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This is great. I do worry that a future more sinister malicious patent troll could read all the wonderful strategy Cloudflare used and work around them. Hopefully Cloudflare legal team got stronger!

Kudos to the likes of Cloudflare and (yesteryears’) Newegg that fought these trolls.

I shudder at the thought of how many of the existing legacy industries outside the computer space are still riddled with these patent portfolio companies :(

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> I do worry that a future more sinister malicious patent troll could read all the wonderful strategy

The "good" news is that patent trolling is, more or less by definition, a get-rich-quick scheme - they want to make a lot of money by sending a few dozen letters every year. It does not attract people who are interested in anything approaching due diligence.

But also, the whole point of all of this is to get the trolls to leave Cloudflare alone, right? This is a very deliberate strategy; this announcement says "don't try that stuff here ... but feel free to try Cisco or Juniper instead."

I was wondering if Cisco or Juniper payed them anything to back off or just threaten them the same thing that Cloudflare actually did to them.

The fact that they thought they had a winnable case again Cloudflare makes me think that others actually paid up ... or that the troll was just getting desperate to finally earn anything.

Or they saw rolling the dice with a jury as low risk potentially high reward.

Or they are shotgunning and there are many others in flight, and this was just public first.

I don't agree its always a get-rich-quick scheme, it can also be seen as a passive income stream. Its just another example of parasitic rent-seeking on which our economy is based.

I don't see how it's a get rich quick scheme when looking at companies like Immersion, who've been shaking down companies successfully for years.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/14/meta-settles-lawsuit-over-...

They basically have a stranglehold on patents for haptic feedback in gaming for some unfathomable reason and they will have it for the foreseeable future.

How would they get around crowd sourced prior art?

Supply prior art to Cloudflare themselves and win money from Project Jengo.

I guess they could. Is that a worse outcome than the on net additional expense of dealing with patent litigation?

Hopefully the powers that be will look at it from a national security perspective, in that other countries do not respect US copyright law and may be pulling ahead

copyrights are different from patents.

Copyright, patents, it doesn't matter. It's all IP and our enemies do not respect it. We need to move forward with that reality.

Patents are explicitly open for anyone to see. I don't know that we need more help there: you can get a product banned from import if someone uses your patent without recompense.

As someone in a place without pure software patents (algorithms can't be patented, but software/hardware combination systems can be), I'm willing to let US users use an overseas hosted instance instead of locally running it.

Though keeping US entities from importing copies against US patents isn't really something I could stop.

*laughs in amazon*

The US used to ignore IP laws when we were an underdog.

Do you think China is still an underdog compared to the US?

I suspect the only thing that would ever convince China to take IP seriously is if China's own companies would profit more from stronger IP protection.

China takes IP very seriously domestically when big corporations need protection. A bit of topic but I always found that the only "communist" country is the biggest infringer of copyleft licenses and has neglible open source culture. Shouldn't code be "for the people".

Totalitarian dictatorships are not communism.

Point us to a "real" communist country, either existing or in the past.

That's the point, isn't it? There aren't any. But what was the point of asking?

The point is that Communism always leads to totalitarianism

China operates an almost entirely capitalist economy. Who's ever heard of new billionaires under Communism? In fact no country remotely implements "communism," yet you say it always leads to authoritarianism. Why and how would an economic system only create totalitarianism? I think it more likely has to do with complex historical and political factors that leads to despots taking power under the guise of communism. I think it's fairly antiquated and disingenuous to make this red-scare blanket statement in 2024

So what you’re saying is that communism is such an unworkable ideal that nobody has achieved it on even a small-nation scale?

It’s cool in principle. It doesn’t actually work at scale. It barely works with 100 people. Still a fan?

It wasn’t tried at scale is what’s being argued. Maos china was not really communist even though they called themselves the communist party. Maybe something like totalitarian state capitalists

Oh, I get that. I’m saying, it barely works at even small scale, like 100 people (there are innumerable failed communes in the US), let alone a small state of a few million. I don’t think the Chinese under Mao implemented communism in any meaningful way, but that’s not proof of communism being unworkable. Its manifest failure on any scale beyond a large family is why I think it’s just not workable for society.

What's the point again? He did put the word "communism" in quotes, so I don't understand your ultra-pedantic remark.

The Church of Scientology's site promises to "bring Man to total freedom and truth". But in practice, all it does is separate its adherents from their money, and generally make their lives and the lives of those around them worse.

As such, True Scientology has never been tried! Maybe we ought to try it, so that we can have total freedom and truth?

> the only "communist" country

What about Vietnam and Cuba?

One colorful anecdote from that period.

> In the United Kingdom, he was called "Slater the Traitor" and "Sam the Slate" because he brought British textile technology to the United States, modifying it for American use. He memorized the textile factory machinery designs as an apprentice to a pioneer in the British industry before migrating to the U.S. at the age of 21.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater

Why should they respect it? Software patents are and have always been a bad idea, blatant parasitism. They should never have been established, must never be taken seriously, and ought to be abolished.

Aren't most of those "enemies" enemies by choice?

Trademarks help the user.

If I buy a can of brown sludge I want to know it’s sold by the Coca Cola company. If anyone could sell their stuff as “coca cola” that would harm me, the consumer, as it takes information away from me.

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