7 ms·

What's interesting to me about this story in light of current events is that Johnson Research and Development Co., seems in many ways like an NPE. He doesn't m

• wging 13y ago
  >it is absolutely the case that every Intellectual Ventures, Lodsys, and Rockstar thinks of themselves as being innovative inventors like Lonnie Johnson. How sure are you about that? If they acquire patents, how could they possibly believe that?
  • rdw 13y ago
    Intellectual Ventures actually does create the patents. We think they're for obvious, trivial ideas, but they definitely create them. (I guess they don't actually sue other companies directly, either.) My understanding was that it's likely that some of the people who work at Rockstar are the inventors of some of the held patents. Maybe not the key patents, but it's a company holding a lot of patents and employing a bunch of engineers, there's almost certainly some overlap. I agree that the transfer of ownership of patents is a potential aspect of a dividing line, that seems to be a common theme. But it seems like it wouldn't be too difficult for a patent troll to skirt this by "employing" an inventor, or somehow wedging the name of one of their employees into the inventors list for every patent.
    • dagw 13y ago
      Intellectual Ventures actually does create the patents Intellectual Ventures do create some patents, but they also buy a lot of patents. Most, if not all, of the cases that have hit the news involved patents Intellectual Ventures bought.
      • rdw 13y ago
        Hah, I guess I bought into their marketing, then!
  • tedunangst 13y ago
    Perhaps not as inventors directly, but they could certainly believe the patents they are buying are innovative. (That's why they bought them! (supposedly)) In an abstract sense, patent aggregators (to coin a term) are not inherently bad. A small inventor faces a number of obstacles and risks marketing and protecting a patent (see linked story). Selling the patent to a middleman guarantees cash today. For many people, $1 million today is better than $10 million in ten years. That said, the implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
• ye 13y ago
  > but what's the bright line between what he does and what a patent troll does? He actually does something with his patents, he develops profucts and then licenses the manufacturing. Patents trolls don't do anything useful. They buy the patents (most of which are trivial and obvious), and then they wait for somebody to implement said trivial and obvious.
• revelation 13y ago
  The patents were not just transferred in? Maybe the solution is to stop treating patents as some kind of business asset you can willy-nilly transfer and sell. Keep it with the original company, if theres no legal successor, the patents are gone.
  • Supermighty 13y ago
    Maybe we could limit the amount of damages awarded related to how many times the patents have been transferred. Potential damages are cut in half each time they are transferred. It would keep the patents with the original innovator.
  • ErikHuisman 13y ago
    How do you prevent a company itself from being sold?
• reginaldjcooper 13y ago
  Non-obviousness to someone working primarily in that field is a good start to determining the line. We get most riled up by scan-to-email or click-here-for-full-version patents. The idea that you could independently come up with an obvious solution like clicking to upgrade and then need to pay some shitbird for the privilege of implementing it is despicable.
  • wcfields 13y ago
    Yes, there's a whole world of difference between developing a pressurized self-contained water pistol and a vague all-encompassing concept like "cloud backup".
  • jedbrown 13y ago
    Is a pneumatic squirt gun with integrated pump really a huge innovation? If you gave an engineer a task of building a hand-held water gun that shoots more than 50 feet, how many wouldn't think of something similar? The first patent for a compressed air squirt gun toy was 1949 [1] and the Cosmic Liquidator (1977) [2] enjoyed moderate commercial success (the market for high-end $6 squirt guns was limited; everything else was $3). (Johnson's patent cited these.) Shooting water with compressed air has a long history, nor is putting the pump on the device (air pellet guns have done this for a while, for example). While the Super Soaker was a wildly successful product, it was still an incremental combination of existing technologies (moving the tank from a backpack to the gun and borrowing pump ergonomics from air guns). Is it really fundamentally different from the software engineer that puts together existing packages with some tasteful glue code? [1] http://forums.sscentral.org/showthread.php?t=4019 http://forums.sscentral.org/showthread.php?t=4019 [2] http://www.isoaker.com/Armoury/Analysis/1978/cosmicliquidator.html http://www.isoaker.com/Armoury/Analysis/1978/cosmicliquidato...
    • jrs99 13y ago
      i think it takes some leap of imagination to think of kids having fun with this kind of toy. it's engineering plus toys plus the confidence to know that it will be massively successful so you pursue it all the way and get a patent. it's more of an innovation than something like Bratz, which itself is somewhat of an innovation. what does it take for you to make Bratz in a world of barbies? it really does take imagination, a lot of thinking, and a lot of experience, i think.
• etler 13y ago
  In this case it seems to be entirely a royalty dispute, and has nothing to do with the patent. Hasbro properly licensed the product, the just didn't properly pay out the royalties. Also, the patent reform bill[1] that was featured not so long ago isn't about holding companies, it's about making the trolling process harder. One of the provisions is requiring the "real party of interest" to be exposed in the litigation, so a shell company litigating on behalf of microsoft would have to get microsoft involved with it. The other big thing has to do with validity and pleading. In many cases the lawsuits are brought about without any valid claim, and are just used as a harassment tactic to get small companies to pay up their fee instead of going through an expensive and painful legal process. Under the bill, the discovery process is halted until the patent is interpreted, and it forces the patent holder to be more specific about which claims are actually at issue. None of the things put in that bill seem like they would affect the likes Johnson, had this case even been about patents, as he has legitimate and valid patents, and he himself is the real party of interest. [1] https://www.eff.org/issues/current-legislative-proposals-patent-reform#ia https://www.eff.org/issues/current-legislative-proposals-pat...
  • rdw 13y ago
    That is an excellent explanation! What it suggests to me is that the problem with patent trolls is perhaps not so much with the patent system itself but with the specific mechanisms through which patent lawsuits proceed. Kind of like how software security most often fails in the implementation rather than the theory. :)
    • etler 13y ago
      I'm thinking that it's easier to get support for reforming details about the lawsuit proceedings than the patent system itself. The bill is smart in keeping its scope very small and clean, tackling the real common sense improvements that will have a big effect of frivolous litigation.
    • andrewfong 13y ago
      No, there are definitely problems with the patent system itself in addition to the problems with the legal system. Take the Rockstar suit against Android. We know who the real parties in interest are (Apple, Microsoft, etc.). Rockstar isn't going after small businesses who are more likely to settle than go court. They're going after Google (which will almost certainly fight back). I don't know about the validity of the claims, but they're at least plausible enough that Google felt compelled to bid for the patents. Nevertheless, the Rockstar suit feels wrong. And it's because Google created Android independently of anything Rockstar (or the previous holders of the Rockstar patents did.
• ollysb 13y ago
  I think the line lies in the transfer. Patents should only be enforceable by the original inventor or businesses that are actively using the patent for goods/services.
• andrewfong 13y ago
  One line you could draw is whether there's a prior relationship between the patent holder and the defendant (or the successors to those parties). BUT FOR Lonnie Johnson's work, Larami (and by extension, Hasbro) could not have made Nerf guns or Super Soakers (or at the very least, it would have taken some longer to come to market). In contrast, you can't make any similar statement about what IV, Lodsys, or other trolls do. For the most part, business don't find out about those patents until after a lawsuit has been filed. There's no benefit derived from what IV or Lodsys "invented" and that's why it seems unfair. This is basically the idea behind an "independent invention" defense -- that is, if I can prove that I independently invented something without assistance from the whoever previously patented the invention at issue, I should be able to get that patent suit tossed out. Unfortunately, that's not what the law currently says. Moreover, thee's a fair amount of legitimate pushback against the idea. It's hard (but not impossible) to prove someone knew about a patent before they made something. And the question of whether something was independently invented usually isn't a binary one. If the patent holder tells his friend who tells her friend who mentions something in passing to me which inspires my invention, did I invent my product independently of the patent holder? Hard to draw a bright line there (but not impossible).
• noonespecial 13y ago
  He invented a real (specific) product with prototypes and everything, licensed that product to a real manufacturer who then made it, gained lots of money, and then stiffed him on the payment they promised. Trolls would have produced no toy at all, for anyone, kept the whole process a secret, and then sued every child who ever flung water at another at a birthday party. "Its the difference between using a feather and using a chicken." You know it when you see it. Edit: Just for clarity, its the direction the arrow points. Lonnie Johnson created a product and then went out and sought a company to start producing it. Trolls do it backwards, they go out and find companies that are already producing it and then threaten them with forcing them to stop.
  • unreal37 13y ago
    Exactly right. Trolls try to extort money after the fact. Mr Johnson licensed his idea to the toy company before they started producing it. Lucky for him, his agreement granted him 2% of any 3D product that resembled his invention.
    • runako 13y ago
      ...but he had to patent it before he could license it to him. Between patent and licensing could be infringement. Then he'd be going backward to extort money, right? Put another way: if the laws are changed to prevent backward "extortion", what incentive is there for Hasbro to license in the first place? Why not just let him come in with the patent, and then willfully infringe? And how do you tell the difference?
  • mikeash 13y ago
    What about the hypothetical scenario where Hasbro tells him to get lost, then rips off his design and produces the stuff anyway? As far as I can tell, this scenario is very difficult to distinguish from a patent troll. The only real differentiator is whether or not the patent is actually a novel invention or whether it's just the "click a button on the internet" kind of crap that so many of these things end up being.
    • 13y ago
• Lagged2Death 13y ago
  How can that line be drawn? We could end the transferability of patents.
• JVIDEL 13y ago
  There's a world of difference, and in fact Johnson's case has a happy ending compared to the hundreds of honest inventors who lost everything in legal battles against the conglomerates that stole their ideas and made billions. Check the inventor of the FM radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstrong Was he a patent troll too?
  • onethree 13y ago
    if anyone hasn't seen it, the movie flash of genius is a great story about the patent battles of the guy who invented intermittent windscreen wiper.
    • deleted 13y ago
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