Google to cough up $20m after Chrome infringes anti-malware patents | Hacker News Reader

Google to cough up $20m after Chrome infringes anti-malware patents

theregister.co.uk

52 pointsdbcooper9 comments

It's sad that they're being punished for security here.

If adding fancy security schemes becomes legally risky, it'll be yet another reason for decision makers to say "don't bother about security, just make the product work".

Glancing at that first patent quoted in the article makes you think the patent office follows a "first at the goalpost" strategy of awarding patent protection, and ignoring ingenuity. To think that this patent gets the same kind of IP protection as the light bulb or the combustion engine ... Edison, Otto, Tesla all would feel offended.

I think the problem may be that the patent office doesn't have enough field knowledge to distinguish that.

It's not their job to prove that a patent is novel.

Think of it as a well-formedness check rather than a content validator. Patents don't have to be able to hold up in court under scrutiny in order to be issued.

That's broken. Litigating patents is too expensive for your average person or company; the burden should be on the government, which does have the resources to do it properly, even if they refuse to deploy those resources effectively.

Yes, obviously. I'm not saying the patent system is "working".

> Glancing at that first patent quoted in the article makes you think the patent office follows a "first at the goalpost" strategy of awarding patent protection, and ignoring ingenuity.

That's actually precisely what the Patent Office does now.

https://gigaom.com/2013/03/18/first-to-file-patent-law-start...

It's even worst for the world of software, because pretty much any piece of software will eventually be independently developed by someone else, yet the one to first file for it will get to reap all the rewards.

Well, in practice others get to do it, too, while hoping they don't get sued, but that's just because of selective enforcement - if the patent law was enforced 100% of the time the system would quickly break-down.

For instance, I think there once was an article on Bloomberg about a smartphone containing 250,000 patented inventions. Even if say 80% of those were expired (I don't remember if it mentioned that older patents were included), nobody would be able to make a smartphone, unless each unit cost like $10,000, so they could afford to pay everyone.

But the patent system isn't anywhere near being enforced 100% of the time, so we limp along with it broken as it is, with only a few companies getting to rip-off those making the products, because they "own the patent" (while most of them don't even have their own similar products).

It's a shame google had to resort to stealing their innovative and detailed way of identifying and dealing with malware. All those countless years of research that must have went into such a complex method should really be rewarded. $20m is way too little for all the effort the poor researchers had to go through

Honestly.. How can this even be a patent? That's like the most generic and simplest thing ever, right? Instead of running it on the real thing, just put it onto a safe processor/sandbox (or scan it before saving it to disk)

> jury trial in Marshall, Texas

Not surprising.

> The Eastern District of Texas is still number one for patent cases. [1]

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/why-do-patent-trolls-g...

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