Sun employees competed to see who could file the goofiest patent | Hacker News Reader

Sun employees competed to see who could file the goofiest patent

zdnet.com

60 pointsmetamemetics18 comments

It costs a company $20-50k to successfully prosecute a patent. Filing alone costs $15k or so by the time the various filing bonuses are paid. (I don't know Sun's numbers, but many companies pay $3-5k to inventors on filing and a comparable amount on issue.)

Filing joke patents aren't responsible for Sun's financial woes, but if you're throwing away that kind of money on "humor".... (And yes, huge meetings also waste large amounts of money.)

As it was done in response to a crippling patent law suit chances are the was minimal or no filing bonus at all, it was probably pitched as "file or Sun dies."

I received a "dollar" for mine on filing. It's still in the machine. Maybe I'll get another if it gets approved.

"A method of inertially stabilized propulsion by the serialized placement of one supporting appendage in front of another"

There may be prior art for this.

But has it been documented?

So, like a Segway, but with legs?!

Totally radical. I guess it's beyond our current technology by at least a decade. See the clumsy attempts at http://www.paulgraham.com/anybots.html

That looks like a patent for a light switch.

This system is so incredibly broken. But it advantages the companies with the most money, and the most political influence, so of course they love it.

Is there any hope we'll ever get rid of this travesty?

I don't think that's actually the case. Huge companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google spend a massive amount of time and money fighting comparatively tiny patent trolls. While they might not want to abolish the current patent system, they certainly want to see it changed.

Sure, it's a huge cost to big companies (and smart big companies who are actually innovative and passionate see that as a bad thing). But it's a cost that big companies are capable of shouldering. Whereas these costs can be existential risks for smaller companies. That gives bigger companies a competitive advantage.

The same is true of a lot of regulation.

Sun employees competed to see who could file the goofiest patent ... Viacom sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom.

Ah, the things employees of companies who sue Google are capable of. Horrific.

Did Sun ever sue Google?

No, but Viacom sure did. In fact their lawsuit included infringing materials that their own employees uploaded to Youtube.

And I wouldn't be surprised if some of the people who tried to file joke patents are now working for Oracle, which is also suing Google.

To be fair though, the patents were filed with the intention of corporate defense. That is, if a company like IBM sued them again, they could use the patents that they had to come to some sort of low-damage settlement. When Oracle bought Sun, this defense became an offensive weapon - something far different than the Viacom situation. Repurposing joke patents is far different from fabricating evidence.

No, Viacom did.

I would post the obligatory "patent the process of patent trolling" joke here but that ones been filed already.

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