Comment by tpatke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tpatke | Hacker News Reader

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1. Everyone who gets sued by a patent troll is going to complain about the validity of the patent. Even when the patent is, in fact, completely valid.

2. Patent troll + Law firm is not a "dangerous new breed". This has been happening for a long while now.

3. It seems strange to complain about the being sued for patent infringement while owning '150' patents. Do you agree with patents or not? If you agree, then being sued for patent infringement is part of it. If you disagree, why invest so much? I understand the argument of patents being defensive, but, does that really help in a world of patent trolls? More likely, a company eventually goes under and the patents are acquired on the cheap - by a troll.

4. I think the "we will pay you a bounty to help make our problem go away" approach is interesting and I hope it works. ...but it's very self serving. Maybe just pay a law firm $50,000 to invalidate the patent rather than making a contest out of it.

To be fair, I really don't understand the concept of a software patent. If I can implement it then it is fair game.

1. That is another issue, the USPTO issuing patents that shouldn't be issued.

3. They don't seem to be against patents, just against non-practicing entities. Did you even read the article?

I hate patent trolls with a passion, but these non-practicing entities are are just another negative by-product of what has devolved to be a negative system. Patents originally existed to protect inventors. Today, like in other legal systems, they have very little to do with justice and a lot to do with "whoever has the gold makes the rules". As such, while I definitely side with CloudFlare, it does seem like a complaint of "not fair, they are manipulating the rotten system better than us"

I don't understand why we can't just make patents non transferable. If you company gets bought, your patents go away. Small companies still have protection but trolls disappear. You still do have the IBM approach to "patent all the things" but that can also be addressed by forcing patents to have to be actively deployed in a public way or they expire after a year or something.

> I don't understand why we can't just make patents non transferable.

Because inventors want to invent things, not prosecute patents, and making patents transferrable allows them to make money from inventions without having to accept any of the headache of patent defense, which is a distraction even when (as you will practically need to) you hire counsel to do the actual legal work.

The wright flyer was just sticks, canvas, and a small engine. Anybody could have done it - in fact there were teams around the world competing to be the first ones. The Wright brothers got a patent on it. Should they have?

In retrospect: No. Prior art.

They abused the system for their own gain, while at the same time "retarding the development of aviation".

"The Wrights' preoccupation with the legal issue hindered their development of new aircraft designs, and by 1910 Wright aircraft were inferior to those made by other firms in Europe. Indeed, aviation development in the U.S. was suppressed to such an extent that when the country entered World War I no acceptable American-designed aircraft were available, and U.S. forces were compelled to use French machines."

"The lawsuits damaged the public image of the Wright brothers, who previously had been generally regarded as heroes." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war

The Wright patent holding back the US airplane industry is a myth, as demonstrated by industrial data from the period:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2355673

In fact, a lot of airplane innovation was happening in the US during that era despite the patent being in force. For instance the seaplane was invented in the US (by Curtiss, the Wrights' most bitter foe.)

Also their patents were challenged repeatedly and, despite being interpreted broadly, upheld repeatedly because they actually were that much of an improvement over the prior art.

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