troll would be able to do anything about. And they try lure you with $5.000 to do the work to get them off the hook? They are cheap and bunch hypocrites.
- sophacles 2y agoDo you have any evidence of Cloudflare suing people for violating their patents. Seems like you'd be able to back up this claim since it's a core component of your argument. Also, your reasoning seems to leave out a world of possibilities for why someone would hold a patent - its worth looking up the thinking around defensive patent portfolios. These exist for a few reasons.... patents might be strategically filed to: * have prior art on the record to keep a market open... e.g. preventing a competitor from monopolizing a space. * have patents available for counter-suit against competitors suing over patent violation of some bit of tech that uses both. * impress investors * provide recognition to employees. At least in the US patents are filed by individuals, and the rights of the patent are then assigned to the company. Granted patents usually come with bonuses, as well as a nice resume padding that helps the engineers involved get higher salaries in the future.
- bithavoc 2y agoThank you Cloudflare (there, I said it for you)
- dangoodmanUT 2y agopatent trolls have a special place in hell, next to the boiler room
- mnemotronic 2y agoinside the boiler
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoGood on ya! > the Western District of Texas against patent trolls That means they had really good lawyers. I had a friend that lived in that area, many moons ago. He showed me a few of their local newspapers. They were filled with stories about "plucky innovators," fighting against "corporate vested interests." It seems they have a fairly well-prepped jury pool, thereabouts.
- AlbertCory 2y agoIt used to be the Eastern District of Texas, with Justice Rodney Gilstrap. I never went to Marshall or Tyler, but I knew a lot of people who did. They're small towns. I don't know when it shifted to the Western District. Waco is not nearly as rural as East Texas; it's halfway between Dallas and Austin.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI’m not that familiar with the area. I know that he said the nearest large town was Dallas. Those papers were a hoot, though…
- robterrell 2y agoIt's thanks to Judge Albright: https://www2.law.temple.edu/10q/how-the-west-became-the-east-the-patent-litigation-explosion-in-the-western-district-of-texas/ https://www2.law.temple.edu/10q/how-the-west-became-the-east... Plaintiffs file in Waco to get Albright -- if they filed in Austin, they wouldn't get him. Then they make a motion to move it to Austin, which he grants if he can based on schedules, and if it can move there, he still presides over it.
- AlbertCory 2y agoGreat, thanks. Taking over from Judge Gilstrap the Darth Vader role.
- bilater 2y agoGood news! There should be a rule that you have to use a patent in X years (much less than the lifetime) so its harder to do this behavior of hoarding a patent.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoThere is a rule that you have to build the thing that you patent. Most of the time this sort of trolling happens, a company that built the thing went bankrupt, possibly due to the infringement (but not in this case).
- xp84 2y agoCan you explain/cite? I wasn't aware of this requirement.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago"Reduction to practice" is the requirement. You have to either build the thing or describe it in enough detail that proves that you have built the thing.
- bilater 2y agoIf that's the case how do these patent troll companies sit on thousands of patents? Or they likely milk it to the last day of that time window before it expires I guess.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoPatent trolls buy them from people who reduced them to practice and then went out of business. Their inventions being copied is often part of why those companies went out of business. Without patent trolls, there would be no reason for startups to get patents - you are just going to go bankrupt before the litigation finishes otherwise.
- gwbas1c 2y ago> Sable agreed to pay Cloudflare $225,000, ... and to dedicate its patents to the public, ensuring that Sable can never again assert them against another company. Makes me wonder if Cloudflare could have sued to "life the corporate veil" and go after the people who owned / operated the company. (IE, sue them so they loose their homes.) Also makes me wonder if this is in the playbook the next time a patent troll comes sniffing around. Somewhat related: In MA, to fight NIMBY-ism, we passed a law that people suing new housing developments can be forced to put up a deposit, without requiring proof that the case has merit. I wonder if a similar law could help with patent trolls: IE, making it easier that the plantiff put up a deposit when suing for violating their patent.
- chuckadams 2y agoPiercing the corporate veil usually only happens when there's both criminal malfeasance involved and personal resources are intermingled with the company's so that individual and corporate actions are largely indistinguishable. Sable might have been a fetid pond of rancid scum, but they were still a legal operation.
- mnemotronic 2y agoThat payout to Cloudflare seems really, really low, considering the claims postulated by sable ip. I think $225M would be a more convincing way of de-incentivizing patent trolls.
- ryukoposting 2y agoThe excerpts from the Borchers testimony are a riot. > The responsible business people in this business actually sit down and talk to folks before they sue them, fair? > Fair. > And you don't do that, do you, sir? > No. I'm not a fan of Cloudflare in general. I think "Browser Integrity Check" is banal malware, the McAfee of the Web 2.0 era. But this? I love this. Settling with a patent troll out of court is cowardly.
- Spivak 2y agoBut in the settlement they got to ask for something the court can't grant them. Cloudflare could have settled in court and got more money but this is better, no?
- anentropic 2y agoI think parent comment is referring to the other companies before Cloudflare who settled out of court with Sable, not Cloudflare who just destroyed them in court.
- eob 2y agoA Project Jengo grant for using Agents/LLMs to identify prior art could be a fantastic experiment..
- breck 2y agoThank you cloudflare! Fighting patents is god's^god work. Patents are poison. Patenting your invention is like poisoning your children. Never do it. We need to abolish these things. They were a great way to build a centralized public library of all new inventions in the early days of the Union at no cost to the government, but now are purely a drag on innovation and society and create horrible incentives that lead to things like the Opioid crisis. ^god feel free to find/replace this with nature/universe/humanity etc.
- hermitcrab 2y agoKudos to Cloudflare. Patent trolls are parasites. The sooner they are all put out of business, the better.
- silexia 2y agoPlease please please banish the patent system already. It is solely used by corrupt lawyers to persecute and rob successful entrepreneurs.
- epolanski 2y agoThis is a very bad take. Patents most important goal is to protect entrepreneurs and the resources they spend in R&D and to promote entrepreneurship and innovation. Imagine spending millions on developing, say, a new method to produce something at 1/10th a cost. Now imagine a world without patents, where competitors can just copy your process. Who's gonna invest and innovate? Apply that to everything from batteries to telecom from anything healthcare to car engines, etc. Without patents we would not have the same technological evolution.
- 20after4 2y agoEven with a patent it's not that easy to stop someone from copying your invention. They can just change it a little bit and tada, now it's not a violation. Or a company in China can clone everything about your invention, right down to the marketing copy and aspects of the branding. Then they can buy placement on amazon.com to steal your market and drink your milkshake essentially zero consequences.
- silexia 2y agoIdeas are worthless, execution is everything. Famous mantra on old school HN, and the same philosophy held by some of the most famous inventors in history such as Ford, Edison, Musk, etc.
- throwaway48476 2y agoWe seriously need patent reform. I propose all patents should require a prototype to be demonstrated that embodies all claims in the patent.
- fennecfoxy 2y agoExactly, patents used to be for inventors. Now they're for "idea men" MBAs that spitball some bullshit idea with the half-listened-to assistance of a couple tech people. I feel like there are so many patents in the pool that are just companies waiting for a technology to be actually invented by a clever engineer - but bc the company had the "idea" they have the rights to it. At that point we may as well automate it by having an LLM spit out ideas en masse.
- gleenn 2y agoWhile noble, the immediate strategy with that is that prototypes can be overwhelming expensive in time and money to produce. Patents are supposed to protect inventors, but if that's the bar then right out the gate you are favoring the corporate behemoths who have the resources and can then just snatch the idea and weasle out the not-so-resource laden inventor. This is the type of thing where there seems like there should be easy solutions to the problems but a little nuance reveals that these things are very lucrative and some level of corporate apparatus will find a way to abuse the system and reap potentially hefty winning at the expense of the actual people coming up with stuff.
- baby_souffle 2y agoWould a better approach be to limit the amount of damages that can be claimed to some multiple of whatever the patent generates in revenue? A patent that’s only sitting in a war chest and not being used to actually enrich the owner would be able to claim damages of zero if somebody else was found to be infringing
- throwaway48476 2y agoNo, inventions that are never produced have no value and do not need protection. For most things prototypes are cheap and production is expensive. The patent system already gives you a provisional year if you're not quite ready but want to stake a claim.
- zoom6628 2y agoWould love to see results of all such prior-art research work going to EFF and patent offices to build a database for troll-crushing by anybody who needs it. Once refutation is made much easier and far less expensive then is much harder for trolls to operate.
- ggm 2y agoAre patent trolls a uniquely American disease or do they just thrive in a patent rich environment which America is? I don't recall any famous European patent trolling cases.
- robertclaus 2y agoI would love more details on how the case transitioned to the counter-suit. I feel like going from Cloudflare owing millions to dissolving all the troll's patents was more complex than the article implies.
- scotty79 2y agoIt's amazing that they got them to admit, "yup, we are patent trolls, nothing we do is reasonable, suing people is our entire business, you got us, we are giving our patents so we can't do this again".
- jb1991 2y agoThis is a small win for a company, but one giant win for mankind.
- khafra 2y agoLotta proposed solutions to the patent troll problem in this comment section, and they all have bad unintended consequences. So here's mine: Institute a new tax on rent-seeking. Tax rent-seekers for close to 100% of the value they extract (basically a version of Georgism generalized to everything, instead of just real estate). This would require basically a second IRS, and they would occasionally get things wrong and stifle value-producing businesses, but if it was at all effective it would be a net benefit to the economy instead of a net drag on it, and it could easily pull in enough revenue to let us eliminate income tax.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- saagarjha 2y agoOk, and what do you define as rent-seeking?
- khafra 2y agoWikipedia: growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Obviously, we have to also tax people who are free-riding on the social or political manipulations of others--not every real estate owner profiting from a 5x increase in property value was actually involved in NIMBY political actions, and not every patent troll worked toward creating judicial conditions conducive to their trolling.
- saagarjha 2y agoNo, you misunderstood. What do you define as rent-seeking, in a way that can be enforced? Clearly everyone hates patent trolls. But even here it is hard to come up with rules that affect them but not "legitimate investors" or whatever. Yes, everyone wants the evil to be punished. But how are you to decide who they are?
- khafra 2y ago