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Comment by abridgett | Hacker News Reader

I remember when I worked at IBM Hursley research labs 20 years ago. The lab director told us all "patents are very important to IBM". I expected him to tell us that IBM made billions from licensing them. He didn't say that though. I don't think he even _mentioned_ that. Instead he stated: "It raises the entry barrier for the competition".

Patents were (narrowly) created to _encourage_ the spread of knowledge. Instead of risky "trade secrets" a company would make the knowledge public for a short monopoly. Most patents these days are not worthy of protection (certainly not as long as they are granted for). We need different lengths for different patents - we shouldn't treat how rectangular a phone is the same way as a life saving drug.

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To be fair to IBM, what your director may have been saying is that their use was primarily defensive, which it is and was for IBM. It’s not wrong for them to patent as much as they are able to, it serves an important disclosure function. When I worked at the USPTO, we used several patent databases. The US, of course, Japan, Europe, and IBM. IBM had their own database because of how significant their IP was. So while it’s unfortunate that they’ve taken the offensive in this case, historically IBM has been an important and relatively benign player in the IP landscape.

So while it’s unfortunate that they’ve taken the offensive in this case, historically IBM has been an important and relatively benign player in the IP landscape.

Your faith in IBM is misplaced, according to the article:

> IBM has cross-license agreements in place with the likes of Apple and Amazon and previously won $83M in a similar lawsuit against Groupon.

This is informative. What is a good way to keep track of 1) parents filed by IBM, 2) lawsuits and parties involved IBM? Is there a service you like that provide weekly or monthly updates?

Disclaimer, I've contributed a couple of patents to IBM's hoard of patents, but I no longer work there.

#1 is fairly straight forward, a simple script that uses the USPTO search function and searches for the Assignee field being IBM and the date range being the last 30 days gives you the patents issued that month to IBM. You can do that with a simple cron script, curl, and some script code.

#2 is somewhat more difficult, IBM gets sued a lot because they are big and a juicy target. If you have access to one of the legal databases (Lexis, Etc) you can search for cases where IBM is the plaintiff and the complaint contains phaseology around patents (like "patent", "infringement", Etc.) While expensive to access, if you live near a College or University with a Law program and you can get library privileges you use their access. In Santa Clara county you can join the Santa Clara Law Library (http://sccll.org/) which will give you access. Unfortunately, you need to be there to access the databases so that would involve a monthly trip to the library (not a bad thing in my opinion :-))

Tangential question for everyone. I recently had to file a small claims case by myself (i.e., no attorney). It's still in the pipeline, but the process made me realise that the legal world is a different universe altogether. From the tech perspective, everything is stuck in the dark ages. I had to create a pdf, print it, then go to the court, only to scan it again on a windows 8 computer with silverlight that would keep timing out. Similar experience with the website (run by a company called tyler technologies). I was not successful in doing much research on my own about the laws and precedents regarding such cases. The instructions on the court's website are not precise. Why is everything so siloed and inefficient that only lawyers can navigate this? Are any startups working in this space ?

In those situations I almost always go to the "tyler technologies" site and see if they're hiring development people. They never are.

There are startups in this space, but there are also people who value the friction (and not all for selfish reasons).

> (and not all for selfish reasons)

Can you elaborate?

Having physical interaction and time needed makes it harder to file nuisance suits, etc.

Physical version of proof of work. It helps avoid spam by making it costlier.

And they are entirely one sided. Try suing Google for patent or trademark infringement. I've seen the attempts: it's impossible to get justice. The entire system is rigged and serves as yet another way for powerful interests to extract value from productive members of society.

Right, but this is because institutions like Google use their power to weaken patent rights.

As long as it suits them. I think the bigger reason is that in many civil cases (not just IP) it ultimately comes down to who is willing to pay more for lawyers and legal fees.

As a litigator I do not think that is true. Facts, more than anything, dictate outcomes, generally. Though I will say that patent cases are prohibitively expensive. Though, contrary to what I would think many here assume, leaves the inventor with the short end of the stick as opposed to large IP-owning organizations like Google (that simultaneously advocate for lesser patent-rights).

> As a litigator I do not think that is true. Facts, more than anything, dictate outcomes, generally. Though I will say that patent cases are prohibitively expensive. Though, contrary to what I would think many here assume, leaves the inventor with the short end of the stick as opposed to large IP-owning organizations like Google (that simultaneously advocate for lesser patent-rights).

The problem is that patent cases are intrinsically prohibitively expensive. It's the nature of them, not a result of some recent regulatory change advocated by Google. Especially when there are companies that hold many thousands of patents, any of which can be claimed in combination and cause the defense to incur significant costs even if the claims or their applicability ultimately turn out to be bunk. And you're bankrupt before you can prove it.

The result is that large companies can destroy small practicing inventors with legal fees at will, which is naturally what they do if the small practicing inventor attempts to assert their patent.

To avoid this is to not practice your own invention so you can't yourself be sued for infringement. Which implies that the patent system is only useful to trolls and large incumbents and is actively harmful to small practicing inventors, who can't usefully assert their own patents against the incumbents but can have the large incumbents assert their patents against the small inventor.

Seeing as you thought this out, surely you thought out the alternative that is somehow better for inventors? I'd like to know what conclusion you came to regarding that

Facts alone don't help you if you can't afford to play long enough. These things are rarely clear cut, and anyone with deeper pockets than you can use that to their advantage quite easily. In a way it's best to get into an IP disagreement with someone having roughly the same resources as you, as you can both see the path that only makes lawyers happy and agree to avoid it.

That is all true, but money cannot change facts. If there is no factual basis for a claim, you lose on the first motion. I'm not sure what about that you don't get. Expensive lawyers can do many things, but they cannot change the factual basis of a litigation and whether or not it supports a claim.

As a non-litigator, i call BS. Facts don't matter much when it comes to justice. Try suing a small businesses LLC for some wrong doing: they'll file bankruptcy and you'll never see your money.

That's sort of the point of an LLC, though, so you can't really fault it. True, if it's a one-person shop the friction to fold it up isn't very high but you should factor that into your deal analysis.

As someone who has been personally sued after my company went bankrupt, I can tell you that it is not as simple as you paint it. Although I wish it was.

Some more detail: during bankruptcy, anyone that had business with the company can either file an adversary proceeding (essentially a lawsuit within bankruptcy court), and/or can do depositions/discovery (2004 examinations). They can also buys assets of the defunct company as well as legal claims to go after the company officers. Then after bankruptcy they can try to use whatever information, assets and claims they acquired, to sue the company officials personally.

> Some more detail: during bankruptcy, anyone that had business with the company can either file an adversary proceeding (essentially a lawsuit within bankruptcy court), and/or can do depositions/discovery (2004 examinations). They can also buys assets of the defunct company as well as legal claims to go after the company officers. Then after bankruptcy they can try to use whatever information, assets and claims they acquired, to sue the company officials personally.

What on Earth could make someone so angry to go through the hassle of doing this?

Not necessarily angry, but greedy maybe. Although at this point your guess is just as good as mine. Unfortunaty this guy has a lot of money and some sort of personal agenda against my cofounder and I. Hopefully we can sort it out. Otherwise we are looking at personal bankruptcy.

Make sure to stay away from assholes and never sign a contract that says you (your company), will cover the other party's legal expenses.

I obviously don't know the situation as well as you, but this feels more like being vindictive than greedy.

Whatever the case, I wish you luck.

I'm sorry, you are asking why is someone so greedy as to make a creditor's claim for money owed to them in a bankruptcy proceeding? That's the entire point of bankruptcy, you declare it, the creditors line up, the court doles out your money in the "fairest" way possible.

What on Earth could make someone so GREEDY to go through the hassle of doing this?

FTFY

"Patents were (narrowly) created to _encourage_ the spread of knowledge"

That may have been the language used, but it didn't reflect the reality even of that time.

James Watt had a mate in Westminster, and patents were a novel mechanism for him to stymie competition. It stalled the pace of engine advancement for a couple of decades.

This is described in some detail in an early chapter of /Against Intellectual Monopoly/ (Boldrin/Levine, 2010).

> We need different lengths for different patents - we shouldn't treat how rectangular a phone is the same way as a life saving drug.

We don't treat them the same. A design patent protecting an ornamental feature of a product has a term of 15 years from the date of issue. A utility patent for a useful invention has a term of 20 years from the date of application.In both cases, the rights granted are in exchange for disclosure of information and for a limited term. After the term ends, anyone is free to make full use of the design or invention and to make improvements without paying any royalties and without fear of infringing.

> Instead of risky "trade secrets" a company would make the knowledge public for a short monopoly.

Some inventions are suited to being kept secret (e.g., Google's search algorithms), while others are not (e.g., any product that can be reverse-engineered). Patents can protect the latter, for a limited time, where trade secret law cannot.

I think the lengths is only one possible solution. The other broken part is that the inventor has one idea they want to spread the knowledge of, but their patent attorney makes it overly broad and unrecognizable. Nobody even knows what the patent is about, sparing one “embodiment” described but not even part of the important “claims”. This is a rational reaction to the only way to make royalties on a patent because everyone would prefer to circumvent them instead of utilize them. Very broken incentive model.

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