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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

Rothschild Patent Imaging appears to be the company holding the rights to a number of dubious patents filed by Leigh M. Rothschild, who appears to have a well-deserved reputation as a patent troll [1][2].

I hope Gnome is able to take a Newegg approach here and kill the patent.

[1]: http://www.unhappyfranchisee.com/qr-code-patent-troll-sues-d...

[2]: "A Florida inventor named Leigh M. Rothschild is the largest single NPE based on the number of defendants who have been added to patent lawsuits he filed, according to the the report." https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2016/0106/Despite-crack...

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Seems like this https://phys.org/news/2005-09-world-built-in-wi-fi-enabled-d.... invalidates the patent.

Nikonn CoolPix had wifi support in 2005. I'd imagine if you could select specific pictures to upload wherever from the device, that's the whole patent claim invalidated by 4 years. Hell, this article even references a device that Nikon offered to wirelessly transmit images as early as 2003. Find one of these, bring it to the law firm defending Gnome and that should invalidate the patent.

Kodak had consumer wifi support then too. They had military cameras with satellite upload capability even earlier.

I built a service around 2005 that did realtime photo sync and sharing from mobile devices. Here's a demo video from 2007 (the most relevant part is around 6:45):

https://connectedsocialmedia.com/1163/sharpcast-demo-brings-...

Unfortunately, the Nikon CoolPix would not serve as prior art because it does not appear to have these two elements of the patent.

filtering the plurality of photographic images using a transfer criteria wherein the transfer criteria is a subject identification of a respective photographic image within the plurality of photographic images,

wherein the subject identification is based on a topic, theme or individual shown in the respective photographic image;

How on earth can an obvious business practice be patented?

“yes, I would like to patent the sale of a spade when you buy a rake”

I wouldn't consider providing customers who paid for rakes with shovels instead to be an "obvious business practice"...

Reading comprehension fail.

filtering the plurality of semantic interpretations using a transfer criteria wherein the transfer criteria is a sensible interpretation of a respective natural language sentence within the plurality of semantic interpretations

Is that in a patent application for reading comprehension?

That sounds patenting facial recognition (among other things). Not a method for facial recognition, but the very idea of doing facial recognition.

The patent system is so broken. It's as if drug companies, instead of patenting a specific treatment for cancer, were able to patent "treating cancer".

It’s not patenting facial recognition. It’s patenting the specific use case of identifying a subset of images to transfer over the wireless link based on the subject of the image.

Sorry, it seems I forgot to put the word "like" in there, as in similar to.

I understand it's not patenting facial recognition in general, just in the specific case of using facial rec or other techniques (which the lawyers called transfer criteria/subject identification) to identify subjects of images before filtering by subject and transferring them wirelessly.

I stand by the meaning of the simile though. There's nothing original enough to be patentable in that claim.

A specific method for doing facial recognition should be patentable. "Use facial rec to identify individuals in images, then filter for specific individuals, then transfer those images" should not. If we allow patents on use cases, every use case will be patented and eventually the trolls will have a collection of patents that together cover the very idea of recognizing faces.

Like parent said, the patent doesn't actually seem have anything to do with facial recognition. I read it as talking about images that have already been identified, by some unspecified process. The process could be facial recognition, but it could also just be the user herself manually identifying each image.

I do agree that the patent is too unclear and broad, and that everything described must have been already known by 2008.

I'm not fluent in patent lawyer, so I must say you might be right. I read "subject identification" as an active process that was part of the claim, but it could refer to a pregenerated tag instead.

Which would make the patent even more laughable. "Wirelessly transfer all images I've tagged with 'Vacation 2017'" is patentable?

Still sounds awfully general. I mean, it is clearly subjective, but I think the issue is the divide between domain specific technical expertise and lawyers / judges who would argue a patent is exploitable.

So images are indexed by topic, theme, and individual. Sub-setting the transfer on any of those indexes violates the patent? There must be more to it.

That's a good start, but there's more to claim 1:

...filter the plurality of photographic images using a transfer criteria wherein the transfer criteria is a subject identification of a respective photographic image within the plurality of photographic images, wherein the subject identification is based on a topic, theme or individual shown in the respective photographic image; and transmit, via the wireless transmitter and to a second mobile device, the filtered plurality of photographic images.

Invaliding prior art has to cover every single thing in the claim. (And my hunch is that it's out there).

Perhaps some NASA software does this, considering the cost of sending each and every image?

Based on my understanding, the patent still needs to represent an "inventive step" from the prior art. Let's say you can show that

A. Classifying images based on a (pre-existing?) identification; B. Filtering images based on classification; C. Wirelessly transmitting images

were all known at the time. Then you could argue that a "person having ordinary skill in the art" would have known to combine A+B+C to solve the problem. Thus the prior art teaches the invention and the patent should be declared invalid.

This isn't wrong. But it's oversimplified and in practice in the US obviousness arguments have a low likelihood of success, lower if it gets too a jury trial.

You are much better off defending again infringement suits with novelty arguments.

Shouldn't infringement match all claims too? SQL did filtering using transfer criteria 45 years ago.

Aside fighting the patent, I hope this egregious act does not come without consequences. It may be meaningless, but I'm tempted to mail a letter to this company regarding my disapproval for the gesture they are sending to the open source community.

Patent trolls don't care what you think of them. They don't have customers to worry about offending. They're just corporate highwaymen.

I mean sure, a single letter would not stop a company that is a known patent troll. On the other hand, a lot of letters may at least be felt, at least by employees handling the mail.

Or maybe not, maybe they’ll be laughing all the way to the bank. But you know, it’s not like it would take so much time or effort that it would be much of a shame if it did nothing at all.

You will waste more of your time than theirs.

These people are purely evil; they don't care what you think of them, and will just laugh at your letter before they toss it in the trash. You'll just be wasting your time.

I would applaud you sending a letter, but honestly this company might not even receive mail at their box or just outright discard items coming from unknown parties. I feel like you'd be putting some effort into this and they wouldn't even notice or read your letter.

These sorts of trolls tend to operate with a minimal amount of staffing since they're usually subsidiary spin off companies (so nothing but bare bones is allocated in terms of payroll) and since patent trolling is such a gamble (if you're trolling 200 patents with the expectation of getting one or two hits then you should try and minimize costs)

They know what they're doing, and they don't care that it's wrong.

One reform worth considering is that an entity that can be demonstrated to persistently engage in frivolous patent lawsuits should lose the rights to their entire portfolio.

This could be accomplished with a legal mechanism that allows the defendant to counter-sue the plaintiff as a patent troll. In this scope they could bring in previous litigative history of the plaintiff (or any related entities, piercing the corporate veil). If the judge rules in the defendant's favor, then all of the plaintiff's patents (and any related entities) are immediately released into public domain.

This would go a long way to preventing patent trolling. And not just because of the direct incentives. Any entity engaging in a patent lawsuit would put their entire portfolio at risk. The larger the portfolio, the higher the risk. The individual or small company with one or a few patents has very little risk. Whereas the large company that hoards thousands and thousands of patents would bear enormous risk on any single lawsuit.

AFAIK that was what Facebook tried with their modified BSD that granted patents unless you sued Facebook.

Though that doesn't help against NPE.

I'd go a step further. The people behind this lawsuit, and anyone else owning a software patent, should be in jail for fraud.

So they'd have one company for every patent. It won't work.

> In this scope they could bring in previous litigative history of the plaintiff (or any related entities, piercing the corporate veil).

Transparent shuffling of money and legal responsibilities don't have to be an effective shield if we follow the money.

Plus if you toss lawyer in jail and disbar them you will run out of lawyers to sac pretty quickly.

Or alternatively you'd manage to take down all of microsoft's patents for that one time they thought a paper clip telling people what to do was innovative... Less jokingly, I'm sure microsoft has a dumb patent or two kicking around, that doesn't mean their entire suite is BS.

There's a difference between having a handful of dumb patents among a sea of valid ones v. having a portfolio composed entirely of dumb patents.

There's also a difference between sitting on a handful of dumb patents v. most or all of your patent litigation cases being over dumb patents.

There isn't a difference unless that's outlined in the law or it's interpretation and I don't know how you'd sanely define things to disallow abuse here.

Sounds like Anti-SLAPP with IP characteristics.

I'd prefer just upping the potential consequences for patent trolling - heavier fines for standard violations and the option, if a violation can be shown to demonstrate clear intent, to jail the offender.

Seriously, want to solve all white collar crime ever? Put some jail time on the table and watch everyone straighten right out.

Another potential reform (from the book "Radical Markets") - charge a (say 1%) property tax on the patent based on self-assessed value, with the caveat that you MUST sell the patent to anyone willing to pay your claimed value.

This basically destroys patent trolling, which only works because of the asymmetrical difference in cost between obtaining a patent and defending a patent lawsuit. If the troll prices the patent too low, the person they are suing just buys it, if they charge too much, they have a massive recurring tax bill (and an incentive to settle quickly, not to drag it out in the courts for years).

Doesn't this work against small-time inventors? Price it too high, and they can't afford to keep it (don't have time to sell it or build a business around it); price it too low, and someone can just buy it off them. Perhaps it could lapse sooner if you aren't paying the tax (to discourage people from just sitting on patents), but that doesn't solve patent trolling.

Remember, the rationale for the existence of patents is to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", not to reward people with monopolies, which is the mechanism.

This is one of several related reasons why I hate the term "intellectual property". Ideas are not property, and shoving them into a property-rights framework and thinking of them as such leads to all sorts of perverse results.

It seems fair that you should have to pay some kind of fee to reserve useful ideas. If you don't have the ability to turn ideas in to reality then they should be given to someone else who can pay the purchase price.

It would be possible to, say, make it royalty free until either you tried to use it in litigation or, say, five years had passed.

If you can’t make the thing event slightly useful in five years, society doesn’t gain much for you having an exclusive monopoly on the thing. So long as the tax is low percentage wise, the yearly cost to keep it as your own would be well worth it.

Doesn't work very well for e.g. drugs, where you may have the first 10 years of the patent term effectively useless because of approval cycles, etc.

Add on a "use it or lose it" policy and I'm onboard. If the patent holder isn't building products with their IP or licensing it as the original author than they shouldn't be allowed to hold it.

It would disable "defensive" patent strategies where companies don't patent their actual technology, but the path to it, which is against the spirit of patents, and disable patent acquisition as an IP strategy.

Meanwhile companies like ARM, which live off IP licensing but wouldn't be punished because they're the original patent authors.

What about just losing software patents altogether? Sorry, but from my perspective on the other side of Atlantic, it looks like a yet another example of "there's no way to avoid this - says the only country where this happens".

They have software patents in many (most? all?) EU countries. The only thing they don’t have is patents on software code itself, which the US doesn’t really have either. See: https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/11/15/epo-publishes-revised-...

The main criteria in the EU is whether the method embodied in the software is “technical.” (Image recognition as opposed to say a business method.) See: https://mewburn.com/resource/patentability-of-business-metho...

In the US, under Alice, Section 101 has morphed into a very similar analysis.

The loosing side having to pay the legal fees of the winner is an often used mechanism to deter frivolous lawsuits. Patent troll cases I've seen tend to stick to places of trial/judges without those, so could be another area to improve...

Take away Rothschild's ability to use any open source software bearing a license with a patent clause.

I'm sure his phone or internet access don't at any point rely on such software.

I'd like to point out that the patent isn't even relevant and this lawsuit will probably get thrown out straight away, copied from the article comments, the patent specifies:

> An image-capturing mobile device, comprising Shotwell is not an image-capturing device.

>a Newegg approach

Any more info about this? Never heard of it admittedly.

Here's a summary: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/newegg-fought-it...

Newegg's legal counsel, Lee Cheng, successfully convinced his bosses that they might save money by fighting patent extortionists instead of paying them. They had an early high profile case, and won, and then won several more. (Also lost a couple, if I remember right.)

Lee furthermore pursued a strategy of trying to win by invalidating the patent. Newegg got enough of a reputation for this that patent trolls would mass-file a lawsuit, realize that they had included Newegg in the lawsuit, and withdraw the suit. So then Newegg started a strategy of chasing down any patent troll dumb enough to file a suit against Newegg, and aggressively sue them in retaliation -- again, seeking to invalidate the patent (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/newegg-sues-pate...).

Cheng and Newegg eventually went their separate ways, and I haven't heard much from either one since. But, for a while, Newegg was in the tech news every few months for doing real damage to another patent extortion outfit, and it was glorious.

And thus, having been gloriously saved by a commercial company instead of better laws or regulations, we never heard from patent trolls again.

All regulation in the US is just a consequence of the lobbying war between opposed commercial interests, so in reality the difference is moot.

> I hope Gnome is able to take a Newegg approach here and kill the patent.

How do you propose paying for that? It is fantastically expensive.

If anyone from the Gnome team is listening, if you guys started a GoFundMe or something to help with legal fees to challenge this, I would throw twenty bucks your way.

I'd be happy if someone held me to that.

It cost Newegg $60,000 to fight their patent troll. Gnome team is going to need a lot more then $20.

He will not be the only one throwing $20...

I know, but $60,000 / $20/person = ~3,000 people. That really isn't that much in the scope of things.

Donating to an open source project to combat a software patent troll?

I could already see this story making headlines in pretty much every tech news outlet there is. They'd get a few thousand individual donations for sure.

And sadly it will be the lawyers laughing their way to the bank.

Or will some of the money be recovered if the case is won? Thinking about it, wouldn't it be fair if you were more than compensated in case you won a lawsuit filed against you?

Aren't expenses for lawyers compensated by the losing party?

Loser pays (the English rule[0]) can apply in the U.S. but is quite uncommon. Most of the time both parties are responsible for their own legal fees[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_fee...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney's_fees...

> Federal courts also possess inherent authority to assess attorney’s fees and litigation costs against a plaintiff who has acted in bad faith, vexatiously, wantonly or for oppressive reasons.

Patent trolls obviously act in bad faith.

> It cost Newegg $60,000 to fight their patent troll. Gnome team is going to need a lot more then $20.

Wow, that's all? That's actually really encouraging, if true. I would have assumed it was millions.

Even if that is correct, you still need to have a couple hundred grand in reserve in case the judge is a dumbass and you lose.

I would donate to an effort to kill this patent as well.

We have to start getting more aggressive in these scenarios. If the patent isn't killed, they're just going to turn around and sue someone else with it. So if we want a world where small players can compete with the likes of Microsoft or Facebook, we need to retaliate against trolls who go after small players.

It's not just the patent. That whole company needs to be killed. They serve no useful purpose; the epitome of bullshit jobs.

Honestly I wish more countries would take New Zealand's approach and just outright ban all software patents. There is no reason any software patent should exist.

I don't disagree, but I don't think you can bring a legal case to a judge that a company can't exist.

But if every one of their threats resulted in someone dragging them into an expensive fight over whether or not that patent was valid, maybe eventually they'd just go bankrupt from the legal fees.

Essentially, use their own strategy against them. Whenever they sue someone, they have two choices: roll over and let the patent get invalidated, or fight an expensive lawsuit against a party that refuses to settle.

Where is the satisfaction of having a troll bankrupted by litigation? If the troll went bankrupt, it probably means:

* The lawyers got paid so much money there is no more money left to pay the receptionist and the power company and the copier rental.

* The troll is protected from paying any damages to the legal team that defeated them.

So the lawyers/executives suck up all the money and move on, leaving a wake of destruction behind them. In many cases, that should be considered criminal.

> That whole company needs to be killed.

And the owners both bankrupted and jailed, or they'll just do it again.

There are still ways you can patent software in New Zealand. I knew a guy who did it and IIRC it was granted on the basis of there being a comparatively small hardware component.

The GNOME Foundation takes donations[0], I think it would probably be good if they had some way to signal that you only want the money in a legal defense fund (especially given that sometimes they put Foundation resources behind controversial things which I myself don't want to support).

Nonetheless I'm throwing some money into the pot, hopefully it is used to fight this troll case, which thankfully may be so facially ridiculous that it is thrown out.

[0]: https://www.gnome.org/support-gnome/donate/

Not a GNOME user so I have no idea what the GNOME foundation gets up too, what sort of controversial things have they funded in the past?

Look at the staff list https://www.gnome.org/foundation/staff/ . It's top heavy with useless people running "diversity initiatives" and "anti-harassment teams" and only one Gtk dev. If they had 10 developers then maybe there'd be a place for these people, but at the moment I don't agree with their priorities.

I'd happily donate to a legal fund to fight this lawsuit though.

The role of a typical FLOSS foundation is to enable development by providing neutral infrastructure and organizational efforts, for example organizing conferences & hackfests with travel reimbursements, boring accounting & paperwork, maintaining trademarks, avoiding legal risks; the actual development will be done by interested companies and individuals.

I think part of what flukus was getting at is not supported by that staff page. GNOME has outreach and sponsorship programs, but they all seem to be gender discriminatory, and focused more on external social causes than on the quality of GNOME software.

GNOME Foundation could probably just use GitLab.com, it wouldn't take a full time staff if their focus was infrastructure. It seems like the GNOME Foundation is predisposed with gaining institutional power over the symbols of GNOME, to egoistically control the community.

> GoFundMe

oh, that American health insurance website.

I mean didn't the people of Belgium recently did the equivalent of gofundme to raise money for treatment for a toddler for the drug Zolgensma?

Belgium, I dunno. But it happened in Portugal. Governmeant ended up paying for the medicine. The parents kept the €2.5m...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49739845

Yeah, that's exactly what it is...

Ditto. Patent trolls need to be destroyed.

Put me down for $20 if it comes up.

I'm in for $20 too.

Same here. Documenting and open-sourcing the legal effort around this could be good experience for people that help in other similar situations.

I'm in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Foundation

Revenue (2014) - $667,370

Is this the first time a troll has gone after an open source project?

Is there a precedent?

Are they after the usual troll thing, a quick settlement less than lawyer fees to fight it?

Does nonprofit status of the victim become relevant?

If you really want to know, it's not hidden : https://www.gnome.org/foundation/reports/

Donations are not necessarily consistent over years. You'll also have expanses.

They could start some sort of anti-patent troll foundation / joint effort with Cloudflare, Newegg, the EFF, etc.

I would personally donate hundreds each year if such organization existed, patent trolls are my worst software nightmare.

Gnome accepts direct donations a number of online payment methods including paypal and bitcoin. They are 501(3)c tax deductible.

(I just donated $50 - good luck guys)

I’m a patent litigator. I’ll do the work for free. I’d do it myself but I don’t want to also front the ~$20k for an IPR filing fee.

This is a good potential pro bono case, there are some big firms that might be willing to pick it up since theyre unlikely to be conflicted out

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