Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

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Its a defensive patent scheme. Remember the old days of the internet where people would take boring business model X and patent "doing X on the internet" and try to make millions or billions? The idea is if it costs $5K to file a patent and you think there's a 1 in a 1000 chance of someone actually inventing room temp superconductors soon-ish, then you net profit if you license your patent for more than $5M which seems quite reasonable. Say, for example, GE discovers and commercializes room temp semiconductors, it would be a lot cheaper and faster to pay this guy off (despite him doing nothing) for perhaps $10M than to fight him in court and try to explain to a completely non-technical judge that the guy didn't actually invent anything. Any one patent will almost certainly not pay off, but file enough patents and you'll win the lotto eventually. Somebody out there working independent of the patent guy will eventually invent an actual real world room temp superconductor and the patent guy will get a lot of money for doing, well, essentially nothing.

Really, everyone should be patenting everything in science fiction. We can do the "doing X on the internet" thing with drones. Why hasn't someone patented the idea of "delivery of bags of dogfood ... via drone", that was a classic of dotcom 1.0.

There are several problems with this idea, as I see it:

1. The assignee is the US Navy. He won't personally profit.

2. Protection is given for the claims, not for the abstract, diagrams or specification. The claims have to describe something relatively concrete or they'll be rejected. You can't obtain patents for titles or elevator pitches.

3. Even if it's granted and you think GE infringes, they might disagree. Welcome to patent litigation, which is super expensive.

4. Even if it's not granted, it might be successfully cited as prior art against GE's application. You won't get royalties on nothing.

5. Patents expire. If you're patenting science fiction, yours might expire decades before it's actually possible.

I have filed a patent on my own time and dime. It is much harder than it looks. ~$50,000 USD and hundreds of hours of work over 5+ years.

I'm not sure I got it right:

Did it cost you ~$50k to file your patent?

This is in the ball park for a patent being filed and managed internationally (say Japan, USA and Europe) through all the stages to grant. Which takes ~5 years. And then over it's life cycle - there's a lot of admin. I've been regularly quoted £20k.

Yep. I filed through through WIPO for worldwide priority. Eventually my finances stretched as far as obtaining an Australian patent and a US patent. EU was going to cost tens of thousands for low probability. Chinese patent would've cost another 10k at least and it would be a gamble on the future state of IP enforcement there.

There will be more expenses. $50k was the get as far as the US patent. I've spent another $3k since then on costs arising from other paperwork around it.

That's a cheap patent. Especially given the timescale. Look at it this way. Can you find a lawyer to help shepherd a patent for 5 years and his/her fee is less then 10.000 dollars per year?

I kept down the cost by doing a ton of the legwork myself. Lots of drafting, diagrams, picking apart the examiner's citations etc. But for a lot of it you absolutely need a professional to help.

...and there are ancillary patents, for defense of the original patent, that need to be filed in order to keep up with competition. I have a buddy who has several patents for polishing concrete vertically https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMSR0R8tA8A

That's fine for room temperature superconductors, but things like gravity manipulation and inertial dampeners are, as far as I know, not even technically feasible. Why even bother with a defensive patent for patent nonsense?

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