9 ms·

My Brush With a Patent Troll

221 points by ivancdg 14y ago

davyjones 14y ago
"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." - John Carmack
- icebraining 14y ago
  His /. comment on the issue is good too: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151312&cid=12701745 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151312&cid=12701745
  - gruseom 14y ago
    Yes. This part is worth repeating even though it says the same thing as the GP (I cleaned it up slightly): "Patents are usually discussed in the context of someone "stealing" an idea from the long suffering lone inventor that devoted his life to creating this one brilliant idea, blah blah blah. But in the majority of cases in software, patents affect independent invention. Get a dozen sharp programmers together, give them all a hard problem to work on, and a bunch of them will come up with solutions that would probably be patentable, and be similar enough that the first programmer to file the patent could sue the others for patent infringement. Why should society reward that?" Carmack put his finger on precisely what bothers me as a programmer about software patents.
    - krickle 14y ago
      This is a very good explaination of why it is wrong. It all boils down to the fact that patent examiners apparently cannot be well-versed in every possible domain and therefore don't realize what is trivial or not. They give patents to each of the ten guys, when a patent should only be issued after ten guys' research of many months (if at all).
      - gruseom 14y ago
        It's not just about what's trivial, though many patents are. It's that you can work hard to solve a problem independently and then legally be attacked for infringing some claim you knew nothing about. One thing puzzles me. The social utility of patents is supposed to be that they spread knowledge, because otherwise people would keep their discoveries secret. Well, how many people make use of the "knowledge" in software patents to further their work? When was the last time any of us said, "Gee, this is hard, I'll do a patent search to see if anyone has solved it"? The very question sounds like a joke. In other words, regardless of what one thinks about software patents in theory, in practice their positive uses are negligible compared to their negative ones.
        SimonPStevens 14y ago
        That's not the sole utility of patents. While it is part of the agreed exchange (temporary monopoly in exchange for publication), patents are also intended to encourage research and innovation. Who would bother spending time and money on research if the outcome was easily copied by competitors before you could recover your costs. (admittedly, this doesn't quite work out that way with many software patents). The publication of the patent itself is more of a side effect of the desired outcome. Also, just because you don't read patents doesn't mean nobody does. I would guess it's more of a trickle down effect. University professors and researchers read patents and use it to expand and continue research and gradually for the good patents by the time the patent has expired the knowledge it imparted has diffused into the working participants in the field.
        Schwolop 14y ago
        Bollocks. No university professor or researcher I know reads patents - we read journal papers and conference proceedings that describe the work in our language. Patents are written in legal language such that I can't even decipher patents written about my own work.
        gbhn 14y ago
- tomjen3 14y ago
  It would not be a problem if lawyers wouldn't take the case. So the question is, how do we make sure lawyers don't want to? (without going to jail).
  - wmil 14y ago
    I think the big problem is juries. A group of random individuals isn't going to wade through the technical details well. However there's a right to a jury trial. So I propose the following. Juries for patent trials should be paid dramatically more (in the neighbourhood of what lawyers get) and selected from a list of volunteers according to criteria that the two sides argue over. The idea being that we want competent people to fight to get on juries rather than come up with an excuse not too.
    - alanctgardner2 14y ago
      Unfortunately, the flies in the face of the principles of trial law. The goal,in a trial, is that the jury is a blank slate, which exists only to judge what the counsels say. The only facts they can consider are those they hear in the trial from witnesses, and exhibits introduced. To have a jury of experts completely defeats this point; a lot of people argue the recent Apple v. Samsung ruling was invalid precisely because the foreman was an 'expert'. There is already legislation coming into effect in the US which will give parties 9 months to contest any patent, through the patent office. This should help solve the problem of lay juries deciding the validity of recent patents. http://ipspotlight.com/2011/09/19/changes-to-u-s-patent-law-what-happens-next/ http://ipspotlight.com/2011/09/19/changes-to-u-s-patent-law-...
      - cookiecaper 14y ago
        >a lot of people argue the recent Apple v. Samsung ruling was invalid precisely because the foreman was an 'expert'. Not so much that he was an expert, but he thought he had relevant expertise, made a false presumption about the nature of the law based on that misunderstanding (namely, that because object files would not run without recompilation between the iPhone and instances of prior art produced by Samsung, it didn't count as "real" prior art), and convinced the rest of the jury to deliver a guilty verdict based on whether the processor could execute the same object code or not, not whether the presented evidence actually was sufficient "prior art", meaning a demonstration that the invention was not unique enough at the time to warrant protection, to invalidate Apple's patent. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120828225612963 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120828225612963
ZeroGravitas 14y ago
Has anyone got a theory as to why video and video streaming seem particularly prone to patent trolls? A few years ago people might have accepted the answer that "they're really complicated", but I think we all accept now that patents are pretty much BS. So there must be some other incidental business reason why so many people went and filed patents on these ideas. Because Hollywood has lots of money and a reliance on video but no tech understanding maybe?
- gallerytungsten 14y ago
  "a theory as to why video and video streaming seem particularly prone to patent trolls" There's lots of streaming video on the web. For trolls, plenty of targets. Millions of potential defendants. If they issue 100,000 threats to sue, there will be at least a few that decide they'd rather pay than fight. Which then enables the troll to repeat the process.
- kristaps 14y ago
  Because it's likely to be profitable. Countless companies are doing something with streaming video and there are enough light and medium-weights in this space that are likely to choose to pay off the trolls instead of going to court.
- Tipzntrix 14y ago
  My best answer is...Youtube blew up. The market for it went through the roof, anyone's posting videos all over the internet, and obviously the trolls weren't using their patent to make money themselves, they were using it to ride on the backs of the real developers.
  - tisme 14y ago
    Your best answer doesn't hold water. YouTube was started in 2005, which means it was founded after the first round of these lawsuits had started. These patents are about live content, Youtube was about stored content.
    - 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
denzil_correa 14y ago
The Stack Exchange "Ask Patents" sound a very good idea for such cases. People can be more aware like the OP.
Tipzntrix 14y ago
I'm glad we have such staunch defenders here and at the head of the Patent Office. This is nice to read, and Ask Patents is a great concept that perhaps you can be a part of.
macchina 14y ago
I can see allowing a patent on software to the extent the invention incorporates a truly novel and interdependent physical component. But plain software patents are, for the most part, bogus and ought to be outright eliminated. There is no dearth of software innovation, and the litigation is twice as expensive as development.
shasta 14y ago
Just to clarify, the idea of video in the browser wasn't novel. Your implementation was novel and might even have been the first instance of the general idea, but the only way you could claim such an obvious idea as novel would be to have invented the browser.
easy_rider 14y ago
This guy literally "saved" GeoCities hah. (dutch) http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/64140/nederlander-redt-geocities.html http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/64140/nederlander-redt-geocities....
a-priori 14y ago
So I had an idea the other day for a patent reform: property tax on patents. As long as a company wants to keep the monopoly rights over a patented invention, they are taxed a percentage of the patent's market value each year. They can choose either to pay that tax or sell the patent to someone else. The government would offer to buy any patent for its market value, using tax revenue gathered from other patents, in doing so putting the invention into the public domain. This would discourage companies from building large 'defensive' patent portfolios, since they'd be expensive to maintain. It works for the 'lone inventor' scenario too, since the market value of a new, untried invention would be low. Once a patent's value is proven by developing the patent, its value will rise. At some point, the benefit derived from the patent's monopoly rights will no longer be worth the cost, and the rational thing to do is sell the invention.

221 points by ivancdg 14y ago

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." - John Carmack

icebraining 14y ago
His /. comment on the issue is good too: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151312&cid=12701745 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151312&cid=12701745
- gruseom 14y ago
  Yes. This part is worth repeating even though it says the same thing as the GP (I cleaned it up slightly): "Patents are usually discussed in the context of someone "stealing" an idea from the long suffering lone inventor that devoted his life to creating this one brilliant idea, blah blah blah. But in the majority of cases in software, patents affect independent invention. Get a dozen sharp programmers together, give them all a hard problem to work on, and a bunch of them will come up with solutions that would probably be patentable, and be similar enough that the first programmer to file the patent could sue the others for patent infringement. Why should society reward that?" Carmack put his finger on precisely what bothers me as a programmer about software patents.
  - krickle 14y ago
    This is a very good explaination of why it is wrong. It all boils down to the fact that patent examiners apparently cannot be well-versed in every possible domain and therefore don't realize what is trivial or not. They give patents to each of the ten guys, when a patent should only be issued after ten guys' research of many months (if at all).
    - gruseom 14y ago
      It's not just about what's trivial, though many patents are. It's that you can work hard to solve a problem independently and then legally be attacked for infringing some claim you knew nothing about. One thing puzzles me. The social utility of patents is supposed to be that they spread knowledge, because otherwise people would keep their discoveries secret. Well, how many people make use of the "knowledge" in software patents to further their work? When was the last time any of us said, "Gee, this is hard, I'll do a patent search to see if anyone has solved it"? The very question sounds like a joke. In other words, regardless of what one thinks about software patents in theory, in practice their positive uses are negligible compared to their negative ones.
      - SimonPStevens 14y ago
        That's not the sole utility of patents. While it is part of the agreed exchange (temporary monopoly in exchange for publication), patents are also intended to encourage research and innovation. Who would bother spending time and money on research if the outcome was easily copied by competitors before you could recover your costs. (admittedly, this doesn't quite work out that way with many software patents). The publication of the patent itself is more of a side effect of the desired outcome. Also, just because you don't read patents doesn't mean nobody does. I would guess it's more of a trickle down effect. University professors and researchers read patents and use it to expand and continue research and gradually for the good patents by the time the patent has expired the knowledge it imparted has diffused into the working participants in the field.
        Schwolop 14y ago
        Bollocks. No university professor or researcher I know reads patents - we read journal papers and conference proceedings that describe the work in our language. Patents are written in legal language such that I can't even decipher patents written about my own work.
        gbhn 14y ago
tomjen3 14y ago
It would not be a problem if lawyers wouldn't take the case. So the question is, how do we make sure lawyers don't want to? (without going to jail).
- wmil 14y ago
  I think the big problem is juries. A group of random individuals isn't going to wade through the technical details well. However there's a right to a jury trial. So I propose the following. Juries for patent trials should be paid dramatically more (in the neighbourhood of what lawyers get) and selected from a list of volunteers according to criteria that the two sides argue over. The idea being that we want competent people to fight to get on juries rather than come up with an excuse not too.
  - alanctgardner2 14y ago
    Unfortunately, the flies in the face of the principles of trial law. The goal,in a trial, is that the jury is a blank slate, which exists only to judge what the counsels say. The only facts they can consider are those they hear in the trial from witnesses, and exhibits introduced. To have a jury of experts completely defeats this point; a lot of people argue the recent Apple v. Samsung ruling was invalid precisely because the foreman was an 'expert'. There is already legislation coming into effect in the US which will give parties 9 months to contest any patent, through the patent office. This should help solve the problem of lay juries deciding the validity of recent patents. http://ipspotlight.com/2011/09/19/changes-to-u-s-patent-law-what-happens-next/ http://ipspotlight.com/2011/09/19/changes-to-u-s-patent-law-...
    - cookiecaper 14y ago
      >a lot of people argue the recent Apple v. Samsung ruling was invalid precisely because the foreman was an 'expert'. Not so much that he was an expert, but he thought he had relevant expertise, made a false presumption about the nature of the law based on that misunderstanding (namely, that because object files would not run without recompilation between the iPhone and instances of prior art produced by Samsung, it didn't count as "real" prior art), and convinced the rest of the jury to deliver a guilty verdict based on whether the processor could execute the same object code or not, not whether the presented evidence actually was sufficient "prior art", meaning a demonstration that the invention was not unique enough at the time to warrant protection, to invalidate Apple's patent. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120828225612963 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120828225612963

ZeroGravitas 14y ago

Has anyone got a theory as to why video and video streaming seem particularly prone to patent trolls? A few years ago people might have accepted the answer that "they're really complicated", but I think we all accept now that patents are pretty much BS. So there must be some other incidental business reason why so many people went and filed patents on these ideas. Because Hollywood has lots of money and a reliance on video but no tech understanding maybe?

gallerytungsten 14y ago
"a theory as to why video and video streaming seem particularly prone to patent trolls" There's lots of streaming video on the web. For trolls, plenty of targets. Millions of potential defendants. If they issue 100,000 threats to sue, there will be at least a few that decide they'd rather pay than fight. Which then enables the troll to repeat the process.
kristaps 14y ago
Because it's likely to be profitable. Countless companies are doing something with streaming video and there are enough light and medium-weights in this space that are likely to choose to pay off the trolls instead of going to court.
Tipzntrix 14y ago
My best answer is...Youtube blew up. The market for it went through the roof, anyone's posting videos all over the internet, and obviously the trolls weren't using their patent to make money themselves, they were using it to ride on the backs of the real developers.
- tisme 14y ago
  Your best answer doesn't hold water. YouTube was started in 2005, which means it was founded after the first round of these lawsuits had started. These patents are about live content, Youtube was about stored content.
  - 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

denzil_correa 14y ago

The Stack Exchange "Ask Patents" sound a very good idea for such cases. People can be more aware like the OP.

Tipzntrix 14y ago

I'm glad we have such staunch defenders here and at the head of the Patent Office. This is nice to read, and Ask Patents is a great concept that perhaps you can be a part of.

macchina 14y ago

I can see allowing a patent on software to the extent the invention incorporates a truly novel and interdependent physical component. But plain software patents are, for the most part, bogus and ought to be outright eliminated. There is no dearth of software innovation, and the litigation is twice as expensive as development.

shasta 14y ago

Just to clarify, the idea of video in the browser wasn't novel. Your implementation was novel and might even have been the first instance of the general idea, but the only way you could claim such an obvious idea as novel would be to have invented the browser.

easy_rider 14y ago

This guy literally "saved" GeoCities hah. (dutch) http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/64140/nederlander-redt-geocities.html http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/64140/nederlander-redt-geocities....

a-priori 14y ago

So I had an idea the other day for a patent reform: property tax on patents. As long as a company wants to keep the monopoly rights over a patented invention, they are taxed a percentage of the patent's market value each year. They can choose either to pay that tax or sell the patent to someone else. The government would offer to buy any patent for its market value, using tax revenue gathered from other patents, in doing so putting the invention into the public domain. This would discourage companies from building large 'defensive' patent portfolios, since they'd be expensive to maintain. It works for the 'lone inventor' scenario too, since the market value of a new, untried invention would be low. Once a patent's value is proven by developing the patent, its value will rise. At some point, the benefit derived from the patent's monopoly rights will no longer be worth the cost, and the rational thing to do is sell the invention.