U.S. government owes over $100M for TSA's patent infringement
reuters.com
reuters.com
St. Petersburg, Florida-based SecurityPoint's founder Joseph Ambrefe offered the TSA a license to his patent in 2005 in exchange for the exclusive right to advertise on the trays at U.S. airports.
The TSA had success testing SecurityPoint's technology and equipment, but refused SecurityPoint's offer.
The court said the TSA began using the same method with its own equipment later that year at most or all of the airports under its control, and SecurityPoint sued the U.S. government for patent infringement in 2011.
The government conceded that it had used the technology since 2008 in 10 airports including Dallas/Fort Worth, Boston Logan, Phoenix Sky Harbor and all three major Washington, D.C.-area airports.
The court rejected the government's arguments that SecurityPoint's patent was invalid in 2015, leaving questions about the extent of the government's infringement and how much it owed in damages.
(It boils my blood that the patent system rewards the people who essentially “call dibs” on ideas like this, instead of the people who build things.)
If there is space, you can put a ad on it, that's a trivial truth older then the patent system itself.
It's completely possible to look at a system, realize there's a flaw, and not take advantage of it--perhaps even try to fix the flaw you discovered.
In the US, we're increasingly normalizing the culture of "well, it's legal" as to whether we should or shouldn't do something--the baseline of morales is becoming law.
Part of this is driven by competitive forces that put us at critical disadvantages if we don't follow suit. Taking the "high road" often costs more and hinders us to points we can't survive, so even if you don't want to play exploitative games on systems and people, in some cases, your very livelihood may actually depend on it.
"Don't hate the player, hate the game" comes to mind as players unwilling to come to a consensus that the game is flawed and adjust the rules so they can follow the intent of the game and not the flaws in the rules of the game.
Yes, this makes me sick. I know a disturbing number of people who, to varying degrees, seem to think gaming things without regard to positive-sum outcomes is just... right and normal.
People want to talk about a morality crisis, there's your crisis. Way too many people seem to want to live in Soviet-class corruption.
It's right and normal because the US[1] has a very rule-based social system. Break the rules with the best of intentions, and you're not going to have a good time. Follow the rules with the worst of intentions, and you are.
[1] And it is by no means alone in this.
One thing that a society under communism has to deal with is reckoning with the fact that, actually, its all a game and there is little difference between what you can get away with, and what is right. In fact the Soviets celebrated and rewarded those people who, as individuals, could play the game best.
while in America we have always valued human enterprise in itself. It's not about the money, it's about collectively coming together to maximize prosperity and well being. People know whats right and good because, as a nation, its manifest that greedy individuals should not be celebrated; goes against the whole idea of the United States that's been there from the start.
It's really sad, I feel like I'm living in the USSR more and more everyday
Edit: to be clear, I'm pretty sure they intended "right" to be sarcastic in that statement, not that they're actually endorsing something as depraved as cultural relativism.
Obviously it's not a positive thing in this case, but there seems to be a lot in common with a hacker sort of mindset here. Figuring out loopholes in laws seems awfully similar on some level to figuring out how a piece of tech works and making it do goofy things the designers never thought of or intended.
Obviously, ethics enter into the equation, and there's a collection of things that are legal but unethical whether you're talking about legal loopholes or traditional hacking. Though given this discussion I'm able to think of more in the legal realm that's unethical.
Maybe we need an analog to red-teamers in the legal world. I guess that's a lawyer? A certain kind of lawyer anyway.
This isn't a witty corner-case hack. This is a system intentionally designed to reward insiders.
In the US as well, though the system is geared toward hiding that fact.
Jury nullification is a thing, though if you admit to have heard about it you'll be booted off the jury.
Judges may not have as much leeway in sentencing as they used to, but they do for verdicts, though no judge likes to be reversed on appeal, the threat of which tends to constrain verdicts and opinions (which sometimes seems to lead to more creativity in findings of fact).
Because our patent system is broken beyond repair and should be entirely dismantled never to be rebuilt.
Remember cases like this the next time you hear anyone try to justify existence of something like a software patent. A monopoly on ideas is an absurdity laid bare to most people only by glaring examples like this.
For instance, I may discover a manufacturing machine that cuts the cost of building semiconductor chips in half. My options under this model, though, are to either price it low enough that I can actually afford to build up a business on top of it (in which case a bigger company can swoop in, buy the rights from me, and destroy my business) or price it high enough that the incumbents can't afford to buy me off (in which case, the proposed tax will be large enough that it'll stifle my business, and the incumbents can just wait until my business dies on its own.)
The current system is far from perfect, but it does favor upstarts and entrepreneurs' ability to build business rather than incumbents. The big thing I'd love to see is a shortening of the patent exclusivity period before becoming public domain.
I think exactly the opposite is true. Patents are one of the primary ways that incumbents are able to rent seek on their inventions for decades. These large companies hoard patents, and are legally granted monopoly on a given technology, making direct competition on their invention illegal.
A world without patents would be more enabling to small entrepreneurs, because the amount of things they are allowed to attempt is so much higher than in our current world.
Totally agreed, and the solution there is (in my opinion) to reduce the duration of such patents to the point where newcomers have a reasonable chance to bootstrap a business based on that patent, but not so long that patents bar competitors from coming to market down the line.
Value-based taxation will always favor those with deep pockets who can afford to pay top dollar to scrape the cream off of small businesses.
Meanwhile, with a Georgist tax, either you have to raise hundreds of millions just to pay the tax when created, or FB buys your patent for peanuts.
Because it seems to me, the way the patent system is supposed to work, and the way it actually works in practice, are very different.
1. A fixed original-author schedule which is 28 years, tax free; and,
2. A "work for hire" schedule which is 70+ years, where the Geoist tax is free for the first 7 years, then increases by 1% every 7 years.
Again, the rule is this: you self appraise, and pay your tax. Any other entity can pay the balance due (in my opinion, to the Treasury: the monopoly is granted by the people, not the copyright owner), and it places the copy into the public domain.
For patents... I'd probably say its "free" unless you enforce its monopoly. Then, if you value the patent at "100 million$" you owe the government N-years X percentage X 100 million. Obviously, the valuation isn't the infringing value — infringement is a fraction of its value. That means a patent only "has value" when it's used to enforce its monopoly.
Imagine the Hobson's Choice you just offered small-time artists. If you don't want to work with a large publisher, you either have to overvalue your copyright to the point of being buried by ruinsome, confiscatory taxes... or, if you don't want the taxes, then a large publisher can buy you out for pennies on the dollar. What that would mean is that you would lose the legal right to write your own work anymore.
Large publishers would benefit handsomely, as they'd be able to buy into a new market of hilariously undervalued work. You would turn every independent creative endeavor into the highly exploitative contracts that the average record label M&A lawyer writes on a day-to-day basis. Meanwhile, because these companies are already rich and powerful, they can just afford to pay the tax to overvalue their copyrights. So the end result would be a transfer of wealth from artists to publishers.
Furthermore, what happens to any existing licensing agreements? What happens if Microsoft buys out Linus Torvalds or the FSF with the intent of making Linux or GNU proprietary software? Does the GPL still hold, or does the buyout override the licensing agreement? The latter is bad for obvious reasons. The former would allow the use of improper transfers and creative accounting to partially evade the taxation regime. Hold your copyright personally, exclusively license it to an LLC on very generous terms, and then undervalue the copyright on your taxes. If someone does buy you out, they can't terminate the license for at least 35 years - upon which most of the copyright's value will have already been exploited.
What you seem to be asking for is a way to attack large companies for being large. The answer to your question is not to break copyright and patent law (more than it already has); but to actually enforce antitrust law, and reduce the scope and scale of copyright back to something reasonable.
I replied elsewhere, but will reply here, as well. I think there should be two "schedules":
1. A private schedule, which is tax-free which terminates at 28 years or upon any (or all?) of the authors' death, whichever is first; and,
2. A work-for-hire schedule, which begins at 0% tax, and increases by 1% every 7 years after that.
A "private" copyright can be converted to a "work-for-hire" by paying past taxes. A work-for-hire may not be converted to private.
First, when a copyright is "bought out", the payment is made to the Treasury — the copyright is granted by the people via the US government, that is the beneficiary of the buyout. Second, the buyout places the work into the public domain; this is not a transfer sale! Third, the copyright owner can increase the value whenever they feel like, but the valuation can never decrease. For example: the owner could value the copyright at 50 gajillion dollars; at the end of 7 years, if they can't pay the tax on the 50 gajillion dollars, the copyright lapses.
For patents, I think a tax is owed when the patent is enforced in a court of law. I don't know the schedule for that.
What you're talking about with patents could be handled by just taxing licensing revenues. That would also work for creating a copyright value tax. However, I'm pretty sure we already have ways to tax the proceeds of copyright and patent licensing.
Also, while "buyout to uncopyright the work" is better than "buyout to own the work for yourself", I still think there's some problems with this. Public domain doesn't just mean "everyone owns it", it also means "everyone can reuse it", and when you do that you create a new copyright on that derivative work[0]. This is part and parcel of the reason why copylefts and share-alike licensing exists. It lets you lock things open. Would Microsoft be able to buy out Linus Torvalds in order to evade the GPL on Linux?
[0] This is also why nominally public domain characters like Sherlock Holmes are actually fiendishly difficult to reuse. The estate that owns the still copyrighted part of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work can still sue if your reuse of the public domain character is too close to their copyrighted expression. Notably, this means your Sherlock can't be too human.
Patents are regularly invalidated due to prior art. As long as you document your inventions thoroughly, then even if you don't patent the idea yourself, you can invalidate the person who did. If the people who "call dibs" are being rewarded, it's only because the inventors either weren't patenting, or weren't documenting.
You know what's required for a patent to be awarded? It has to be non-obvious. It has to be something that someone "the typical person in the field" wouldn't think to do, when given that problem to solve.
If the patent office (and later, the courts) would just apply the non-obviousness criteria reasonably we wouldn't have these problems.
And yes, that means they'd likely need to consult with people in various fields. It's not exactly free to get a patent; some of that money could go to pay those same consultants to judge the obviousness of each patent as it is reviewed.
Agreed, but given that inventors can endlessly refile with whatever minor tweaks they like, and examiners are incentivised according to the number of patents they grant, it isn't hard to wear them down, eventually.
Courts then presume a patent is valid and it takes a lot of effort to convince them otherwise, and typically it is only prior art that will do it.
This is completely wrong; their incentive is actually to reject an application. The optimal strategy for an examiner seems to be to reject an application at least twice, usually more. There is abundant literature on this topic, and I encourage you to explore it.
To me that's a really bad take, obsessing on builders, do you see how much additional wasted energy and mindshare that requires?
"woah hey there, I don't respect you because what I wanted you to do was build the security apparatus and tray system yourself and find the product market fit yourself, despite the TSA monopoly on all the checkpoints, don't worry about that part its about how much I respect you, not the higher capital requirements, time requirements and worthlessness of attempting any of this!"
If you click through to the patent filing (linked elsewhere in this thread), the claims are quite easy to read. If someone notices something novel in the claims that I've missed, I'd love to be wrong and learn about some fantastic new invention for plastic bins. But all indications are that this is yet another utterly bullshit patent that should never have been granted.
We need to rewind to 2001 and 2002 here, where the priority date of this patent begins.
TSA was created as part of a series of kneejerk reactions to the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks in November 2001. Congress was merely a tool here as there was almost zero original bills passed, just pet projects that enterprisers and war hawks had already written as bills, forwarded to their favorite committees when it was convenient.
Within 8 months this person has their provisional patent filed that predicts how these checkpoints will be structured and how they could further function. July 2002.
Here, I agree that it was patentable because this level of security really was not in use anywhere back then. There was no need for an efficient baggage binning system back then. Just a few government buildings had scanners for just a couple people at a time.
The TSA did not implement this until after this patent holder presented the proposal to them.
The TSA also had a choice of not doing these obvious things. The patent system allows for infinite permutations to be patented, as well as patents to cover many of those permutations. The TSA did a very specific one, this isn't really that ambiguous.
I agree with the patent examiner, I agree with the judge. Also thank you for validating my point about how non-practicing entities get scapegoated way too much, I appreciate that. Hope my perspective still offers more insight others can agree with.
It's impossible to directly refute the argument that it only seems obvious in retrospect, short of finding some people who became isolated/frozen/etc in Y2K and asking them to judge.
Which is why we look to prior art. But that forms a much weaker argument - while we've seen stackable bins and bin aggregation carts for decades, we hadn't seen them in use at high volume invasive security checkpoints, as such checkpoints didn't exist before. Does applying a longstanding technology to a newly needed purpose constitute invention?
The patent system asserts that this answer is undecidable, and thus defaults to issuing a patent. Whereas to everyone else looking at the constructive behavior of this system, it looks an awful lot like lawyers getting paid a bunch of money to generate paperwork that divvies up ownership of the intellectual commons.
Yes, if the technology is new in that 'field'.
I remember often standing in line at Dulles. Backed up to the escalators, you look down and see the security line completely folded on itself(like the game snake), people filling the entire space logjammed by security. There were easily more people there than on any flight I took out of Dulles.
Especially with how common we've seen violent outbursts on airplanes since post-pandemic flights have resumed. It's almost a daily occurrence. If those individuals had weapons during flight, the outcomes would be very different.
Leave the detection and prevention of sophisticated threats to agencies better equipped.
Alternative take: the people throwing tantrums have reached their breaking point from the stress of being in a totalitarian environment [0]. And all the security theater of airports is a major and needless contributor to that stress.
[0] Just to be clear here, I think masks are highly necessary and if I had to fly somewhere I would be wearing a full face P100. But the act of forcing people to wear them is still totalitarian, regardless of how justified it is.
Wearing something over your face is annoying. Loops around your ears are irritating. Confronting someone that they need to put something on their face creates an adversarial situation. These are facts that the (otherwise sensible) pro-mask political dogma has rallied around rejecting, rather than focusing on the more enlightened viewpoint that wearing a mask is indeed a burden but we all have the responsibility to do it.
https://news.yahoo.com/american-airlines-flight-diverted-pas...
Even the deadly hijackings it was formed to prevent wouldn't ever happen again, since the passengers would fight back now
https://www.datagraver.com/thumbs/1300x1300r/2016-03/hijacki...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/03/29/hijackings-ra...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2017/11/09/tsa...
Putting an ad on a tray would at least be somewhere in the top 500 most atrocious things the TSA regularly does.
As I recall (I flew a couple weeks ago), the bins where you need to dump your belt, shoes, carry-on, etc. have advertisements on them.
But even without the ads, the TSA security theater was already a clown show, IMHO.
If we want the rich to finance large projects of cultural benefit, the appropriate mechanism for doing so is via taxation.
I mean it doesn't seem to pass the necessary burden of ingenuity as it's IMHO/as far as I can tell just a trivial combination of long known methods.
> A disadvantage to the present system used in security areas is that the trays for holding laptop computers are not part of a uniform system and do not protect the items from possible damage. Therefore, it is possible that multiple size trays that do not in any way correspond with one another may be used at a security area thus making storage of the trays when they are not in use cumbersome.
Probably some people working on there had ideas like that, too.
I mean it's such a common thing that there are EU standardized sizes for stack-able boxes (and as far as I can tell they existed since pre-EU, or at least I can't remember my dad not using them in his little shops storage room).
The sizes are so common that even car manufacturers consider them when designing (some kinds of) cars.
What can be said, generally, is that patentability isn't assessed with the benefit of hindsight, and a combination of well-known methods may, in some circumstances, be patentable.
This is more of a case of "knowingly infringing on a patent" rather than "infringing on a patent"
> It was the final step in the method of claim one – “moving said tray cart to said proximate end of said scanning device” – that was added at the PTO to overcome the examiner’s initial obviousness concern.
So the lynchpin of the case earning this company $100m is the idea of moving trays on a cart from the exit to the entrance.
https://www.eff.org/files/2016/12/22/security_point_ruling.p...
Or even more like the stackable plastic trays (and carts designed specifically for them) that you could find in the dishroom of most large cafeterias 50+ years ago.
And running actual stacks of those trays through the big dishwashing machine (say, to heat up a bunch of clean soup bowls right before they hit the serving line) was "d'oh, obvious" when I briefly had a dishroom job in the early 1980's.
I suppose drawing a definitive line where common sense ends and invention begins is difficult so we end up with the current system.
The US Government could dispute the patent claim if they think the so-called invention is not an invention.
Are there higher judges they can appeal to for a more rational outcome?
In relation to a patent infringement matters commenced in the US District Court of the relevant judicial circuit, it can be appealed to the Court of Appeals. In theory it can then be appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States (as happened in Google v. Oracle), if that court thinks its intervention is warranted.
In relation to issues arising from the grant of a patent (not an infringement action), an appeal can be made to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, and then to the Court of Appeals for the federal circuit, and then to the Supreme Court of the United States, if that court thinks its intervention is warranted.
I read below this is working its way through the appeals process but I'm not sure about its status.
Look at the claims, not the general descriptions. "A better stapler" may just be a stapler, but that description elides the novel mechanism contained within. (There may be no novel mechanism here. I don't know. I'm not a cart expert.)
> For a scanner with a near and far end, position one cart near the near end. Remove a tray from the cart. Pass it through the scanner. Put the tray in a second cart at the far end of the scanner. Move the second cart to the near end of the scanner.
I'm not exaggerating. That's what claim 1 says. If you do that they can sue you for infringement.
The subordinate claims talk about stackable trays, but you only have to infringe claim 1 to be infringing. Claim 1 is written as broadly as possible in order to "catch" as many infringers as possible, and then the subordinate claims are there in case the courts actually rule that claim 1 was too broad.
So you can say "Fine, we can't patent using a cart to move trays, but what about claim 3? We patented using stackable trays! That's very novel!"
I'd just start gesturing wildly at cafeteria trays that have been around for decades.
> One embodiment of the present invention may be a system including a security scanning device through which objects may be passed, having a proximate end and a distal end, a plurality of trays, and a plurality of tray carts adapted to receive the trays, wherein the plurality of trays are provided in a first tray cart at the proximate end of the scanning device, and wherein the trays are adapted to be passed through the scanning device at the proximate end, and wherein the trays are received in a second tray cart after passing through the scanning device at the distal end of the scanning device, and wherein the second cart is adapted to be relocated to the proximate end of the scanning device.
If the patent troll wins, we lose, and low quality shit patents are further confirmed.
If the TSA wins, it allows the TSA to continue to incinerate cash in a never ending play of "security theater".
Consider (120 years ago) a patent on "using energy to move a vehicle quickly". Well, that's stupid and obvious. But using an ICE to move a car was not. So you add more details and limits until it's no longer obvious.
You mean this one?
"... moving said tray cart to said proximate end of said scanning device"
I guess my bar for non-obvious is a lot higher.
Basically, the TSA didn’t try to establish that prior art for this patent existed? Why would they not do that? Is it too late for them to try now?
A method comprising: positioning a first tray cart containing trays at the proximate end of a scanning device through which objects may be passed, wherein said scanning device comprises a proximate end and a distal end, removing a tray from said first tray cart, passing said tray through said scanning device from said proximate end through to said distal end, providing a second tray cart at said distal end of said scanning device, receiving said tray passed through said scanning device in said second tray cart, and moving said second cart to said proximate end of said scanning device so that said trays in said second cart be passed through said scanning device at said proximate end.
There are 14 dependent claims, all depending from claim 1. We don't see anything about "advertising" until claim 4.
If you knock out claim 1, then all the others fall as well. I won't even try to defend claim 1 -- if you're saying "how else would you do it?" you're on the right track).
> states enjoy unfettered sovereign immunity with respect to copyright, trademark, and patent infringement claims in federal court
(In the specific case of IP, not in general. This is because the fed. gov. waived sovereign immunity for itself and the states, but the courts found that the fed. gov. couldn't waive the immunity on the state's behalf.)
At this point, we need to throw the baby and the bath water, discard the entire security theater and have some SV company innovate in this area.
Edit: I suspect the downvotes are because I quoted Peter Thiel. Very reasonable.
Masks on airplanes are the same deal. There have been numerous reports that masks don't provide that much protection, airplanes have superior air filtering systems, yada yada yada. Yet the FAA will likely keep extending the mask mandate indefinitely. The masks don't make us any safer, hell they might make us less safe when you consider the number of "mask related" unruly passengers. But they provide "safety", and that's the key driver here.
Really this trend can be seen everywhere. We make sacrifices as a society to feel "safe". Whether that thing we are doing is actually making us safer is irrelevant, it's all about feeling good about yourself and your "safe" decisions.
https://www.businessinsider.com/israels-ben-gurion-airport-s...
However, this system basically automatically applies increased risk to certain nationalities and cultures.
Are we willing to trade political correctness for a better security system?