We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won

See the section titled: "Step 4 — File complaints against Blackbird attorneys by bar association disciplinary counsel in Massachusetts and Illinois"

It would almost be like a security company, where you have a sign, “Protected by AntiTroll.”

Back in the 70s, Japan had that reputation. Then South Korea and Taiwan had it in the 80s. Now that these countries produce valuable IP, they vigorously support and defend it.

I think it is safe to extend argument not just for China, but the entire SE Asia. Hell, some regions in Vietnam smells almost like those PVD coating chemical gas chambers in Guangzhou.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-China-Paul-Midler/dp/1119...

Patents in software space are an abomination.

The solution is actually easy, and AFAIK has been at one time in the books too. Require a physical prototype with the submission. But I would go further. We should also require that the information in the patent, and any publicly available resources it references are together sufficient to replicate the prototype build.

If the rebuild cannot produce the same results as the application claims, then the entire application is invalid. (This limits the incentive for patent claims to be overly broad.)

Want to patent a process improvement? Fine, submit the description, the claims, the prototype implementing the improvement - and the accurate build instructions to replicate the design.

Think your setup would be too costly due to the requirement of the physical prototype? Works as intended: now you have an extra incentive to improve the invention to the point where it is actually useful and cost-effective.

And if the cost of submission due to prototype requirement prevents you from submitting for a patent in the first place? Excellent, the cost of entry is already high enough. Now you have to keep innovating to maintain your competitive edge, because there is no patent moat to prevent competition in an obviously expensive, potentially high-margin field.

The last one may sound like a weird one, but it serves a very specific purpose. You are allowed to keep trade secrets, but if you choose not to patent them and your competition does (because they figured out a more cost-effective way of doing it), then you just got what you deserved.

And the final nail in the coffin of overbroad patents would be to turn the patent office incentives around. Make the rejection of an application be financially the most beneficial result. Allow resubmissions, but make them exponentially more expensive, so companies can't just bombard the patent office with junk.

This is an inevitable trade-off but it will not be like China mainly due to strong sense of distrust in Chinese society.

Gadget manufactuers would also obfuscate or hide design features to make it harder for their inventions to be copied.

Also, I imagine, in the absence of patent protection, trade secret or non-compete laws would be more onerous.

> Over the past decade, China has demonstrated serious resolve to enforce an effective IP rights regime, and to bring the system in line with other developed systems in the US and Europe

I think this is entirely questionable where you have rampant IP theft [1][2] (I can recall couple of major recent incidents), and the claim that 1 in 5 US companies face IP theft in China [3]. The Chinese government wants to attract foreign businesses and number 1 concern for any western company when they want to do business in China is IP. It doesn't surprise me that the Chinese government is drumming up its stance on IP protection.

Lack of respect for IP runs deep in Chinese culture, articulated in great detail by Paul Middler in his book "What's wrong with China?". Having worked in China for a long period, there is no better summary of the Chinese business culture.

[1] Huawei Case: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-prosecutors-probe-huawei-on...

[2] Micron Case: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/technology/china-micron-c...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/28/1-in-5-companies-say-china-s...

It's not out of the question that they're doing it as a pretext for protectionism. If their companies file a large number of garbage patents then their courts can throw them out if anyone tries to use them against a Chinese company but enforce them whenever they're used against a foreign company.

200 years ago the US was a notorious thief of tech. The UK had strong export protections on skilled workers and important machinery, especially in the spinning industry.

Alexander Hamilton helped steal many trade secrets and helped many skilled US artisans migrate to the US, that was his government's policy, including paying for artisans' travels, suggesting to hand out bounties to people smuggling artisans out of the UK, and so on.

The US' strong copyright laws and international enforcement came later.

That's a very naive view of things.

Big companies will be happy to license your stuff if they actually got something with it (an actual developed product or component) but they won't be much compelled to license if you just wave a patent in front of them.

"Oh but then you sue", yea, it's not that simple.

Refutal: raise the cost differently depending on time to enter the market?

Then some statistician will have to be paid to estimate this, meaning patent applications are much more expensive.

I hope you think my comment was constructive.

And the problem is that the patents of today do their best to be as vague as possible (in order to maximize the "area under patent"), while either being obvious or not revealing sufficient details for one to recreate the patented invention from the patent. Not to mention that patents lengths are not in line with exponential rate of progress.

So if they already fail at the functions they were created for, how worse are they from trade secrets? Maybe what we should do is not only get rid of patents, but also reduce protections around trade secrets? People will keep trying to make money anyway, this will still lead to inventions, but that way, at least society will get to make use of those inventions.

(Drug research is an exception I'm not sure how to handle, though.)

Patents could've worked somewhat originally, at least in principle, but soon people started gaming the system, rendering the patent system worthless. Except for maybe certain domains patents do not currently host important inventions in the meaningful sense. Especially in software, execution matters much more than the actual idea.

And the execution part usually is akin to a trade secret: for example, it's not so much what Google and Amazon do, it's about the mountain of work they did in building all that and also making it scale. That's the non-trivial part that you couldn't replicate even if you read and bought all their patents.

A low-hanging fruit of fixing the patent system would be to reduce it to a mere notary service of timestamping ideas. Establishing the patent de facto would require the patent to be defended in courts: this alone would cut down the amount of bogus patents.

Defending a complex, vague system would cost a lot of money, balancing the usefulness of gaining a court-verified monopoly on the idea. On the other hand, a simple but truly novel idea would be rather easy to defend, even for a private person. There's no downgrade to the current state of matters: it's not as if the current patent system would allow individual inventors a low-cost way to sue and win big companies trying to abuse their patents already.

There are other ways but in any case gains need to be balanced with cost, that's the only way to make people and companies prioritise and valuate the true worth of their ideas. No party is going to spend a lot of money trying to defend a vague patent that was written only to win the first-to-file race and game its coverage within the patent system. They already know it's bollocks.

The idea that they were meant to serve as a way to reduce trade secrets falls flat in the face of the fact that most places with strong patent and copyright law, also have strong laws protecting trade secrets

Does anything in the early history of patents backs the assertion that they were invented for that reason?

"Patents might be useful as a way to fight trade secrets", is not the same thing, and could even be true enough; I think "patents were invented because..." might be a back-port of more recent thinking on to a history that does not support it.

Its becoming less and less and issue these days. Top secret product frequently leaks. Reverse engineering becoming better and better. Good luck keeping thing secrets, the cost will be higher and higher.

Patents encourage monopolisation by harming smaller companies more than large conglomerates. Small companies either take their chances and risk being sued out of existence or actively avoid patent infringement, wasting resources and limiting innovation.

If anything, patents discourage knowledge sharing because showing your work opens you up to liability for violating patents you may have been unaware of. The only form of "knowledge sharing" patents seem to encourage is filing patents, which only becomes "knowledge sharing" when they expire many years later.

EDIT: The most frequently cited counter-example is historical: guilds keeping trade secrets to prevent outsiders from just copying them. But this is meant to associate all the negative associations we have with that time and its level of technology with the absence of patents without doing the actual work of establishing anything resembling a causal relationship.

That said, the obvious flaw with that point in isolation is that it would still be possible to license a non-practicing entity to sue people on your behalf and then have a revenue sharing agreement between the holder and their employer at the time where the employer reimburses the holder for all expenses related to filing and in return receives all licensing revenue -- effectively recreating the current system but with more layers of bureaucratic indirection.

The problem is patents. If you try to fix them, the market will simply adjust to work around those fixes. Much like with actual nuclear weapons, we need to get rid of them, not just write more laws about when it is okay to use them. But unlike actual nuclear weapons, we can get rid of patents without changing the laws of physics -- we can just ban new applications and let the existing patents run out.

Cloudflare set an example that anyone with similar resources can follow.

And Cloudflare shared many of the results of their work, including an extensive prior art portfolio. This can be useful to anyone who gets sued for these and possibly similar patents.

I really hope more companies will follow Cloudflare's example.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tit-for-tat.asp

Still mega imo. Yes your mom seems awesome too. Congrats on that victory, sweet strategy!

Continuing Ed or not, I can’t imagine her sitting in a CS course in a year. Wow.

And yes, kudos to your mom for providing you that opportunity.