Show HN: A crowdfunding platform to combat patent trolls | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A crowdfunding platform to combat patent trolls

unpatent.co

12 pointsluisivan5 comments

Hi Hacker News!

Patents were created to promote innovation, but as the whole industry agrees now, they're actually hurting innovators. Patent trolls are using them to sue the hell out of startups and innovators — more than $29bn/year are wasted on patent trolls, not to mention the $21bn on VC investment also wasted on them.

We want to change this trend by empowering companies to invalidate patents that threaten them and the whole ecosystem.

Everyone can create a campaign against a patent, and then interested companies can back it. With the raised amount, we reward people for contributing prior art — which is any evidence that a patent was not novel. Then we file a reexamination before the patent office.

Patent office/lawyer fees + prior art rewards should be minimum $20k, which is extremely small for anything regarding IP litigation. The process takes ~6 months.

We chose patent '435 because it affects the whole ecosystem - everyone customizes online content with some user's preferences.

Let's kill stupid patents together! Feedback and personal experiences are super welcome. Thanks!

Awesome! Do you foresee corporations contributing to fundraising? Unpatent seems like a great way to raise awareness of overreaching patents, but individuals have little incentive to contribute financially. Corporations have both the incentive and financial resources to contribute.

Absolutely, we're 100% corporate focused right now. We also got some interest from companies who want to fight against other companies' patents just so they have a better portfolio than their competitors. That's not our utopian use of the platform, but in the end, if patents that shouldn't be granted are revoked, we're happy!

Pretty neat that you have Lee Cheng as an advisor, who is hero in the battle against trolls.

But from the Bio's, it doesn't look like anyone on the team is a lawyer. What sort of track record do you have invalidating patents?

Lee is awesome! We love having him onboard. We've been talking with lots of lawyers since the very beginning, but to be honest we are automating the role of the lawyer here. That's why we are focusing on the ex partes reexamination, which allows this kind of automation to happen.

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