Yahoo: Patent Sell-Off Isn’t a Fire Sale
medium.com
medium.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11860308
It's obvious that patent trolls are the most likely candidates to buy out this portfolio, IV would be one of the companies that will try to get a hand on these.
The good engineers whose brains led to these patents had no way of knowing that this would happen, but let it be a warning to all the good engineers in the present whose parent companies are patenting things left, right and center for defensive purposes only, of course.
Typically, about $1500 - $2000 per patent granted.
I was very conflicted about signing on as a co-inventor since I had strong feelings about software patents (and have even stronger ones now), but I was verbally assured that the patent would only be used as part of a defensive portfolio, etc., etc.
Later I was asked to participate in several other patents, and I declined. I wish I had declined to participate in the first one too, since it's now on the auction block and will very possibly be bought by a patent troll, making me complicit in whatever horrible things that troll chooses to do with my patent.
I quit my job at Yahoo when they sued Facebook. My patent wasn't one of the ones involved in the lawsuit, but the fact that it could have been horrified me, and I couldn't stomach the thought of working there anymore, even though I loved my job.
It irked me mostly because, sadly, many people still think that an issued patent actually reflects something substantive about the "inventor". So now I don't get to say that I'm the author of several patents on my resume, whereas the next guy might.
I took a patent law course and _hated_ it. My professor was once an interim director of the USPTO, and was rabidly pro-patent. That was annoying. There were also several patent examiners in my class, including two who examined software patents. One of those examiners agreed with me that software patents are generally bogus[2], but his job was to follow the law, and specifically the law as interpreted by the USPTO.
[1] I use scare quotes around inventor because like many software engineers most things seem obvious to me. Necessity is the mother of invention, not genius. And necessity will find you if you're in a competitive market, so you rarely need the prospect of a government monopoly to incentive you to "invent". Losing market share is usually all the incentive you need. (And there's nearly USD $100 trillion dollars in liquid or readily liquid assets in the world today. And while only a small fraction of that amount is likely to seek risky investments, it's still more than any entrepreneur would have imagined in their wildest dreams a few short decades ago. So guaranteeing returns on risky capital investments is a poor justification for government-enforced monopolies.) But FWIW in the relevant cases I both independently formulated the original ideas and wrote the implementations.
[2] Bogus for various reasons. But the whole "software patents are patents on math" argument widely shared in the FOSS community is pretty non-sensical in the patent realm. Patents are intrinsically about drawing difficult and arbitrary lines between the abstract and functional, and there are many dimensions where such lines are drawn. So expect examiners and lawyers to pretty much roll their eyes if you try to bring that up. The arguments against software patents that find the most purchase in the legal community are difficult to decipher without reference to concepts internal to the patent realm. The patent regime, like Catholicism, is based on a logic all its own. Internally consistent and analytically rigorous, yes, but ultimately divorced from reality.
Being engineers and not morons, of course they knew that this (meaning the sale of the patents in question) could happen.
But it's an easy thing to get past, when you're the engineer in question. The "patent bounty" at a typical large company often amounts to a bonus of multiple thousands of dollars, just for sitting down for a few hours with an attorney. It's likely that an engineer -- especially a young one -- won't understand that they're building the intellectual equivalent of a land mine. Something with one or two good uses and a hundred evil ones. Something that will probably just lie buried in the sand for 20 years, but that also might cripple someone or something that they care about. Instead, all the engineer sees is the extra $$$$ and professional prestige that comes with their name on a United States Patent.
Source: personal experience.
NOTE TO LAWYERS: if you are contesting a patent (especially a software or business method patent), consider contacting the inventor and asking them if they would be willing to testify that the invention WAS obvious to anyone skilled in the relevant field. I imagine that quite a few WOULD be willing to so testify, and hearing that testimony from the named inventor might be particularly persuasive to a judge or jury.
> It's likely that an engineer won't understand that they're building the intellectual equivalent of a land mine
You're contradicting yourself.
How so? In my own case, I knew that the patent I was helping my company's attorneys to file was a valuable property that the company would own and possibly sell. But I didn't contemplate what could happen after such a sale, once the patent ended up in the hands of a nonpracticing entity.
I was pretty naive about things like that, even though the XOR cursor patent that eventually helped bring down Commodore was already on the books, and the good folks at Unisys who bought the LZ77 patent were already running roughshod over everyone using .GIF image files. All I knew was that I wanted a new road bike, and the patent committee was only too happy to pay for it.
Seriously?
It's interesting to receive snarky replies and be modded down to goatse.cx territory for posting an honest, factual account of events that took place over 25 years ago that I've come to regret participating in. But it's also puzzling, because the people who disagree with me aren't stating why.
Because they would never sell out. /s
My point was that when you sell something, you have no idea what it will be used for, period. If you're uncomfortable with this idea, don't sell the item in the first place.
Saying "I filed my patent but how could I possibly guess what my employer would do with it?" is a baffling defense to me.
That's the part I may not have stated clearly enough. This isn't exactly something that happened last week.
Thank you for the honest and direct personal account. I've been asked a hundred times or more why I didn't patent 'the livestream' when I could have and it always boils down to 'it was obvious to me'. I just did not feel it was something that was unique enough to patent, and this turned out to be right because some guy in the UK independently re-did it a few weeks later and we ended up finding out about each other much later still.
Easy to take the moral high ground after the fact, once again thanks and have some upvotes.
But eventually they become old, disused, and forgotten, leaking out into the landscape and poisoning the environment for decades.
"How can an old patent cause problems for DECADES when patents expire after only TWO DECADES?"
:-)
Every company eventually goes out of business. When that happens, they tend to sell their assets, which includes "defensive" patents.
Calling a patent defensive would be like calling a gun defensive. Your use may be defensive, but the item itself is not defensive.
Say, create a blind trust, grant nonrevocable, universal, and sublicensable rights to the trust, and set the trust to grant free sublicenses to anyone and everyone in 5 years?
I do not know if these are among those being auctioned.
Yahoo's "non" fire sale is a good counterpart to the devil on my shoulder trying to rationalize away my participation. My job is actually pretty great otherwise (especially for the town I live in), so I'm stressed as hell at the prospect of quitting over this. I keep thinking of the Milgram experiment, and how confident I was when I heard about it that I wouldn't have been part of the majority that continued shocking a human being to the point of apparent death. Software patents are an abstract evil by comparison, but now that there's a part of me saying "yeah it seems bad, but it probably won't result in any real harm", I can somewhat empathize with that majority.
I don't really have a point to make, this just seemed like a reasonable place to vent my shame and frustration.
In the 'real' (as in physical) world there are still some good patents issued. But for computer related stuff (and that's what the bulk of Yahoo!'s patents will be about it has been quite a while since I saw a patent that made me think 'good that someone spent the years required in order to come up with this and that their rights are protected with a patent'.
I'd suggest a retro-active limitation of patents that do not involve anything physical of 3 years. That should be enough of a head-start and will immediately take care of all these ticking time bombs of patent portfolios in the hands of aging and ailing Leviathans.
There is no way that my improvement to the derivatives market would have ever been worth my time if I couldn't sell the patent to financial institutions.
People that have never had a good idea in their life imagine that patent holders are making widgets in their woodshed, or have the ability to make said widget in their woodshed.
But the reality is that there was no way I could ever have commercialized this in a way that had so few risks, aside from my ability to cough up $12,000 at the time.
Yeah let me just go recreate the financial derivatives market and lobby Congress for the rest of my life just so that children on reddit won't call me a patent troll.
I would almost give you a pass for saying "most" if not for noticing that my patent cites other "actual financial innovations" that financial institutions filed as patents and got approved, popular opinion on the internet lives in a separate reality than any framework this country functions on
Not even if you could grant them a license, but not ownership?
I probably wouldn't have pursued the patent if that was the only option. Unless the costs to filing patents were also cheaper. Lots of variables that this simple discussion doesn't consider.
Sorry guys!
software of course iterates much faster than other inventions, meaning a 19 year monopoly can really stifle the industry
thats the only debate on patents, software applicability
On the other hand, I think that software and business methods should not be eligible for patent protection at all.
A lot of nonsense is swept in under this seemingly reasonable cover story. If I can't build a device that embodies my invention, in what sense have I really invented it?
I dislike patents in general and software in particular, but that one can invent yet not commercialize is not farfetched.
On the other hand, if Bob invents something, but chooses not to produce it, then he's effectively relinquishing his rights to patent protection.
When we allow Bob to simply transfer his "invention" (an idea basically) to Patent Corp. in exchange for cash, and Patent Corp then uses that to extort people, we massively incentivize dreaming up random ideas in the hope of getting them patented. That incentive exists whether or not the idea is a good one, practical, effective or any other characteristics that reasonable people use to evaluate things.
Such restrictions would kill the patent troll business overnight.
That would be one solution. But the cause of the patent trolling is not the transferrable patents - its the human nature. There will always be some humans finding _some_ way to make money instead of thinking of doing the _right_ thing.
Effectively, Big Corp would spin up "Obvious Shopping Cart Patents, LLC", wholly owned by Big Corp, and register their patents for a given category through it. Then they could sell the entire company to another entity without the patents themselves transferring ownership.
The best fix for patents I can think of is simply lowering their lifetime to somewhere in the 2 - 5 year range.
I'd say a better solution is to just make software ineligible for patents entirely.
Imagine some state selling a pile of old nuclear weapons to the highest bidder, no matter who that is...
> The best outcome, for Yahoo and all of us, would be for a company like Google, Microsoft or Facebook to buy the whole shebang. While it might give one of those already mighty powers even more leverage, those firms are more likely to retain them as assets in the mutually-assured-destruction game played by the titans of tech when they consider suits against each other.
MAD analogy doesn't really help. While two power states with nuclear weapons are in some balance through MAD, states without them are instantly at a disadvantage. They aren't part of MAD scheme. Same goes for someone small pitted against such monster as MS. They simply can't defend themselves against massive patent aggression attacks.
Plus, MS can easily sell those patents to patent trolls which serve as their privateers with nothing to lose, thus bypassing MAD even against big opponents (it's like big state backing mercenaries which aren't officially affiliated with them, but really do their bidding).
So unless someone with good intentions buys these patetns and disarms them, it will be a problem either way.
Get John Oliver on the case. His show released 16 million dollars in medical debt last weekend.
He also spent much of his career inventing workarounds for other peoples' patents.