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Fair enough. Replace "I" with "someone" in my previous comment. I can see why people would do these patent searches, but I still think it's a bad idea for those

Fair enough. Replace "I" with "someone" in my previous comment. I can see why people would do these patent searches, but I still think it's a bad idea for those folks do these patent searches for so little.

barkingcat 2y ago
isn't this exactly the point? from the viewpoint you've presented it's a bad idea to volunteer for basically anything. even something like enlisting in a nation's armed forces is a bad idea since the risk is so high vs the monetary reward, and the only way people would become soldiers is to join mercenary armies where there is a price exacted that matches the performance. for many people, they value the intangible more than the money.
- btrettel 2y ago
  Okay, I think appreciate your perspective and that of some others here more. If you all think it's a good use of your time, go ahead. Personally, I have more pressing concerns. And for what it's worth, (and I know this won't be popular here) the entire patent troll narrative is overblown, which seems to be the consensus opinion of people working in patent law. For example, see this blog post: https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/06/22/myths-patent-trolls-prevent-honest-discussion-patent-system/id=84598/ https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/06/22/myths-patent-trolls-preven... Given that I think the narrative is overblown, I don't really see this as a "public service". It's a problem, sure, but it's not a major one.
  - scbrg 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - kortilla 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - Multiplayer 2y ago
    I think the severity of this problem depends on context. I can share that as a small startup we had a patent troll come after us and it was almost fatal because it shattered our fund raising process. We prevailed and lived to fight another day but that was an incredibly unproductive and stressful time. So I see this differently as do the many team members who kept their jobs and made good money when we were acquired.
  - feoren 2y ago
    Wow, that is an awful article. Straw-manning everyone who wants patent reform as "those who prefer to take technologies they did not innovate rather than pay a reasonable royalty to innovators." Multiple paragraphs devoted to tearing down the straw-man argument "every company that tries to enforce its patents is a patent troll" -- which nobody is claiming. An insane argument about how "America's technology companies" are hypocritical because both the trolls and the ones complaining about trolls are technology companies -- so what? That's like when people claim "Reddit" is hypocritical. They're different people! That author is barely even trying to hide his extreme slant, and you posting an obviously extremely biased article as some sort of evidence dramatically undermines your opinion on the topic and frankly calls into question the limits of "assume good faith".
  - mlyle 2y ago
    My first startup had 3 different firms with no real product try to shake us down using patents with obvious prior art at different times. It was a major distraction and costly in resources when we had limited capital. We did manage to convince them all to go away, but it might have been cheaper to just pay them off. I'm guessing that all they really wanted was a long list of capitulations and licensees before litigating against the big guys. I'm not surprised that the IPR industry which thrives upon resulting legal fees is less inclined to view things as trolling and any trolling that happens to be not too severe, though. ;)
    - btrettel 2y ago
      Sorry to hear about your experience. To reply to you and some others: I'm not saying that patent trolling is not a problem. My point is that it's not as big a problem as commonly believed (in terms of total monetary losses over the US). The real problem is poor patent quality, which goes beyond patent trolling but does allow trolls to exist in the first place. For those who want to do a public service, address poor patent quality as it's the root cause.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > And for what it's worth, (and I know this won't be popular here) the entire patent troll narrative is overblown, which seems to be the consensus opinion of people working in patent law. "People working in patent law" have a conflict of interest. The arguments being made in that link are practically in bad faith, e.g.: > Google and Uber are locked in a patent battle over self-driving automobiles, so does that make Google and Uber patent trolls? The ordinary definition of a patent troll is a firm that sues for patent infringement as its primary business. Say what you will about Google and Uber, they clearly derive the bulk of their revenue from offering products and services to the public. > As we consider all of this it is also important to keep in mind that the U.S. tech sector spending on patent trolls is less than 1% of all IT spending. If you compare a smaller number to a bigger number, the bigger number is bigger. But the thing that matters isn't the size of the problem relative to the size of the industry, it's whether the shakedowns are net positive or net negative. For software patents in particular, it's the latter, because software is inherently and purposely abstract. Which is incompatible with the reasonable operation of the patent system, because it makes the two viable strategies to patent the abstraction or to patent some specific implementation which is required for compatibility, so that alternate implementations can't be used without disrupting interoperability. Otherwise the number of alternate software implementations of any given abstraction are so large that nobody would purposely use somebody else's software patent, they'd just create their own non-infringing implementation of the same abstraction. But patenting the abstraction itself is not supposed to be allowed (even though these patents are all too often granted) and using a patent for the purposes of preventing interoperability should be an antitrust violation for the same reason as tying is illegal even when the original monopoly was lawfully obtained, because the value you're extracting isn't the value of the invention, it's the value of compatibility with the existing system. And then there's nothing of merit left.
  - eastdakota 2y ago
    You do? You’ve spent more time here commenting than some of the people who got paid under Project Jengo. #odd
    - btrettel 2y ago
      You're right. I do think arguing with people on the internet was a bad way to spend my day off.
  - antonvs 2y ago
    You apparently have difficulty understanding that other people have different experiences and priorities from you. This shows up in every aspect of your argument here.
ordu 2y ago
It is the same with programmers who writes open source programs just for fun of it. And I remember in 2000x there were people who thought that it is a bad idea. There were even lawsuits filled by programmers who couldn't sell their programs because they were left without customers due to open source solutions.
- otherme123 2y ago
  Or the whole Wikipedia thing, that at first was dismissed by traditional publishers, whom then were bankrupted and buried by an army of free working amateurs.
  - eastdakota 2y ago
    You don’t still consult your Encarta CD-ROM? How do you ever figure out what’s what?
intended 2y ago
For a patent search? Too little. Screwing over a patent troll? That’s priceless. No amount of money can provide that satisfaction. Heck, I’m not even impacted and I’m gleefully happy. Whoever helped deserves a free beer. Patent trolls are a blight.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  The problem is there's a lot of patent tools and only a few make the news. Passion can't win them all.
  - AlbertCory 2y ago
    > Passion can't win them all. If you do the numbers, yes it can. There are a lot of people who could do this searching.
  - intended 2y ago
    Patent trolls win because they are a protection racket, and it takes resources to fight them. This battle took 2 years, I think ?
mlyle 2y ago
I don't think it's paying most of them to do a patent search. It's a way to get media attention for people to glance at it. It's providing a nudge for them to tell you about something that they know off the top of their head. Patent trolling is a big problem, and a lot of us view opposing it in a small way as a type of community of service.
HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
That's like saying it's a bad idea to contribute to Open Source. It's a similar motivation: people want to do good in the world and don't necessarily need to be paid for it.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  I think I see his point though, and it's not quite the same as working on FOSS. He made a sibling comment about helping a "multi-billion dollar" corporation (CloudFlare) for so little reward. So in his view, this volunteer effort didn't really help regular people that much, and instead benefited a huge company mostly. People usually work on FOSS because they have a personal interest in a project, and want to share that with everyone. So we end up with stuff like device drivers for hardware where the mfgr couldn't be bothered to make a Linux driver, or various useful utilities, a whole OS (which everyone can use), etc. What we don't see much in FOSS is "enterprise software": stuff that's only really useful if you're a huge company. Where's the FOSS alternatives to proprietary human resource management systems, supply chain management systems, etc.? Generally, stuff like that doesn't exist, because no one wants to spend their free time working on things that they personally have no use for, and no one's found a good business case to make a company producing an open-source version.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 2y ago
    Taking out patents is like FOSS, though, in that the effect is that, once the patent is gone, anyone can work in that area without worrying about infringing that patent. So, even if the occasion might be a threat to a multi-billion dollar company, this is a case where helping such companies is well-aligned with the needs of the FOSS movement.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      >once the patent is gone, anyone can work in that area without worrying about infringing that patent. I agree, and that's a great point I think the patent examiner person was missing. These patents are a hazard for everyone, big or small.
the_gorilla 2y ago
You clearly don't understand how much people hate patent trolls and software patents in general. It's all a cruel joke, and getting paid some token sum of money to invalidate a bunch of worthless patents is just a nice bonus. You wouldn't do it for free because generating these patents is your job.
- btrettel 2y ago
  You are mistaken. I'm a former patent examiner as pointed out in the third word of my first comment here. So I have no conflict of interest. And I think I have a solid understanding of how much people hate patent trolls and software patents in general, which is why I added the qualifier about how I know my comment would be unpopular in some other comments here.
  - the_gorilla 2y ago
    Conflicts of interest don't really work like that. You are a patent examiner even after you stop working as one, and for as long as your loyalties and ideas remain with your former job.
    - jon_richards 2y ago
      I’d say the conflict of interest has gone away, but the years of rationalizing cognitive dissonance have solidified certain opinions.
  - eastdakota 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - dpe82 2y ago
    "I'm going to say something you hate" > Says something we hate "Why do you hate what I said?"

barkingcat 2y ago

isn't this exactly the point? from the viewpoint you've presented it's a bad idea to volunteer for basically anything. even something like enlisting in a nation's armed forces is a bad idea since the risk is so high vs the monetary reward, and the only way people would become soldiers is to join mercenary armies where there is a price exacted that matches the performance. for many people, they value the intangible more than the money.

btrettel 2y ago
Okay, I think appreciate your perspective and that of some others here more. If you all think it's a good use of your time, go ahead. Personally, I have more pressing concerns. And for what it's worth, (and I know this won't be popular here) the entire patent troll narrative is overblown, which seems to be the consensus opinion of people working in patent law. For example, see this blog post: https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/06/22/myths-patent-trolls-prevent-honest-discussion-patent-system/id=84598/ https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/06/22/myths-patent-trolls-preven... Given that I think the narrative is overblown, I don't really see this as a "public service". It's a problem, sure, but it's not a major one.
- scbrg 2y ago
  [flagged]
- kortilla 2y ago
  [flagged]
- Multiplayer 2y ago
  I think the severity of this problem depends on context. I can share that as a small startup we had a patent troll come after us and it was almost fatal because it shattered our fund raising process. We prevailed and lived to fight another day but that was an incredibly unproductive and stressful time. So I see this differently as do the many team members who kept their jobs and made good money when we were acquired.
- feoren 2y ago
  Wow, that is an awful article. Straw-manning everyone who wants patent reform as "those who prefer to take technologies they did not innovate rather than pay a reasonable royalty to innovators." Multiple paragraphs devoted to tearing down the straw-man argument "every company that tries to enforce its patents is a patent troll" -- which nobody is claiming. An insane argument about how "America's technology companies" are hypocritical because both the trolls and the ones complaining about trolls are technology companies -- so what? That's like when people claim "Reddit" is hypocritical. They're different people! That author is barely even trying to hide his extreme slant, and you posting an obviously extremely biased article as some sort of evidence dramatically undermines your opinion on the topic and frankly calls into question the limits of "assume good faith".
- mlyle 2y ago
  My first startup had 3 different firms with no real product try to shake us down using patents with obvious prior art at different times. It was a major distraction and costly in resources when we had limited capital. We did manage to convince them all to go away, but it might have been cheaper to just pay them off. I'm guessing that all they really wanted was a long list of capitulations and licensees before litigating against the big guys. I'm not surprised that the IPR industry which thrives upon resulting legal fees is less inclined to view things as trolling and any trolling that happens to be not too severe, though. ;)
  - btrettel 2y ago
    Sorry to hear about your experience. To reply to you and some others: I'm not saying that patent trolling is not a problem. My point is that it's not as big a problem as commonly believed (in terms of total monetary losses over the US). The real problem is poor patent quality, which goes beyond patent trolling but does allow trolls to exist in the first place. For those who want to do a public service, address poor patent quality as it's the root cause.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > And for what it's worth, (and I know this won't be popular here) the entire patent troll narrative is overblown, which seems to be the consensus opinion of people working in patent law. "People working in patent law" have a conflict of interest. The arguments being made in that link are practically in bad faith, e.g.: > Google and Uber are locked in a patent battle over self-driving automobiles, so does that make Google and Uber patent trolls? The ordinary definition of a patent troll is a firm that sues for patent infringement as its primary business. Say what you will about Google and Uber, they clearly derive the bulk of their revenue from offering products and services to the public. > As we consider all of this it is also important to keep in mind that the U.S. tech sector spending on patent trolls is less than 1% of all IT spending. If you compare a smaller number to a bigger number, the bigger number is bigger. But the thing that matters isn't the size of the problem relative to the size of the industry, it's whether the shakedowns are net positive or net negative. For software patents in particular, it's the latter, because software is inherently and purposely abstract. Which is incompatible with the reasonable operation of the patent system, because it makes the two viable strategies to patent the abstraction or to patent some specific implementation which is required for compatibility, so that alternate implementations can't be used without disrupting interoperability. Otherwise the number of alternate software implementations of any given abstraction are so large that nobody would purposely use somebody else's software patent, they'd just create their own non-infringing implementation of the same abstraction. But patenting the abstraction itself is not supposed to be allowed (even though these patents are all too often granted) and using a patent for the purposes of preventing interoperability should be an antitrust violation for the same reason as tying is illegal even when the original monopoly was lawfully obtained, because the value you're extracting isn't the value of the invention, it's the value of compatibility with the existing system. And then there's nothing of merit left.
- eastdakota 2y ago
  You do? You’ve spent more time here commenting than some of the people who got paid under Project Jengo. #odd
  - btrettel 2y ago
    You're right. I do think arguing with people on the internet was a bad way to spend my day off.
- antonvs 2y ago
  You apparently have difficulty understanding that other people have different experiences and priorities from you. This shows up in every aspect of your argument here.

ordu 2y ago

It is the same with programmers who writes open source programs just for fun of it. And I remember in 2000x there were people who thought that it is a bad idea. There were even lawsuits filled by programmers who couldn't sell their programs because they were left without customers due to open source solutions.

otherme123 2y ago
Or the whole Wikipedia thing, that at first was dismissed by traditional publishers, whom then were bankrupted and buried by an army of free working amateurs.
- eastdakota 2y ago
  You don’t still consult your Encarta CD-ROM? How do you ever figure out what’s what?

intended 2y ago

For a patent search? Too little. Screwing over a patent troll? That’s priceless. No amount of money can provide that satisfaction. Heck, I’m not even impacted and I’m gleefully happy. Whoever helped deserves a free beer. Patent trolls are a blight.

throwaway48476 2y ago
The problem is there's a lot of patent tools and only a few make the news. Passion can't win them all.
- AlbertCory 2y ago
  > Passion can't win them all. If you do the numbers, yes it can. There are a lot of people who could do this searching.
- intended 2y ago
  Patent trolls win because they are a protection racket, and it takes resources to fight them. This battle took 2 years, I think ?

mlyle 2y ago

I don't think it's paying most of them to do a patent search. It's a way to get media attention for people to glance at it. It's providing a nudge for them to tell you about something that they know off the top of their head. Patent trolling is a big problem, and a lot of us view opposing it in a small way as a type of community of service.

HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago

That's like saying it's a bad idea to contribute to Open Source. It's a similar motivation: people want to do good in the world and don't necessarily need to be paid for it.

shiroiushi 2y ago
I think I see his point though, and it's not quite the same as working on FOSS. He made a sibling comment about helping a "multi-billion dollar" corporation (CloudFlare) for so little reward. So in his view, this volunteer effort didn't really help regular people that much, and instead benefited a huge company mostly. People usually work on FOSS because they have a personal interest in a project, and want to share that with everyone. So we end up with stuff like device drivers for hardware where the mfgr couldn't be bothered to make a Linux driver, or various useful utilities, a whole OS (which everyone can use), etc. What we don't see much in FOSS is "enterprise software": stuff that's only really useful if you're a huge company. Where's the FOSS alternatives to proprietary human resource management systems, supply chain management systems, etc.? Generally, stuff like that doesn't exist, because no one wants to spend their free time working on things that they personally have no use for, and no one's found a good business case to make a company producing an open-source version.
- fiddlerwoaroof 2y ago
  Taking out patents is like FOSS, though, in that the effect is that, once the patent is gone, anyone can work in that area without worrying about infringing that patent. So, even if the occasion might be a threat to a multi-billion dollar company, this is a case where helping such companies is well-aligned with the needs of the FOSS movement.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >once the patent is gone, anyone can work in that area without worrying about infringing that patent. I agree, and that's a great point I think the patent examiner person was missing. These patents are a hazard for everyone, big or small.

the_gorilla 2y ago

You clearly don't understand how much people hate patent trolls and software patents in general. It's all a cruel joke, and getting paid some token sum of money to invalidate a bunch of worthless patents is just a nice bonus. You wouldn't do it for free because generating these patents is your job.

btrettel 2y ago
You are mistaken. I'm a former patent examiner as pointed out in the third word of my first comment here. So I have no conflict of interest. And I think I have a solid understanding of how much people hate patent trolls and software patents in general, which is why I added the qualifier about how I know my comment would be unpopular in some other comments here.
- the_gorilla 2y ago
  Conflicts of interest don't really work like that. You are a patent examiner even after you stop working as one, and for as long as your loyalties and ideas remain with your former job.
  - jon_richards 2y ago
    I’d say the conflict of interest has gone away, but the years of rationalizing cognitive dissonance have solidified certain opinions.
- eastdakota 2y ago
  [flagged]
- dpe82 2y ago
  "I'm going to say something you hate" > Says something we hate "Why do you hate what I said?"