I received a patent infringement email for my weekend project (2010) | Hacker News Reader

I received a patent infringement email for my weekend project (2010)

royvanrijn.com

77 pointsfedericoterzi29 comments

Former patent examiner here. One problem I've seen time and time again with respect to patents on Hacker News is that people don't read the patent claims, the legally enforceable part of a patent. They just assume that because some journalist or blogger or attorney or whatnot says that this patent covers something, it must cover all instances of that. And that would be a big problem, preventing people from using a technology that should be available to the public. But the reality often is that what the patent covers is quite narrow. Yes, mistakes happen in granting patents, but not as frequently as people here seem to think.

Example of this phenomena on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30387833

The claims there don't cover as much as people think they do! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30388857

While I've never been involved on the litigation side of patents, if I received an email like this, I'd ask for not only the patent numbers but also a detailed "mapping" of how my product is infringing. The mapping is what I had to do as a patent examiner. Just show how my product infringes on the claims. That's what would have to be done in court, after all.

If they claim

    A widget consisting of 3 bars.

and my product has 4 bars [0] then I'm not infringing!

[0] "Consisting of" in patents means exactly. If they said "comprising" then 4 bars would infringe as they could point to any 3 of the 4. You need to know a little legalese, sure, but it's not hard.

Can you recommend a good reference/source for translating legalese? I'm not sure I've ever found a good source for determining which words should be interpreted normally and which are landmines.

The ambiguity about what words mean may be part of why people assume patents are so broad. Most people know that some words and phrases, when used in a legal context, have vastly different (more specific, broader, or even completely disconnected) meanings than what you'd expect in normal writing or speech. Without knowing what those are, the safe approach is to ascribe the least favorable possible meaning to every word. "Does language X mean Y" becomes "could language X possibly be interpreted by someone who doesn't understand the material to kinda vaguely reference Y," and you get the type of broad assumptions you're lamenting here.

The real answer is three years of law school plus a couple of years of work in the relevant field.

If you want a taste of what it involves, for patent law, here is one of the seminal cases on how to construe claim terms, Phillips v. AWH Corp., 415 F.3d 1303 (Fed. Cir. 2005):

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=220719574132079...

For an accessible introduction to patent legalese, I'd recommend taking a look at a recent edition of the book Patent It Yourself by David Pressman. I can't say it'll cover all that I learned as an examiner, but it's well written and covers a lot.

Also: A lot of the legalese I encountered as a patent examiner was "lexicographic definitions", that is, where a patent applicant writes somewhere in the patent specifications that a certain term or phrase has a particular meaning. Applicants didn't always make those easy to find... I recall one where (as I recall) they defined "insulation" to including something that can cool something down, which strikes me as simply wrong and confusing. That definition was basically hidden right in the middle of the patent application. It was necessary to find that definition to understand the claims. If the term is something I hadn't seen before then I would have just search for it, but for something common in the field I examined like "insulation", I wouldn't normally search for that. This is really annoying and unfortunately okay under USPTO rules.

I think we all know that the patents (especially software patents) are often overly broad and won't stand up to scrutiny but us poor pissants won't be able to pay more than a month or two of lawyer fees before we lose our homes and maybe even our families. I mean it's a big row to hoe.

> The two example patent numbers that I sent you are U.S. patents, but each of these patents has also been filed as patent applications in the Netherlands. Also, as I’m sure you are aware, your blogpost may be viewed internationally. As a result, you may contribute to someone infringing our patents in any part of the world.

This seems like a gross misunderstanding of patent- and IP-law. I can't know this, but I strongly doubt those patents would be valid anywhere in Europe.

Furthermore, releasing source code and information on an algorithm that someone claims is protected in US would still be akin to explaining an already published patent. Any information he shares beyond what is in the patent is, obviously, not protected. Further still, when patents are granted all information contained in the patent application becomes public domain. This is actually at the core of patent law.

Indeed, if the definition of patent in the EU is anything close to what it is in the USA, publishing an article, source code, or really anything else about the patent or how it works is not infringement. The entire purpose of a patent is to explain how something non-trivial works. The word means “make obvious”.

A patent isn’t some magical license to stifle discussion of a topic. It’s supposed to encourage it!

You're correct that parents provide a monopoly on working an invention and do not legally inhibit publicising an invention (as you note, that is one of their aims).

>The word means “make obvious”.//

"Patent" means "open", it comes from a Latin phrase meaning "open letter". Patents were originally letters from the monarch to their subjects on all sorts of issues. When monopolies were granted on working inventions people were notified by the issue of a litterae patentes (some people still style it "letters patent" in British English). This mode of acquiring rights stuck and the name became synonymous.

Patents do have to disclose in detail how an invention can be worked ('sufficiency' in UK law).

Those patents are apparently no longer valid in the Netherlands. Their status is: "Lapsed by non-payment of annual fee Art. 62 ROW" [1]. So he could publish the source I guess?

[1] https://mijnoctrooi.rvo.nl/fo-eregister-view/#/query/KGFhbnZ...

The number of things someone can make patents for that take half a days screwing around is way too high. The system is fucking bogus.

Part 2: https://www.royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/11/patent-infrigement-p... TL;DR:

> I’m sorry, but I can’t comply.

> Good luck.

The follow up around 2016: https://twitter.com/royvanrijn/status/788436253532426241

> Nothing happened, never heard from them again...

I couldn't find the code anywhere on his Github profile, so not sure if he actually took the step to publish the code.

It would be nice if there were actual consequences for making empty legal threats like this.

It really looks like US7921296B2, which has a priority back to 2001 is prior art for 7,627,477. They both create a database of id strings which are located at specific locations within a file. They then sample the same locations in the file to be compared. The only real differences is that the US7921296B2 patent uses hash strings, while Landmarks patent uses "fingerprint object". The US7627477 does not does NOT describe how those "fingerprint object" are created. In their description they state(with a prior citation to Knuth) "One way of preparing the data to allow for fast searching is to encode the fingerprint objects into numeric tokens, such as 32-bit unsigned integers, and using the numeric tokens as a key for sorting and searching". I wonder what method are going to use to create that 32-bit uint, without collisions LOL.

And whoever wrote 7,627,477 was a moron, unless the examiner required them to restrict their comparisons to strictly audio files. But since their earliest grant also is dedicated to audio, I'm guessing they were not thinking ahead. US7921296B2 on the other hand applies to multimedia files in general.

What get's me is that it was the examiner that cited US7921296B2.

Have I misinterpreted this?

It's a real travesty that law suits cost money. It basically ensures the one with the deepest pockets has the largest chance of winning. I would love to see a country that doesn't allow commercial lawyers for lawsuits. But instead both parties get a randomly assigned lawyer from the state. The party that is suing also has to pay a sum of money which they get back if the case is deemed non-ridiculous.

> It's a real travesty that law suits cost money

> The party that is suing also has to pay a sum of money

How much thought have you given to this?

It really depends on the country and the matter; I was part in several civil and criminal (as victim) cases where I self-represented myself, zero cost, so far I won every single time. The same cases in US would have costed me 6-digit numbers or more in lawyer fees, it is a lot more difficult to self-represent there.

I know you are joking. But if you had actually understood the rest of the comment you wouldn't be asking this question.

this isn't that far off from how some european systems work.

for example, in the UK[0], if you lose a lawsuit, you have to pay not only your attorney's fees, but the other party's attorneys fees. It gets very expensive. As a result, some percentage of valid claims are not filed because the losing party cannot bear the risk of losing.

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

Fortunately those fees are capped at something reasonable and rarely approach the actual costs. Still, it is a risk that you probably shouldn't take for a hobby project, it's all downside and very little upside.

I've had similar interaction with American companies and their lawyers in the past, and basically told them to sue in NL or get lost. They never did.

Nothing more annoying than these legal parasites.

https://jacquesmattheij.com/my-brush-with-a-patent-troll/

The whole system isn’t fit for purpose given how vulnerable it is to this sort of abuse. Even if one accepts patents as a useful construct the practical implementation makes it a net negative Id say

It shouldn’t take millions for someone innocent to defend themselves.

Interesting comments on his blog of people who REALLY want the code for some reason.

This makes me think an important question. What can individuals in western countries with imported IP-imperialism do to protect open source and other independent innovation from attempts at censorship by anti-hacking laws such as CFAA, DMCA and their foreign analogues or vaguely worded patent claims leading to a faux-monopoly on innovations?

Better to do something than wave the white flag and surrender all ideas to big-tech companies.

Don't use a web server located in those other countries of concern to publish your content.

How do people fight the urge to tell these people to fellate a phallic object and then later sign up their emails to all possible gay dating sites and spam newsletters? The audacity of these parasites to gangstalk you with patent claims of a country thousands of km away is just incredible...

In case the blog disappears

* https://archive.ph/kkebe OP blog, does not seem to infringe anything

* https://archive.ph/PjIVA Another blog, explains shazam

in case the blog post disappears: don't worry that much. first, patents describe the algorithm good enough, and 2nd this is not the best music matching method, it's rather primitive. this is much better: https://oxygene.sk/2011/01/how-does-chromaprint-work/ as used in musicbrainz

the first time i encountered this algorithm it was in a class and the paper was presented. i wonder if the paper existed when this all happened.

glad to read he called their bluff. rewarding threatening behavior rarely leads anywhere good and only encourages more bad behavior.

So what happened after Part 2?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com