A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit
wired.com
wired.com
What surprised me, in a bad way, is that to challenge a patent you have to have 6k USD to throw away plus the expertise and time (which the article estimates at 60k USD).
IMHO, if the patent ends up overturned, the patent holder should be liable for those costs. In fact, I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't be that way. Can you?
Disclaimer: I'm just speculating and know nothing about patent law.
I think this patent mess ends when the Patent Office isn't self funded and thus doesn't have the perverse incentive to grant as many patents as possible.
Up until the patent is issued, all costs are on the applicant. Why should the costs of an error by a regulator also be on the requestor?
It just doesn't compute. There must be a tie between this guy and someone at Uber. Or it's VC backers.
It seems like he was able to make a solid case for invalidating the patent, and hiring experts to investigate patent claims is pretty standard in patent lawsuits. It makes me wonder why Uber didn't hire such experts, or if they did and this guy beat them to the punch.
Strategically, isn't it better for Uber to let Waymo yap on and on about it and then crush them during the trial than to ask the patent office for a review and let Waymo drop the issue before the trial even starts?
I mean... if I knew something embarrassing that opposing council didn't know, and I had no obligation to inform them, I would definitely see that knowledge as a weapon and a strategic tool. Letting Waymo drop it without embarrassment is a bit of a win for Waymo, IMO.
Yes.
>Strategically, isn't it better for Uber to let Waymo yap on and on about it and then crush them during the trial than to ask the patent office for a review and let Waymo drop the issue before the trial even starts?
Uber would have to inform Waymo of their invalidity theory way before trial. You can't spring new prior art right before trial.
And in most cases uber wouldn’t use ex parte re-examine. They’d do an inter partes review, which would them to stay in the proceeding and argue for invalidity.
I'm not seeing what it is about the article that makes it a hit piece. Mark Harris, the guy who wrote it has been covering Uber, Waymo, and self driving cars for years. He's always digging up weird stuff like this. When Apple's project Titan was rumours and hearsay it was Mark Harris out there digging up tangible evidence about what was going on. Harris is pretty good at his job.
He can only report on Swildon's stated reasons for going to all the trouble he did, and Harris can't actually prove that Swildon's efforts were the real reason Waymo withdrew it's infringement claim, only that it seems that way.
Keep in mind, headlines are rarely written by the author of the piece. The headline writer has a very different goal than the reporter.
See, for example Footnote 2 on page 2 of http://www.almcms.com/contrib/content/uploads/documents/1/Wa...:
Defendants also moved for summary judgment of noninfringement of Waymo’s United States Patent No. 9,368,936, but Waymo’s dismissal of its patent claim moots that part of the motion
They are burning through way too much money and it's simply not sustainable long term. If they can bring self-driving cars to market -- allowing them to not have to pay drivers -- they'll be able to survive and may even do quite well.
(I understand that trying to develop self-driving cars is going to be a huge R&D expense. I'm talking about their day-to-day operational costs.)
Growing so quickly in a short period of time there is also typically some level of over staffing as well as generally not being 100% diligent with use of funds.
There was an article before how they were spending over $100MM with an ad agency only to realize the numbers were inflated and eventually dropping them, but that is just one example of ineffective spend.
That's not to imply that they are 50% ineffective, but even being 10% ineffective when budgets are in the billions adds up.
The thought process is that the cost of switching between providers is very low when it comes to Uber/Lyft, when the cost of switching is low to consumers you want to establish your dominance in that market as rapidly as possible otherwise if you move slowly, then a competitor can steal market share away from you.
If there are any network effects to market penetration then that begins to create a bit of a moat. So if you think about the availability of cars/drivers at any time of the day to meet the demand, then having a large marketshare is beneficial to getting a ride for a customer quickly. That couple with marketing and lowering the cost of the ride as much as possible to establish the market is where the majority of that money goes.
I opened the link on iPad and the video on the page auto plays but on mute. Anyone else having this problem?
I've found it already is the new norm.
Sometimes the video will even follow you down the page as you scroll. Even worse, sometimes the video isn't even about the same story. I guess they just desperately need to show you a video even if they don't have a very relevant one.
It's terrible, and yet another reason to block almost everything by default with something like uMatrix.
?
At this point I have JS disabled for pretty much every single news-related site - cnn, nytimes, bloomberg, sfgate, wsj, salon, etc... and dozens of less notable ones. It's incredible how much more usable these websites are without JS. No autoplay, no popups, no "CPU goes to 100% and scrolling takes 5s to respond". And usually it disables the paywall.
These sites are quite literally training their audience to disable Javascript.
[0]: https://lite.cnn.io/
Talking about wired, it is SO GOOD to read "We're sorry, something went wrong." when their videos fail to deliver their crap to you!
> Swildens tells me from his home in Los Altos Hills, near Mountain View.
I can't help but feel that he's not being totally genuine here
You’re not the only one.
http://www.d.umn.edu/external-affairs/homepage/12/swildens.h...
[1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Los-Altos-Hills-CA/pmf...
EDIT: The comment below points out that Speedera took $51M in funding
$14/share * 12 million shares ~= $168 million
https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/news/press/2005-press/aka...
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/AKAM/historical?...
The rest of the story seems to support his story that he did this on his own, especially because from the way the journalist describe the court proceedings it seems like Uber didn't capitalize on his work at the right time when they could have if they were aware of it.
Also, this article was published yesterday which is multiple court proceedings after his work was submitted to the USPTO and what was supposed to be court date. If this is a PR effort I would have expected it to be done a bit earlier.
It's almost like he's trying to make himself seem more relatable by saying the fee was a bigger deal for him than it actually was. To me, it comes off like he's trying to hide something
Why do you think $6k is not a consideration given his liquid capital? What do you expect his liquid wealth to be and what do you base that on?
Just to put it in perspective: 6k USD is 0,6% of 1M USD. If I got a savings of 10k USD, and I donate 0,6% of that to EFF during Christmas, then we're talking about 60 USD while I keep 9940 USD or 99,4%.
Even that doesn't tell us much though because your networth isn't descriptive to your income. If you own 0,5M but you don't have income that's something different than owning 0,5k but having 2k to spend every month.
I think this is the key. Having a big fancy house usually comes with a big fancy mortgage, and who knows what his cashflow looks like. Did he invest his windfall and lose it? Did the tax man take it? Did his wife leave him soon after along with "half"? Any massive medical situations he's dealt with in his family? Is he heavily invested in a new project?
The claim is not that $6,000 is a hardship to him, just that it is not "a drop in the bucket". Ie, $6K is not an amount he would spend unthinkingly because of having so much money. Depending on where you live it's not odd to know people in houses worth over a million but who couldn't pick up a another car because the monthly payments would be too much. Technically they can afford it, but practically it's not "a drop in the bucket", so they have other priorities.
As I said initially, I don't mean "all rich people", not by a long shot -- but anyone who is rich and still a fully fledged human being will know even more of the people I'm talking about than I do -- and there's plenty of poor people who are petty, too. Idiocy and insanity don't care much for class. But just because people do something doesn't mean there is a good reason for it, sometimes it's really just psychopathology combined with not having anyone who is strong enough and cares for them enough, and/or no accidents of life, that force them to stop going deeper into their dead end. They need help, not excuses. That is not aimed at the person in the article, just generally.
For a non-profitable move that is probably not even tax deductible, $6,000 is not a trivial investment.
Wasn’t there some kind of prior art project set up to coordinate a large part of work like this? I seem to recall a big splash about crowdsourcing citations of prior art a few years ago, and now I’m wondering how this process and that are related. Was someone filing to challenge patents once enough people claimed prior art through that system or something?
Seems strange to make it so expensive to call bullshit, particularly since it sounds like the examiner erred on something so basic as the presence of an inductor.
I just spend a couple of minutes to see when the USPTO gave up but couldn’t find anything. Maybe someone here knows?
I get that this is to help cover the USPTO's reexamination costs. But whatever the reason, it's still really expensive to call bullshit. And as the grandparent comment laments, this is a real shame given the low quality of many patents that are granted.
In this case a third party did the job the USPTO should have done when the patent was first filed by actually reading the patents citations and finding that the new patent wasn't a novel innovation on the cited patent.
Wouldn't it be nice if the USPTO paid the third party his $6000 back if they determine that he's right the patent should have never been granted in the first place?