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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I posted the wsj article here a few days ago:

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.

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Patents are like the nuclear waste of innovation. At first, heavy with good intentions and swearing to use them for the best purposes, they make power for their creators.

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?

Because old, disused, and forgotten is about 4 years in tech.

2 in the mobile space.

Imagine if you had to wait two decades after the iPhone came out to make any other touch screen phone.

think about the sentence you just said:

"How can an old patent cause problems for DECADES when patents expire after only TWO DECADES?"

:-)

You need to capitalize "old" as well if you're looking for proper emphasis. Only new patents have decades left to do anything, while "old, disused, and forgotten" patents definitely don't, and may have only a few years left. Many of these creaky old patents you see people being brought to court for are so viciously pursued because the holder is about to lose the patent and needs to eke out as much money as possible right now. But thankfully, they can't do that with the same patent for decades.

great point! I did not consider that originally

Often it takes most of a decade for a patent to become relevant commercially - apart from design patents which are pretty much not patents as far as I can see...

So _this_ is the "thermonuclear war" that Steve Jobs was threatening.

The good engineers whose brains led to these patents had no way of knowing that this would happen

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.

ALSO there's that pesky employment contract that REQUIRED the person to sign over any inventions made while employed at the company. It's not just about greed for a patent bonus.

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.

california law has some exeptions. but they should happen during the ownership transfer, i think. not a lawyer.

> Of course they knew that this could happen.

> It's likely that an engineer won't understand that they're building the intellectual equivalent of a land mine

You're contradicting yourself.

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.

and they make a very good argument to the kids wanting a new road bike that it will be a defensive patent. whatever that means.

True, but this was so long ago that they didn't even bother. Nobody cared about the potential ethics issues at the time, because patents were still largely weapons wielded between corporate superpowers.

> 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

Seriously?

Can you please elaborate on what you mean by "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.

> But it's also puzzling, because the people who disagree with me aren't stating why.

Because they would never sell out. /s

Because Stallmann told you so.

Sorry, I thought it would be obvious.

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.

You have to go back to the early 1990s, back before patent trolling was really a big concern. The writing was on the wall but nobody was reading. Today I think the "land mine" metaphor is an almost perfect way to describe patents, but I certainly didn't think that way back then, and neither did most people. Filing patents was just something you did if you worked for a Real Company, and a nice feather in your cap as a junior-level engineer.

That's the part I may not have stated clearly enough. This isn't exactly something that happened last week.

Despite having owned an Amiga, I didn't know about the XOR patent. Here's a brief summary I found:

https://plus.google.com/+RayCromwell/posts/dbipY1GJoGv

Sad to see this downvoted.

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.

Yes, unless there is something legally binding, even in the face of bankruptcy, to keep a patent defensive, all justification of patents as defensive is BS.

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.

I'm sure the engineers as Yahoo who actually created these patents got compensated, with the understanding (written though probably not verbally) that the patents were no longer theirs and the buyer could do what they want with them.

I'm sure they were, and I'm sure they were looking at Yahoo! as their benevolent employer when they did so and never for a second thought that some patent troll might end up owning their work and suing others - more like themselves - in order to make back their 'investment'.

During my time working for Yahoo Europe, I refused to patent the ideas I presented in Yahoo's internal hack days. It was retro-actively declared as the way to encourage us to participate in internal HackDays. So I also stopped participating. Today, I'm satisfied I made the right call.

Thank you.

> I'm sure the engineers as Yahoo who actually created these patents got compensated

Typically, about $1500 - $2000 per patent granted.

Plus, you know, actually getting paid very well while working on the patents.

Maybe. But that's irrelevant to the original question about patent bounties.

I'm one of those engineers. I was compensated for the patent I was involved with, but I regret it and would gladly return the money if I could take my name off the patent.

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.

I've literally been the sole, or almost sole, "inventor" of several patents.[1] But because I had left the company (to go to law school) by the time the lawyer got around to writing them up, they just threw some other names on the application.

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.

What are your thoughts on things like https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement ?

Has that been tested in court?

That probably hasn't been tested in court, but even if it has you shouldn't buy into the software patent system. Just make loads of prior work so that your software can be used to destroy other parents.

Would it be possible to artificially shorten patent terms?

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?

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