10 ms·

Law Students Fend Off a Patent Troll

385 points by teachingaway 12y ago

darksim905 12y ago
It was dismissed without prejudice. This means nothing. If a patent troll wanted to do the same thing & file for the same lawsuit, they could easily do so. This isn't a "win" for the sutdents as much as it's "oh, let's just drop it." I'm glad they didn't have to the pay the troll, but I also hate when the troll doesn't get what it deserves, either: losing.
- teachingaway 12y ago
  pretty much true. Its not a grand slam win, and the case could come back (but not in Delaware). I still think its a win.
- rurounijones 12y ago
  Is there a legal procedure that would have made it possible for the defense team to say to the judge "It should not be possible to dismiss this unless it is with prejudice"?
  - teachingaway 12y ago
    In most cases, if a plaintiff withdraws, it needs to be with prejudice. Thats the default rule. In this particular instance, there was a procedural twist that make it a somewhat close call.
    - coreyja 12y ago
      Can you elaborate or know where I could read more?
- curiouscats 12y ago
  I think it means something, but I agree with you I wish the patent troll wasn't getting away with it. This seems similar to a house that had an alarm system. The thief opened the door and started to look for good stuff to take then heard the alarm go off and ran away. Mainly I would say the home owner "won" in that case by not having their stuff taken. Though it is annoying that the thief could come back and they have to deal with the thief's break in attempt. And it is annoying the thief wasn't caught and put in jail to prevent them from just going to the next house and breaking in there.
asloobq 12y ago
So much WIN!
dang 12y ago
Url changed from http://gigaom.com/2014/08/11/law-students-chase-patent-troll-away-from-connected-car-start-up/ http://gigaom.com/2014/08/11/law-students-chase-patent-troll..., which points to this.
nkurz 12y ago
"The Supreme Court issued 6 patent helpful patent decisions while our case was pending. In particular, Alice v. CLS Bank invalidated patents on taking mundane tasks and doing them on a computer. The patent in our case was basically for sending notification calls from a computer. Probably invalid under Alice. A second Supreme Court case, Octane v. Icon encouraged judges to impose “fee shifting” penalties in appropriate patent cases." ... "After reading it, and weighing the recent Supreme Court decisions, the troll simply dropped its case against CarShield. After months of dedicated work, the clinic students deserved a gavel-banging judicial decision in their favor. All they got was a quiet withdrawal. But I think we can still chalk it up in the win column. The case is dismissed (for now), the students learned real patent litigation skills." Does the decision encouraging "fee shifting" require that the case go to trial? Does it require that the fees actually be paid by the defendant? Or might the law school students still be able to receive payment by the troll for their pro bono defense? It seems like the "new standard" would be much more effective if it also applied in cases like this.
- teachingaway 12y ago
  >> Does the decision encouraging "fee shifting" require that the case go to trial? Nope. It only requires that the case is "exceptional" -- in the sense that the plaintiff filed an exceptionally crappy lawsuit. >> Does it require that the fees actually be paid by the defendant? Or might the law school students still be able to receive payment by the troll for their pro bono defense? I haven't looked into this myself, but my law students tell me that we can get fee shifting even for pro bono work.
- Natsu 12y ago
  I note that it was dismissed without prejudice (i.e. the troll can refile). This is somewhat disappointing, but I believe they only get to withdraw a lawsuit voluntarily once and I don't really expect them to come back and sue this particular defendant again (i.e. they'll probably go after softer targets). One thing I wonder is if patent defendants in a situation like this might win from publishing all of their legal research on the patent online? It seems like this might help future defendants if there was anything interesting and I believe a tactic like that was used with some success against Microsoft in some of the state antitrust lawsuits long ago.
u124556 12y ago
>the troll simply dropped its case against CarShield Yet the startup and the judicial system already lost time on this. There should be a fee for withdrawing cases like this.
- TallboyOne 12y ago
  How come there isn't yet??? Out of all the stuff that makes my blood boil the most... this is it. So basically the troll gets off for free and just does it again? What in the actual fuck.......
- cbd1984 12y ago
  Careful: It's hard to craft remedies against patent trolls that don't also penalize poor inventors whose work was really and truly ripped off by a much richer entity. Even simple rules like "loser pays" can make the potential downside of filing a valid suit so intimidating that large players get a complete pass.
  - teachingaway 12y ago
    Maybe its a close question for the first 2 or 3 patent lawsuits. But when someone's filing 10+ patent lawsuits at a clip, its difficult to imagine a legitimate scenario.
josho 12y ago
I love this. But, am saddened that the troll hasn't lost. The troll is free to move on to the next mark, which likely won't have a free legal team behind them. I wonder if invalidating patents, that trolls commonly use, a good use of a law student's time?
- nlh 12y ago
  What would be really awesome is if the BLIP clinic students decided to dedicate themselves to destroying this particular troll. Since they'd already put in the hours getting up to speed on the patent in question (and filing that likely-would-have-been-successful motion), they should reach out to the other folks who have/will be sued by 911 and offer to defend them. Troll the troll, as it were.
  - jimbokun 12y ago
    Another comment mentioned Maegan Fuller just passed the bar exam. Could be a great way to get a budding litigation career off the ground.
    - dhackner 12y ago
      If she started a kickstarter, I'd be happy to fund...
      - frankacter 12y ago
        I would as well.
- teachingaway 12y ago
  Honestly, 911 Notify is far from the worst troll. Most of their targets are deep-pocket public companies that have plenty of cash to hire big brand law firms. I think it would be a great use of student time to identify the most egregious patents / trolls and try to invalidate their patents.
- talmand 12y ago
dang 12y ago
This is why we started using law school clinics to do free legal defense. It’s a win-win arrangement: students cut their teeth on real litigation, startups get free legal defense, and patent trolls get nothing. Bravo!
peterJHS 12y ago
This article suggests that this is a win-win situation for the startups and law students, but, it's a pretty one-sided deal here. This doesn't work out at all in the long term without unfair exploitation of the unpaid labor of the students. While helping out gives the students experience, it's not reasonable to consider this any sort of real option beyond an occasional situation in which a startup can solicit a law-student who takes on a single case as part of their curriculum.
- ilikemustard 12y ago
  It's not "unfair exploitation". The students willingly sign on to get meaningful experience working on real cases. It gives them a chance to do real work and see more closely how actual law work is done. From the sounds of the article, there is one small clinic in Brooklyn that makes this a "real option" for companies. It's not like every company that faces patent trolls can rely on it, but I don't think it would be far-fetched to think that other law clinics may begin to (or already do) offer similar services. As I see it, it's a win-win for both parties.
  - peterJHS 12y ago
    In a small number of cases it can work - but, you can't expect students to take on legal cases for you for free-99 whenever you like. This is no different than big companies hiring unpaid interns. Sure it can kinda work in a handful of cases, but it's harmful to exploit people to perform unpaid labor. I can recall a great many HN articles complaining about companies asking coders to work unpaid in a variety of situations. Working unpaid on learning projects in school is super! Getting experience is great! But, the reality of the situation is there are massively degenerate patent laws at work here and the solution isn't for startups to expect a contingent of students to work there buts off gratis for them.
    - eru 12y ago
      Pay them in equity?
    - ixwt 12y ago
dave1619 12y ago
I love this story and it's a great effort by this law school. I wonder if there could be some crowdsourced efforts to pool together key documents, resources, processes, etc so that defending against a patent troll could be more efficient. This would lower costs of defense and further discourage patent trolls.
- teachingaway 12y ago
  We definitely want to put together some guidelines for other schools to run similar projects. In fact, @jorgemtorres wrote an entire Kauffman Fellows thesis on this topic.
- allochthon 12y ago
  Relevant link: http://patents.stackexchange.com/ http://patents.stackexchange.com/.
emptywindow 12y ago
THESE PEOPLE DESERVE CREDIT: - Prof. Jonathan Askin - @jaskin - runs the clinic, and trusted us to try this experiment. - Maegan Fuller - @mafuller21 - did the lion's share of research and writing. Brilliant and dedicated student. She just took the bar exam. - Jorge Torres - @jorgemtorres - Guy who actually knows patent litigation. Too bad he dropped out of law to be a VC. Pitch him :-)
- keithpeter 12y ago
  The judge crossed out the 'with' and wrote in 'without' prejudice on the note. Does that mean that if the troll tries this on with someone else, this case can't be cited? Just wondering.
  - toong 12y ago
    I guess not: the troll dropped the case, there was no judicial decision, so there is nothing to cite ?
  - lutusp 12y ago
    No, in general the with/without prejudice language in legal rulings means that a reshaped and resubmitted case on the same issues wouldn't/would be welcomed back for another hearing.
otterley 12y ago
Alas, the case was dismissed without prejudice, which means the troll can just wait a little while and sue again later.
ProfOak_ 12y ago
This article reads like one from 2600. You should consider publishing it on that magazine. I'm not sure about the process, but it might be really neat to do so.
zavi 12y ago
This is an efficient and sustainable model for higher education in general.
aceperry 12y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lawschool that had students supporting patent trolls. There are some schools out there that are founded on ideological grounds.
funkyy 12y ago
I love how Medium becomes my favourite "time waster". I remember about buzz in media about how pointless Medium was but since some time majority of articles I found on major suggesting websites from Medium are extremely interesting. When reading articles from Medium I feel like I am not only not wasting time but acquiring knowledge in extremely fast pace.
monochromatic 12y ago
> The patent behind all these lawsuits is not particularly innovative. It claims something about sending notifications after an emergency phone call. Here’s the gist from one of the figures . . . . This is a little disingenuous. You know the patent doesn't cover the "gist" or any particular figure. It covers the claims (which you don't mention at all, even in passing). And for some reason, you don't even tell us what the patent number is so we can look at it for ourselves! From a little googling, I suspect that we're talking about Pat. No. 6,775,356. But why hide the ball and characterize the patent as "not particularly innovative" when you could just let people see it for themselves? https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US6775356.pdf https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.goog...
- jtzhou 12y ago
  Primary sources are always useful, but so is some context from the writer. Reading the patent and the recent SCOTUS opinion, Alice v Cls Bank, it definitely looks to be invalid in the context of software implementation. I wouldn't call the writer "disingenuous." It would be difficult to argue for fee shifting as an exceptional case, because there has been only a few recent decisions and not consistent precedent yet.
  - monochromatic 12y ago
    If you can already tell whether or not a patent is invalid under Alice, congratulations, you're smarter than any patent attorney in the country.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  > You know the patent doesn't cover the "gist" or any particular figure. It covers the claims It seems like whenever anyone criticizes a patent by summarizing it, someone points out that the patent is defined by the claims, but if anyone criticizes a patent by reading the claims, someone points out that the claims have to be read in the context of the rest of the patent.
  - 12y ago
thinkcomp 12y ago
The reason why it's so expensive for startups to even consider defending themselves is because attorney fees are supra-competitive and corporations cannot represent themselves in court pro se according to Local Rules, such as Civil Local Rule 3-9(b) in the Northern District of California. Whether through (absurd) precedent or rules codifying that precedent, it's been that way for 200 years. However, it shouldn't be that way anymore--not after Citizens United. I'm fighting a lawsuit about this issue right now, and if I win (however unlikely), corporations will be able to represent themselves against patent trolls. Is it difficult, confusing and complex work? Yes. Is it any harder than programming, or anything else a serious startup would do? Not really. And it beats paying a law firm six or seven figures. The case is: http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/29himg3wm/california-northern-district-court/think-computer-foundation-et-al-v-administrative-office-of-the-united-states-courts-et-al/ http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/29himg3wm/california-northe...
thro1237 12y ago
I wonder if this model can work with the criminal justice system as well. Quite often, defendants feel it is better to accept a plea deal even when they have done nothing wrong because the economics of fighting a lawsuit (as well as the outcome in case of a botched up defense) makes it compelling to accept the accept the plea deal. The mechanism is analogous to the patent troll scenario. If law school students can take up these "troll equivalent" cases, they gain valuable experience and defendants get a fair shot.
TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
I'm surprised there isn't an EFF-like non-profit that provides pro-bono patent defense to start-ups, against patent trolls. I would donate to that organization. I've seen a lot of horseshit patents asserted against start-ups. If there was an organization that followed the troll around and offered defense services against all of their defendants, it would make trolling a lot harder, and might reduce the numbers of these parasitic lawyers involved in this shameless trade. I just read about a Fish & Richardson patent partner who started filing his own "inventions" with the patent office, based on slight modifications of the patents he was filing for clients, and then sold those patents to trolls for huge sums. Its actually really easy to write patents focused on sabotaging your clients, if you are a lawyer and become familiar with their future roadmaps. I know a bunch of trivial claims I could write right now and they would be worth a few million in a couple years, because Google, Facebook, and others would have to move in that direction in a few years (related to Machine Learning and image recognition). All you have to do is follow conferences, understand the papers, and then write some trivial, and obvious evolutions of those techniques. Obviousness is something defendant's find extremely difficult to prove for highly complex technology, because the juries are made of people that have no idea what programming is, much less Machine Learning, and the judge is probably some moron, that thinks he is really smart, and assumes that he patent office is full of diligent geniuses ... and so he will give a lot of weight to the plaintiff's "USPTO certified" claims. All it takes is for a programmer to be involved in one patent litigation and you see the patent system for what it is. A colossal system of giant, continuous, expensive injustice implemented in the hope of preventing an extremely rare form of injustice (when a true original inventor is cheated by a shameless larger company). Imagine we institute an expensive system of highly trained commandos to follow every nerd in America around in high schools across the country, to protect them from bullying and to be their friends. It would certainly stop all physical bullying. But would it be worth the giant overhead/expense? That is what we have to start asking ourselves. Even if the patent system prevents some rare injustices, WTF, is this continuous, and overwhelming cloud of uncertainty for every start-up and company worth it? I feel like China and India are doing quite alright without overburdensome strong patent protection. And Europe seems fine with a hamstrung software patent system. And even in the US, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, IBM, and Apple got their start before software became patentable ... and they all did, and are doing fine. If you see someone arguing for patents, they are almost always some fucking lawyer, troll, or someone sitting on a giant portfolio. The people actually making software every day don't want this shit system. VCs that fund start-ups, don't want it ... even though you would expect they want it, to protect their investments.
Confusion 12y ago
Isn't there a potential startup in here? The judicial process follows clear and distinct steps, with clear and distinct documents for every step. It seems like much of this can be automated as much as the trolls automate their process? Question 1: has the lawsuit been filed in an odd/irrelevant place? Followed by some subquestions to be more precise. If so, fill out this form, include the addresses of .. and ... and we'll send a form letter to them for you, asking for a dismissal. Question 2-5: keep stalling and asking for dismissals based on various reasons. Question 6-10: try some other ways to get the troll to drop it, for instance by presenting an example of obvious prior art Of course all letter include repeating references to relevant higher court decisions.
gear54rus 12y ago
Seems like a brilliant solution to this problem Stick it to them! Good work.
- pantaril 12y ago
  > Seems like a brilliant solution to this problem The law students worked on this for months for free and the paten troll got away without any fee. I don't see what's so brilliant about it. Looks like shity system to me.

385 points by teachingaway 12y ago

It was dismissed without prejudice. This means nothing. If a patent troll wanted to do the same thing & file for the same lawsuit, they could easily do so. This isn't a "win" for the sutdents as much as it's "oh, let's just drop it." I'm glad they didn't have to the pay the troll, but I also hate when the troll doesn't get what it deserves, either: losing.

teachingaway 12y ago
pretty much true. Its not a grand slam win, and the case could come back (but not in Delaware). I still think its a win.
rurounijones 12y ago
Is there a legal procedure that would have made it possible for the defense team to say to the judge "It should not be possible to dismiss this unless it is with prejudice"?
- teachingaway 12y ago
  In most cases, if a plaintiff withdraws, it needs to be with prejudice. Thats the default rule. In this particular instance, there was a procedural twist that make it a somewhat close call.
  - coreyja 12y ago
    Can you elaborate or know where I could read more?
curiouscats 12y ago
I think it means something, but I agree with you I wish the patent troll wasn't getting away with it. This seems similar to a house that had an alarm system. The thief opened the door and started to look for good stuff to take then heard the alarm go off and ran away. Mainly I would say the home owner "won" in that case by not having their stuff taken. Though it is annoying that the thief could come back and they have to deal with the thief's break in attempt. And it is annoying the thief wasn't caught and put in jail to prevent them from just going to the next house and breaking in there.

asloobq 12y ago

So much WIN!

dang 12y ago

Url changed from http://gigaom.com/2014/08/11/law-students-chase-patent-troll-away-from-connected-car-start-up/ http://gigaom.com/2014/08/11/law-students-chase-patent-troll..., which points to this.

nkurz 12y ago

"The Supreme Court issued 6 patent helpful patent decisions while our case was pending. In particular, Alice v. CLS Bank invalidated patents on taking mundane tasks and doing them on a computer. The patent in our case was basically for sending notification calls from a computer. Probably invalid under Alice. A second Supreme Court case, Octane v. Icon encouraged judges to impose “fee shifting” penalties in appropriate patent cases." ... "After reading it, and weighing the recent Supreme Court decisions, the troll simply dropped its case against CarShield. After months of dedicated work, the clinic students deserved a gavel-banging judicial decision in their favor. All they got was a quiet withdrawal. But I think we can still chalk it up in the win column. The case is dismissed (for now), the students learned real patent litigation skills." Does the decision encouraging "fee shifting" require that the case go to trial? Does it require that the fees actually be paid by the defendant? Or might the law school students still be able to receive payment by the troll for their pro bono defense? It seems like the "new standard" would be much more effective if it also applied in cases like this.

teachingaway 12y ago
>> Does the decision encouraging "fee shifting" require that the case go to trial? Nope. It only requires that the case is "exceptional" -- in the sense that the plaintiff filed an exceptionally crappy lawsuit. >> Does it require that the fees actually be paid by the defendant? Or might the law school students still be able to receive payment by the troll for their pro bono defense? I haven't looked into this myself, but my law students tell me that we can get fee shifting even for pro bono work.
Natsu 12y ago
I note that it was dismissed without prejudice (i.e. the troll can refile). This is somewhat disappointing, but I believe they only get to withdraw a lawsuit voluntarily once and I don't really expect them to come back and sue this particular defendant again (i.e. they'll probably go after softer targets). One thing I wonder is if patent defendants in a situation like this might win from publishing all of their legal research on the patent online? It seems like this might help future defendants if there was anything interesting and I believe a tactic like that was used with some success against Microsoft in some of the state antitrust lawsuits long ago.

u124556 12y ago

>the troll simply dropped its case against CarShield Yet the startup and the judicial system already lost time on this. There should be a fee for withdrawing cases like this.

TallboyOne 12y ago
How come there isn't yet??? Out of all the stuff that makes my blood boil the most... this is it. So basically the troll gets off for free and just does it again? What in the actual fuck.......
cbd1984 12y ago
Careful: It's hard to craft remedies against patent trolls that don't also penalize poor inventors whose work was really and truly ripped off by a much richer entity. Even simple rules like "loser pays" can make the potential downside of filing a valid suit so intimidating that large players get a complete pass.
- teachingaway 12y ago
  Maybe its a close question for the first 2 or 3 patent lawsuits. But when someone's filing 10+ patent lawsuits at a clip, its difficult to imagine a legitimate scenario.

josho 12y ago

I love this. But, am saddened that the troll hasn't lost. The troll is free to move on to the next mark, which likely won't have a free legal team behind them. I wonder if invalidating patents, that trolls commonly use, a good use of a law student's time?

nlh 12y ago
What would be really awesome is if the BLIP clinic students decided to dedicate themselves to destroying this particular troll. Since they'd already put in the hours getting up to speed on the patent in question (and filing that likely-would-have-been-successful motion), they should reach out to the other folks who have/will be sued by 911 and offer to defend them. Troll the troll, as it were.
- jimbokun 12y ago
  Another comment mentioned Maegan Fuller just passed the bar exam. Could be a great way to get a budding litigation career off the ground.
  - dhackner 12y ago
    If she started a kickstarter, I'd be happy to fund...
    - frankacter 12y ago
      I would as well.
teachingaway 12y ago
Honestly, 911 Notify is far from the worst troll. Most of their targets are deep-pocket public companies that have plenty of cash to hire big brand law firms. I think it would be a great use of student time to identify the most egregious patents / trolls and try to invalidate their patents.
talmand 12y ago

dang 12y ago

This is why we started using law school clinics to do free legal defense. It’s a win-win arrangement: students cut their teeth on real litigation, startups get free legal defense, and patent trolls get nothing. Bravo!

peterJHS 12y ago

This article suggests that this is a win-win situation for the startups and law students, but, it's a pretty one-sided deal here. This doesn't work out at all in the long term without unfair exploitation of the unpaid labor of the students. While helping out gives the students experience, it's not reasonable to consider this any sort of real option beyond an occasional situation in which a startup can solicit a law-student who takes on a single case as part of their curriculum.

ilikemustard 12y ago
It's not "unfair exploitation". The students willingly sign on to get meaningful experience working on real cases. It gives them a chance to do real work and see more closely how actual law work is done. From the sounds of the article, there is one small clinic in Brooklyn that makes this a "real option" for companies. It's not like every company that faces patent trolls can rely on it, but I don't think it would be far-fetched to think that other law clinics may begin to (or already do) offer similar services. As I see it, it's a win-win for both parties.
- peterJHS 12y ago
  In a small number of cases it can work - but, you can't expect students to take on legal cases for you for free-99 whenever you like. This is no different than big companies hiring unpaid interns. Sure it can kinda work in a handful of cases, but it's harmful to exploit people to perform unpaid labor. I can recall a great many HN articles complaining about companies asking coders to work unpaid in a variety of situations. Working unpaid on learning projects in school is super! Getting experience is great! But, the reality of the situation is there are massively degenerate patent laws at work here and the solution isn't for startups to expect a contingent of students to work there buts off gratis for them.
  - eru 12y ago
    Pay them in equity?
  - ixwt 12y ago

dave1619 12y ago

I love this story and it's a great effort by this law school. I wonder if there could be some crowdsourced efforts to pool together key documents, resources, processes, etc so that defending against a patent troll could be more efficient. This would lower costs of defense and further discourage patent trolls.

teachingaway 12y ago
We definitely want to put together some guidelines for other schools to run similar projects. In fact, @jorgemtorres wrote an entire Kauffman Fellows thesis on this topic.
allochthon 12y ago
Relevant link: http://patents.stackexchange.com/ http://patents.stackexchange.com/.

emptywindow 12y ago

THESE PEOPLE DESERVE CREDIT: - Prof. Jonathan Askin - @jaskin - runs the clinic, and trusted us to try this experiment. - Maegan Fuller - @mafuller21 - did the lion's share of research and writing. Brilliant and dedicated student. She just took the bar exam. - Jorge Torres - @jorgemtorres - Guy who actually knows patent litigation. Too bad he dropped out of law to be a VC. Pitch him :-)

keithpeter 12y ago
The judge crossed out the 'with' and wrote in 'without' prejudice on the note. Does that mean that if the troll tries this on with someone else, this case can't be cited? Just wondering.
- toong 12y ago
  I guess not: the troll dropped the case, there was no judicial decision, so there is nothing to cite ?
- lutusp 12y ago
  No, in general the with/without prejudice language in legal rulings means that a reshaped and resubmitted case on the same issues wouldn't/would be welcomed back for another hearing.

otterley 12y ago

Alas, the case was dismissed without prejudice, which means the troll can just wait a little while and sue again later.

ProfOak_ 12y ago

This article reads like one from 2600. You should consider publishing it on that magazine. I'm not sure about the process, but it might be really neat to do so.

zavi 12y ago

This is an efficient and sustainable model for higher education in general.

aceperry 12y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lawschool that had students supporting patent trolls. There are some schools out there that are founded on ideological grounds.

funkyy 12y ago

I love how Medium becomes my favourite "time waster". I remember about buzz in media about how pointless Medium was but since some time majority of articles I found on major suggesting websites from Medium are extremely interesting. When reading articles from Medium I feel like I am not only not wasting time but acquiring knowledge in extremely fast pace.

monochromatic 12y ago

> The patent behind all these lawsuits is not particularly innovative. It claims something about sending notifications after an emergency phone call. Here’s the gist from one of the figures . . . . This is a little disingenuous. You know the patent doesn't cover the "gist" or any particular figure. It covers the claims (which you don't mention at all, even in passing). And for some reason, you don't even tell us what the patent number is so we can look at it for ourselves! From a little googling, I suspect that we're talking about Pat. No. 6,775,356. But why hide the ball and characterize the patent as "not particularly innovative" when you could just let people see it for themselves? https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US6775356.pdf https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.goog...

jtzhou 12y ago
Primary sources are always useful, but so is some context from the writer. Reading the patent and the recent SCOTUS opinion, Alice v Cls Bank, it definitely looks to be invalid in the context of software implementation. I wouldn't call the writer "disingenuous." It would be difficult to argue for fee shifting as an exceptional case, because there has been only a few recent decisions and not consistent precedent yet.
- monochromatic 12y ago
  If you can already tell whether or not a patent is invalid under Alice, congratulations, you're smarter than any patent attorney in the country.
AnthonyMouse 12y ago
> You know the patent doesn't cover the "gist" or any particular figure. It covers the claims It seems like whenever anyone criticizes a patent by summarizing it, someone points out that the patent is defined by the claims, but if anyone criticizes a patent by reading the claims, someone points out that the claims have to be read in the context of the rest of the patent.
- 12y ago

thinkcomp 12y ago

The reason why it's so expensive for startups to even consider defending themselves is because attorney fees are supra-competitive and corporations cannot represent themselves in court pro se according to Local Rules, such as Civil Local Rule 3-9(b) in the Northern District of California. Whether through (absurd) precedent or rules codifying that precedent, it's been that way for 200 years. However, it shouldn't be that way anymore--not after Citizens United. I'm fighting a lawsuit about this issue right now, and if I win (however unlikely), corporations will be able to represent themselves against patent trolls. Is it difficult, confusing and complex work? Yes. Is it any harder than programming, or anything else a serious startup would do? Not really. And it beats paying a law firm six or seven figures. The case is: http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/29himg3wm/california-northern-district-court/think-computer-foundation-et-al-v-administrative-office-of-the-united-states-courts-et-al/ http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/29himg3wm/california-northe...

thro1237 12y ago

I wonder if this model can work with the criminal justice system as well. Quite often, defendants feel it is better to accept a plea deal even when they have done nothing wrong because the economics of fighting a lawsuit (as well as the outcome in case of a botched up defense) makes it compelling to accept the accept the plea deal. The mechanism is analogous to the patent troll scenario. If law school students can take up these "troll equivalent" cases, they gain valuable experience and defendants get a fair shot.

TheMagicHorsey 12y ago

I'm surprised there isn't an EFF-like non-profit that provides pro-bono patent defense to start-ups, against patent trolls. I would donate to that organization. I've seen a lot of horseshit patents asserted against start-ups. If there was an organization that followed the troll around and offered defense services against all of their defendants, it would make trolling a lot harder, and might reduce the numbers of these parasitic lawyers involved in this shameless trade. I just read about a Fish & Richardson patent partner who started filing his own "inventions" with the patent office, based on slight modifications of the patents he was filing for clients, and then sold those patents to trolls for huge sums. Its actually really easy to write patents focused on sabotaging your clients, if you are a lawyer and become familiar with their future roadmaps. I know a bunch of trivial claims I could write right now and they would be worth a few million in a couple years, because Google, Facebook, and others would have to move in that direction in a few years (related to Machine Learning and image recognition). All you have to do is follow conferences, understand the papers, and then write some trivial, and obvious evolutions of those techniques. Obviousness is something defendant's find extremely difficult to prove for highly complex technology, because the juries are made of people that have no idea what programming is, much less Machine Learning, and the judge is probably some moron, that thinks he is really smart, and assumes that he patent office is full of diligent geniuses ... and so he will give a lot of weight to the plaintiff's "USPTO certified" claims. All it takes is for a programmer to be involved in one patent litigation and you see the patent system for what it is. A colossal system of giant, continuous, expensive injustice implemented in the hope of preventing an extremely rare form of injustice (when a true original inventor is cheated by a shameless larger company). Imagine we institute an expensive system of highly trained commandos to follow every nerd in America around in high schools across the country, to protect them from bullying and to be their friends. It would certainly stop all physical bullying. But would it be worth the giant overhead/expense? That is what we have to start asking ourselves. Even if the patent system prevents some rare injustices, WTF, is this continuous, and overwhelming cloud of uncertainty for every start-up and company worth it? I feel like China and India are doing quite alright without overburdensome strong patent protection. And Europe seems fine with a hamstrung software patent system. And even in the US, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, IBM, and Apple got their start before software became patentable ... and they all did, and are doing fine. If you see someone arguing for patents, they are almost always some fucking lawyer, troll, or someone sitting on a giant portfolio. The people actually making software every day don't want this shit system. VCs that fund start-ups, don't want it ... even though you would expect they want it, to protect their investments.

Confusion 12y ago

Isn't there a potential startup in here? The judicial process follows clear and distinct steps, with clear and distinct documents for every step. It seems like much of this can be automated as much as the trolls automate their process? Question 1: has the lawsuit been filed in an odd/irrelevant place? Followed by some subquestions to be more precise. If so, fill out this form, include the addresses of .. and ... and we'll send a form letter to them for you, asking for a dismissal. Question 2-5: keep stalling and asking for dismissals based on various reasons. Question 6-10: try some other ways to get the troll to drop it, for instance by presenting an example of obvious prior art Of course all letter include repeating references to relevant higher court decisions.

gear54rus 12y ago

Seems like a brilliant solution to this problem Stick it to them! Good work.

pantaril 12y ago
> Seems like a brilliant solution to this problem The law students worked on this for months for free and the paten troll got away without any fee. I don't see what's so brilliant about it. Looks like shity system to me.