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Comment by btrettel | Hacker News Reader

As a former patent examiner, I was struck by how low the payout for Project Jengo was. $125,000 for all people submitting prior art? (There were hundreds of submissions, so it's split among many people.) I would like to help out with such things and I think I have the experience to do it well, but even being a GS-7 patent examiner making $75,000 per year is a better deal! That's especially true given that Cloudflare's not only expecting people to find prior art, but to also write the legal arguments about why it reads on Sable's claims.

If they're serious about their prior art bounty program, they're going to need to increase the bounties. Actual patent search firms charge a lot more money, and even lowly paid bureaucrats make a lot more.

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Having talked with several of them, most of the people who submit the prior art as part of Project Jengo would do so even if there were no payout. Several winners have actually asked that the payout be donated back to other organizations fighting patent trolls. This isn't intended to be anyone's full time job. It is intended to reward technical people with industry knowledge who may be able to help surface prior art and are as sick of patent trolls as we are.

That’s cool and all but don’t lowball people. This was the first thing Cloudflare has done in years that I didn’t associate with something shitty until I saw this.

Just for once do the right thing rather than what you think you can get away with because overall this is a genuinely something to be celebrated.

They clearly offered enough to be worth it to enough people to take out Sable. If being part of a successful effort to take down a patent troll is its own reward and Cloudflare successfully coordinated the work to make that happen, I'm really failing to see the problem.

They offered enough to get some activity happening which viewed strictly through the lens of capitalism and quarter to quarter balance sheets is +10 points no question.

That’s not what I’m talking about here though.

That's not what I'm talking about either, so I'm glad we're on the same page.

Thanks for your comment.

Personally, I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate, so I would expect to be paid more, not less, in the situation you describe. I suspect the same is true for many others as well.

> most of the people who submit the prior art as part of Project Jengo would do so even if there were no payout

I'd say this is due to selection bias. People who wanted a bigger payout didn't participate.

You all's program is basically over now, but I think anyone considering a prior art bounty program in the future should check best practices for bug bounty programs. The two seem similar to me. Paying more will get more and better submissions, and it doesn't seem to be particularly expensive to me.

It was obviously sufficient ;)

Paying more doesn't always motivate people more or get more (quality) people to do a thing. Compensation and associated psychology is complicated, because people are complicated.

e.g. I am willingly working very hard at a job where I could make 10x or perhaps even 100x elsewhere with equal or less effort. And I often spend my time on things that are completely irrational by your types of economic measures or even "pay to work."

I'm remembering the time I spent $40,000 worth of time saving maybe a couple grand on bike parts.

(I spent a couple months between gigs building a bicycle from parts, and sourcing the parts was the biggest timesink.)

What did you build?

A 29er with a continuously variable transmission in the rear hub, mustache handlebars, wood fenders, and a crank made by a mill in Petaluma.

That sounds great. Any pictures anywhere? I need to get out of the ‘bike must go faster’ rut.

https://bikeindex.org/bikes/1035

It’s definitely green, fat and delicious.

In the initial version of Bike Index you were supposed to give them names. This was green and brown (the girl I was dating at the time insisted I try brown tires), so I used Avocado.

Looks like a $40k vintage bike.

That’s a heck of a nice bike - you’re very good at what you do. Thanks for sharing that - now I have to talk myself out of doing the same thing. :)

I appreciate that - thank you!

Was a lot of work, but a fun project to really learn what goes into a bicycle. Definitely won't see another bike like mine on the road!

> Definitely won't see another bike like mine on the road!

Exactly! It’s beautiful, functional and very cool in how original it is. Thanks for posting that image and for the chat - you’re very talented and have really inspired me.

Never seen wood fenders before. Very cool!

The crazy thing about home improvement stuff is oftentimes you save a shitload by diy'ing it.

I've saved about $162/hour on various home projects when compared to quotes I've been given. Considering I'm a relative noob when it comes to this stuff I've gotta imagine they're charging much higher hourly rates than this.

This $162/hour is way more than what my salary as an hourly wage would be and it's also tax free to boot.

There's an incredibly high overhead on getting work as a contractor, billing for it, etc. There's a whole lot of unbillable hours you need to amortize.

(At the same time, people DIYing tend to underestimate their real opportunity costs).

The best outcome is that you end up liking tinkering and have pride in your work. That's a very high discount to the real cost.

I totally understand the high overhead aspect, but I assume knowing what you're doing is supposed to help immensely with that.

Pride in work is a big thing. As someone who works at a desk, some manual labor on the weekend is a nice change of pace. It's also not pointless exercise. And in my experience the best way to get something done right is to get free advice from the pros and do it yourself. Because the people the pros hire to do it won't care as much as you.

The problem I see with people doing these cost analyses for home or car DIY repairs is that they always compare two simple things: 1) the out-of-pocket cost of the professional job vs 2) the hourly cost of the DIY job, plus parts and materials. They completely forget to account for the cost of their their time in scenario 1.

Having your car or house fixed by someone else isn't that easy. Unless you have a personal butler, it's not like you just tell some person "fix this" in 5 minutes or less and walk away, then pay them when it's over. If it's a car repair, you have to transport your car to the repair place, then either sit there while they fix it or find some alternate transportation, then you have to come back after it's done. If it's a 1-hour job, how much time will you waste just traveling to and from the repair shop, plus potentially waiting around for it to be done? You probably could have done it yourself in less time. For a house repair, you don't have to travel there, but you probably want to stay at home while the work is being done unless the house is empty, or you really trust the contractors and sub-contractors. So in either scenario, there's a lot of your own time that's not being accounted for.

And this all assumes that the professional will actually do the job correctly, and you won't have to deal with issues from them doing it poorly. This could easily end up taking FAR more time than the original job. And in my experience, the so-called "professionals" frequently do a shoddy job or are completely incompetent (so now you need to spend a lot of time trying to figure out who to hire so you don't get screwed).

So in my view, if you mostly know how to do something yourself, it doesn't need a whole team of people to do, doesn't require expensive specialty equipment, and isn't highly dangerous, it's quite likely a better deal to just DIY.

I'm also coming from a DIY-first perspective and agree with your point. But I've also come to see there's actual value in only spending your own time just prepping/waiting/managing rather than having to physically and mentally exert yourself during that time. It's probably a result of getting older, plus having too much on my DIY plate that the context switches are becoming a killer.

Still yes, the biggest issue I have is most times I hire someone to do something, it often goes sideways and I have to get deeply involved anyway. This effect seems to be even worse for white collar work, where "professionals" tend to push cookie cutter solutions without much interactive analysis.

As I get older, I agree with both of you!

I was raised to fix it rather than spend wherever possible. Picked up a ton of useful skills that have paid me back a ton of money when I measure up with friends of similar age who used shops, contractors, etc.

Now it costs me more personally! It sometimes is just more work and energy demand than I feel good contributing because it can then take away from other parts of my day or days.

That all said, sometimes the money just is not there when the demand was! And so I do the damn work anyway.

>But I've also come to see there's actual value in only spending your own time just prepping/waiting/managing rather than having to physically and mentally exert yourself during that time.

To me, having to deal with people I don't trust one iota is a huge mental exertion too, that more than compensates for any physical or mental exertion needed for just doing the damn thing myself. And that's on top of all the time/effort needed to research places, compare prices, travel time, waiting time, etc.

Sure, if I had Alfred, my trustworthy hyper-competent butler, to take care of more mundane things for me, I'd let him do a lot of this stuff instead. But I don't, and the people that work these jobs (at least in the US) are usually anything but competent.

You need to have all the tools it takes a lifetime to collect all the tools unless you are a contractor

Depends on the task I guess.

You could pay 100+ for a plumber to snake a drain or just buy a snake yourself and do it for <50 in parts and the next time it's free.

Perhaps for some tasks you buy so many tools it's the same price but the second you need to use them again it's a steep discount. Or you could ask a neighbor.

the tools are durable and will last a very long time unless you're buying poorly made items and treating them poorly. you can save a few hundred dollars by buying a 15 dollar capacitor off amazon and a 11 in one multi purpose screw driver to fix your ac unit that doesn't startup. (very common fix for a very common issue) all you need is knowledge and a few bucks in parts and tools.

Buying a 15 capacitor off Amazon for my AC condenser saved me $500 last summer.

Actually, just have a multimeter and you can test your capacitor

I think this is the key point. Voluntary prior art hunts have been a successful strategy for defeating stupid patents[1] for many years now. There may be arguments in favor of bounties for more obscure or less stupid patents, but when the collective demand to fix this problem is so high, the price point is rather low.

[1] "Stupid patents" is a technical term here -- or it has been since Mark Cuban funded an EFF staffer to challenge bad patents on the condition that the position was titled the "Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents".

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/staff-attorney-daniel-naz...

Think of this more of as public service than a job, with the cash prize being there to generate media excitement.

I'll still pick up litter when I'm walking through a rich neighborhood, even though those people have groundskeepers to take care of it for them. No one is doing this with the goal of a profit.

Why should I do a "public service" for a company with a market cap measured in the tens of billions of dollars? They can pay for it.

And this is a much bigger ask than picking up litter.

Nobody's trying to tell you that you have to do this. They're trying to help you understand why other people want to do it.

Is there a name for the fallacy "I don't see why people do X", "they do it because Y", "but I don't care about Y!" ?

Fair enough. Replace "I" with "someone" in my previous comment. I can see why people would do these patent searches, but I still think it's a bad idea for those folks do these patent searches for so little.

isn't this exactly the point?

from the viewpoint you've presented it's a bad idea to volunteer for basically anything.

even something like enlisting in a nation's armed forces is a bad idea since the risk is so high vs the monetary reward, and the only way people would become soldiers is to join mercenary armies where there is a price exacted that matches the performance.

for many people, they value the intangible more than the money.

Okay, I think appreciate your perspective and that of some others here more. If you all think it's a good use of your time, go ahead. Personally, I have more pressing concerns. And for what it's worth, (and I know this won't be popular here) the entire patent troll narrative is overblown, which seems to be the consensus opinion of people working in patent law. For example, see this blog post:

https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/06/22/myths-patent-trolls-preven...

Given that I think the narrative is overblown, I don't really see this as a "public service". It's a problem, sure, but it's not a major one.

My first startup had 3 different firms with no real product try to shake us down using patents with obvious prior art at different times. It was a major distraction and costly in resources when we had limited capital.

We did manage to convince them all to go away, but it might have been cheaper to just pay them off. I'm guessing that all they really wanted was a long list of capitulations and licensees before litigating against the big guys.

I'm not surprised that the IPR industry which thrives upon resulting legal fees is less inclined to view things as trolling and any trolling that happens to be not too severe, though. ;)

Sorry to hear about your experience.

To reply to you and some others:

I'm not saying that patent trolling is not a problem. My point is that it's not as big a problem as commonly believed (in terms of total monetary losses over the US). The real problem is poor patent quality, which goes beyond patent trolling but does allow trolls to exist in the first place. For those who want to do a public service, address poor patent quality as it's the root cause.

> And for what it's worth, (and I know this won't be popular here) the entire patent troll narrative is overblown, which seems to be the consensus opinion of people working in patent law.

"People working in patent law" have a conflict of interest. The arguments being made in that link are practically in bad faith, e.g.:

> Google and Uber are locked in a patent battle over self-driving automobiles, so does that make Google and Uber patent trolls?

The ordinary definition of a patent troll is a firm that sues for patent infringement as its primary business. Say what you will about Google and Uber, they clearly derive the bulk of their revenue from offering products and services to the public.

> As we consider all of this it is also important to keep in mind that the U.S. tech sector spending on patent trolls is less than 1% of all IT spending.

If you compare a smaller number to a bigger number, the bigger number is bigger. But the thing that matters isn't the size of the problem relative to the size of the industry, it's whether the shakedowns are net positive or net negative.

For software patents in particular, it's the latter, because software is inherently and purposely abstract. Which is incompatible with the reasonable operation of the patent system, because it makes the two viable strategies to patent the abstraction or to patent some specific implementation which is required for compatibility, so that alternate implementations can't be used without disrupting interoperability. Otherwise the number of alternate software implementations of any given abstraction are so large that nobody would purposely use somebody else's software patent, they'd just create their own non-infringing implementation of the same abstraction.

But patenting the abstraction itself is not supposed to be allowed (even though these patents are all too often granted) and using a patent for the purposes of preventing interoperability should be an antitrust violation for the same reason as tying is illegal even when the original monopoly was lawfully obtained, because the value you're extracting isn't the value of the invention, it's the value of compatibility with the existing system. And then there's nothing of merit left.

You do? You’ve spent more time here commenting than some of the people who got paid under Project Jengo. #odd

You're right. I do think arguing with people on the internet was a bad way to spend my day off.

You apparently have difficulty understanding that other people have different experiences and priorities from you. This shows up in every aspect of your argument here.

I think the severity of this problem depends on context. I can share that as a small startup we had a patent troll come after us and it was almost fatal because it shattered our fund raising process.

We prevailed and lived to fight another day but that was an incredibly unproductive and stressful time.

So I see this differently as do the many team members who kept their jobs and made good money when we were acquired.

Wow, that is an awful article. Straw-manning everyone who wants patent reform as "those who prefer to take technologies they did not innovate rather than pay a reasonable royalty to innovators." Multiple paragraphs devoted to tearing down the straw-man argument "every company that tries to enforce its patents is a patent troll" -- which nobody is claiming. An insane argument about how "America's technology companies" are hypocritical because both the trolls and the ones complaining about trolls are technology companies -- so what? That's like when people claim "Reddit" is hypocritical. They're different people!

That author is barely even trying to hide his extreme slant, and you posting an obviously extremely biased article as some sort of evidence dramatically undermines your opinion on the topic and frankly calls into question the limits of "assume good faith".

It is the same with programmers who writes open source programs just for fun of it. And I remember in 2000x there were people who thought that it is a bad idea. There were even lawsuits filled by programmers who couldn't sell their programs because they were left without customers due to open source solutions.

Or the whole Wikipedia thing, that at first was dismissed by traditional publishers, whom then were bankrupted and buried by an army of free working amateurs.

You don’t still consult your Encarta CD-ROM? How do you ever figure out what’s what?

For a patent search? Too little.

Screwing over a patent troll? That’s priceless.

No amount of money can provide that satisfaction. Heck, I’m not even impacted and I’m gleefully happy. Whoever helped deserves a free beer. Patent trolls are a blight.

The problem is there's a lot of patent tools and only a few make the news. Passion can't win them all.

> Passion can't win them all.

If you do the numbers, yes it can. There are a lot of people who could do this searching.

Patent trolls win because they are a protection racket, and it takes resources to fight them.

This battle took 2 years, I think ?

I don't think it's paying most of them to do a patent search.

It's a way to get media attention for people to glance at it. It's providing a nudge for them to tell you about something that they know off the top of their head.

Patent trolling is a big problem, and a lot of us view opposing it in a small way as a type of community of service.

That's like saying it's a bad idea to contribute to Open Source. It's a similar motivation: people want to do good in the world and don't necessarily need to be paid for it.

I think I see his point though, and it's not quite the same as working on FOSS. He made a sibling comment about helping a "multi-billion dollar" corporation (CloudFlare) for so little reward. So in his view, this volunteer effort didn't really help regular people that much, and instead benefited a huge company mostly.

People usually work on FOSS because they have a personal interest in a project, and want to share that with everyone. So we end up with stuff like device drivers for hardware where the mfgr couldn't be bothered to make a Linux driver, or various useful utilities, a whole OS (which everyone can use), etc. What we don't see much in FOSS is "enterprise software": stuff that's only really useful if you're a huge company. Where's the FOSS alternatives to proprietary human resource management systems, supply chain management systems, etc.? Generally, stuff like that doesn't exist, because no one wants to spend their free time working on things that they personally have no use for, and no one's found a good business case to make a company producing an open-source version.

Taking out patents is like FOSS, though, in that the effect is that, once the patent is gone, anyone can work in that area without worrying about infringing that patent. So, even if the occasion might be a threat to a multi-billion dollar company, this is a case where helping such companies is well-aligned with the needs of the FOSS movement.

>once the patent is gone, anyone can work in that area without worrying about infringing that patent.

I agree, and that's a great point I think the patent examiner person was missing. These patents are a hazard for everyone, big or small.

You clearly don't understand how much people hate patent trolls and software patents in general. It's all a cruel joke, and getting paid some token sum of money to invalidate a bunch of worthless patents is just a nice bonus. You wouldn't do it for free because generating these patents is your job.

You are mistaken. I'm a former patent examiner as pointed out in the third word of my first comment here. So I have no conflict of interest. And I think I have a solid understanding of how much people hate patent trolls and software patents in general, which is why I added the qualifier about how I know my comment would be unpopular in some other comments here.

Conflicts of interest don't really work like that. You are a patent examiner even after you stop working as one, and for as long as your loyalties and ideas remain with your former job.

I’d say the conflict of interest has gone away, but the years of rationalizing cognitive dissonance have solidified certain opinions.

"I'm going to say something you hate"

> Says something we hate

"Why do you hate what I said?"

I don't know that it's a fallacy that has a name, but it could be considered an appeal to authority (person is claiming authority on what other should care about) or ignoratio elenchi (irrelevant conclusion) since the conclusion (nobody should care about this) obviously doesn't follow (I don't care about this).

It's inductance from the particular (me) to the general case

Since I hate crab, all people hate crab and confronted by a crab meat liker I have no capacity to imagine why, since I hate it and therefore everybody should and therefore you're wrong.

In reality, it's the exception proving (testing) the case and showing it's flaw: all people do not hate crab therefore my generalisation is specious. Instead of doubting why anyone likes crab I should ask why I hate it.

Induction?

Projection?

> Why should I do a "public service" for a company with a market cap measured in the tens of billions of dollars? They can pay for it.

It's right there in the name: public service. Yeah, it benefits cloudflare, but it also benefits nearly everyone else. Some people just want to improve the world, even if they're not fairly compensated for it. Some people see living in a world with one less patent troll as compensation enough.

The alternative is that Cloudflare pays a patent search firm to get the same result, albeit at a higher cost to Cloudflare. That would benefit everyone else too as the prior art would be on legal record. Why can't Cloudflare do a "public service" by paying a patent search firm like most other companies would?

>Why can't Cloudflare do a "public service" by paying a patent search firm like most other companies would?

I'm sure they did that too, like any other major company sued by a troll. This isn't an either/or situation.

Jengo draws from many, many people across the industry. They can surface all sorts of prior art, not just earlier patents, and they know where to look due to their experience.

As I said, every large company that gets sued by trolls pays patent search firms to find prior art. I can't imagine that Cloudflare didn't do the same. Why wouldn't they, there is a lot of money at stake? They added to that through the search program because the yield from patent search firms is often poor.

“You didn’t pay enough to my view of experts, but you won, but you could have won and paid more, and that’d be better.” That’s your argument? Just to be clear?

And, note, this strategy has worked pretty (cost) effectively for us before:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/winning-the-blackbird-battle/

But you’d suggest we do what everyone else does and hire expensive “experts”? K. Good luck with that.

Oh, forgot, that’s your profession… expensive expert. Carry on.

I do think that you all should have paid more. But I'm fine with the bounty program, as long as it's fairly compensated. I don't like the compensation of you all's program, but from the discussion I've had here, it's clear to me that many folks are fine with it. Fair enough, they can participate if they want to.

Also: I'm not saying that patent search firms are perfect. Albert Cory had a comment here about how the quality of search firms varies dramatically. But I do think that searching is a skill which can be developed. Many of the examiners I worked with at the USPTO were outstanding searchers who could find information in their area very quickly. It can be hard for someone looking to purchase patent search services to know who is good, unfortunately.

And your profession is…?

I'm a mechanical engineer. I mostly run and write fluid simulation code for a living. Much better paid and much lower stress than patent examining.

:-p

It isn't that uncommon to see patents were subject matter experts can easily point to unpatented prior art. I doubt such patents were filed without first paying experts to search for prior art. But such experts are experts in patents, not in the technology being patented, so they might not know the best places to look.

Why should a company that is doing a public service for the rest of us, at their own expense, pay more than it needs to to do that service?

If Cloudflare was to behave rationally, it would simply pay the troll to go away. Trolls are very good at making that the logical choice, which is why virtually everyone else just pays up. Cloudflare fights because the act of taking a stand fits with their values.

You're clearly not civic minded enough to appreciate why Cloudflare does what it does. And so you don't understand why other people, who share Cloudflare's values, would be motivated to help them accomplish their good deeds.

Yup!

> If Cloudflare was to behave rationally, it would simply pay the troll to go away.

Well, maybe.

Cloudflare is a company that sells to developers. A lot of developers hate patent trolls. Fighting back against a patent troll is a good way to gain respect and goodwill from those developers. So it could effectively be an advertisement campaign, and for the target audience, probably a lot more effective than paying for banner ads. It could also benefit recruiting, and moral of developers who like seeing someone stand up to patent trolls.

Also, by setting a precedent of fighting back, they might deter future attempts at shakedowns from other patent trolls.

That's not to say that their motives are completely selfish. I'm sure there were altruistic motivations as well (and motivations no doubt varies among individuals involved in this). But it isn't irrational.

> It could also benefit recruiting, and moral of developers who like seeing someone stand up to patent trolls.

For sure. I actually had the thought that I should consider applying to work there, exactly for the reasons you mention and one other reason as well: I enjoyed some of the snarky comments posted here which appear to be from folks at Cloudflare. They seem like people I would enjoy working with. So that's +1 to my opinion of the company in general and +2 to their desirability as a potential employer where I might consider working in the future.

If the patent trolls were only harming CloudFlare then I would not be so concerned. But it is my impression that they mostly try to go after very small, independent companies because those can be guaranteed to not have enough funds to fight in court, so they will either pay up or go out of business.

I consider it a public service to try and drive these patent trolls out of business because the harm they do is done to the the entire industry, especially the most vulnerable companies in that industry.

Of course, I would much prefer to change the law so that patent trolling was not allowed or was not profitable.

For what it's worth, and I know this won't be popular here, the entire patent troll narrative is overblown. Patent trolls are not as big a problem as big tech companies want you to believe. See what people working in patent law actually think, for instance, I found this blog post in a minute or so:

https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/06/22/myths-patent-trolls-preven...

I think it's good that Cloudflare didn't pay this particular troll, but even if they had, it's not that big a deal.

And the best way to stop patent trolls would be to prevent bad patents from being granted in the first place by giving examiners more time. The USPTO is funded solely by fees, not taxes, creating a perverse incentive to grant invalid patents. Fix that, increase patent fees, and give examiners more time.

> For what it's worth, and I know this won't be popular here, the entire patent troll narrative is overblown. Patent trolls are not as big a problem as big tech companies want you to believe. See what people working in patent law actually think, for instance, I found this blog post in a minute or so:

Nothing in the article you cited says patent trolls aren't a problem. It claims (without really supporting it) that modern patent trolling is the fault of the technology industry, which I can almost believe, but "the technology industry" is large, and non-practicing entities which are commonly identified as "trolls" are very different than entities that actually do R&D.

> And the best way to stop patent trolls would be to prevent bad patents from being granted in the first place by giving examiners more time. The USPTO is funded solely by fees, not taxes, creating a perverse incentive to grant invalid patents. Fix that, increase patent fees, and give examiners more time.

I think you are probably right about this, at least in direction if not in magnitude. The "patent troll myth" argument isn't persuasive, however, and I don't think you are convincing many people here.

Patent trolls are clearly a problem, in particular for startups and independent software developers who lack the resources to effectively fight the trolls. The cost of settling with a troll might bankrupt a small startup before they have a chance to raise a lot of capital and hire expensive lawyers. Open source projects are also harmed greatly by patents and patent trolls on a regular basis. There are many famous and well studied examples since the early days of the free software movement. I'd recommend reading some random articles on techdirt.com (or even just skim the headlines) for a quick refresher.

I am strongly in the anti-patent camp. I don't think we should enforce any patents, especially not software patents but even beyond that. It seems to me that all forms of Monopoly are bad, including the time-limited, government sponsored ones.

The promise of patents is that you have to reveal a useful invention, in such a way that it would enable others to copy that invention, but then they must pay you a license to do so. I've read a lot of patents and I have encountered only a few that actually divulged something useful that I wouldn't have known otherwise. The vast majority of them simply utilize a specialized genera of legalese to carefully craft a pretext for interfering in other people's business. The idea is to make the language as convoluted and ambiguous as possible in order to cover the most potential situations and cast the most doubt about what is actually covered. Meanwhile they are careful to control the amount of useful / valuable content to a level that is practically zero. I'd argue that with the vast majority of patents, it's actually pretty far into negative value territory. Besides litigation and hypothetical IP value listed on a balance sheet, the only real service that most patents provide to the world is to fill the world with more FUD. Just what we all need, more things to worry about. I'm sure every god fearing individual goes to sleep at night praying for another reason to hesitate before trying something new. Everyone loves that hesitation which comes along with every inspiration: will this exciting idea I have for making something useful turn into a successful business or will I get the attention of some scummy lawyers and wind up on the wrong end of a ruinous lawsuit.

To explain the thought process: most people doing this aren’t doing this to help CloudFlare. They’re doing this because they want to hurt patent trolls. Their time might be better spent forming a lobbying group and calling their representatives, but CloudFlare’s role in this is to provide them with a way to do what they wanted to do in the first place.

Not saying CloudFlare shouldn’t reward them better.

Because it isn't just helping the one company when you invalidate patents. It's helping future startups and even mom & pop operations in some cases.

Shit, why does anyone even work on open source software, it's just going to help some company with a market cap measured in billions.

As someone who didn't participate (because I didn't have any prior art), I'd donate a few hours of my time (a few thousand dollars' value) to fight patent trolls.

I always thought of it as a way to get input from people who can see the patent application and say “hey that’s just the same as X” off the top of their head.

> Personally, I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate

I think it would be pretty tough for me to sell my marginal hours for more than my hourly rate.

I'm sure if I shopped around aggressively I could find a richer buyer for the 40-hour bundles I'm currently selling, but people aren't really beating down the door for a couple hours of C++ dev time here and there. Especially once you factor in time spent on lead generation, negotiation, dealing with collecting payment, etc, I think the market value of my free time is probably way less than my hourly rate.

> I think the market value of my free time is probably way less than my hourly rate.

GP’s comment was about how they value their own free time, not the market value of that time.

It depends; we (small company/team) do emergency work, especially on legacy software including c++. We usually are at 300-500$/hr but $1000 has happened if the client is desperate and the work is hard. If a company is losing or not making the million$+/day they normally make, they don't care about the hourlies for the fix. We typically go in for a few hours to a few days; we don't take long term projects. Still we have pretty high utilisation.

For collecting the payments we use a factoring agency; it costs a % but whatever; we are always cashed up. And lead generation, well, people find us. I have been 'giving away' this 'business plan' for decades and no one is doing it. Probably because everyone wants to focus on something long term, not jump from php to c++ to cobol to java etc and because of the great resume driven dev strategy. I am for one looking forward to fixing the misery that is nextjs and its 'ecosystem' for the coming decades; please continue! I will have to up the hourlies to 1500+ for that miserable experience though; give me cobol or java any day.

I have not found an employer that values skills in multiple languages + quick at learning new ones. I assume these are the basic req for your type of work. Please share if you can how you got started .

At first we searched on twitter/linkedin for companies that seem to get into trouble more than once; hacked, downtime etc. Also down adsense links of big companies (click on the link -> they pay -> result page is 404, 500, or just dead); I have found these for Pepsi, Nike etc and then send them our proposal. When we started, the hourly was 150E/hr and one of the first we emailed (in London this was) came back and asked if we do entire projects as 150/hr was less than he paid the current people.

If you have extra work that needs doing, I think that I have the right kind of skills for this sort of thing, and I work for a lot less than $500/hour. I've already learned through hard-earned experience that I'm pretty terrible at running a business, however, so I'm not too keen to copy your business plan and implement it myself. It seems like you've got a great niche though and I don't doubt there will continue to be plenty of messes to clean up, especially considering how much care and craftsmanship goes in to most production systems these days. In case my sarcasm wasn't obvious, it's my assessment that in most cases, the care and craftsmanship is entirely absent, and for entirely understandable and defensible reasons.

> Paying more will get more and better submissions, and it doesn't seem to be particularly expensive to me.

They might get more, but will they get better? The most passionate people I know are pretty insensitive to pay rate. Whereas the people I know who are most sensitive to $/hour tend to be more skilled at the business of the thing rather than the thing itself.

bug bounty programs always get you less money than what you could earn optimising for money... look how much bugs go for on bounty programs vs. selling them to companies who want the bugs for other purposes. (not talking illegal here, though maybe shady/gray area, kinda like patent trolls?). generally, working at a company as a fulltime dev will also net you more than working on bug bounties. sure there's big bounty payouts, but its really rare for someone to consistently get such payouts. a lot of bugs filed to bounties are also found just working with thinga daily and stumbling upon them rather than specifically looking for them. I know a few old colleagues who worked on drivers for a security tool hit a lot of Microsoft kernel bugs. they got nice paydays and went up the list/hall of fame of prime bug finders not because of the bounty program but merely because their dayjob yielded them results to submit... i think this cloudflare program is in similar vein. people who already know or stumble upon prior art can submit it easily, and get a few bucks for it.... its imho not meant for people to scower all patents searching for it in their free time... though some might do that. (god what a tedious thing to do... "in one embodiment..." all day long :D)

You're clearly not the target audience for this program, which is fine, but that's not in itself a problem with what they did.

Cloudflare found a model that successfully distributed the cost of killing a patent troll between many passionate volunteers who were in it for the pleasure of taking down a troll. They succeeded, and in the process put other patent trolls on notice that our collective hatred for them is enough to raise an army of volunteers that's cheap to motivate and extremely effective. The low budget is part of the success story here!

A patent troll's whole game is for it to be more expensive to fight back than to cave, and you're complaining that Cloudflare managed to flip the economics.

I'm skeptical this made that big a difference in terms of total cost. The biggest cost (maybe overwhelming majority) is probably the attorneys, which I'm confident Cloudflare didn't skimp on. Anyone from Cloudflare with hard data is welcome to correct me if I'm wrong.

You’re… wrong. Massively wrong. And I say that literally as the guy who approved the comparative budgets.

I stand corrected.

I think the part of it being a contest is what makes the whole damn thing so much more exciting. As a person who has no prior experience in this area, I would love to submit a report on it and stake my claim as an expert if I was selected.

I reckon many of the submitters have the same vision. The name/fame is enough. The money is a show off and a legitimizer.

I’ve not encountered another critter like you. But here you are: a lawyer cum HN poster who believes there are infinite opportunities for your skills and that your skills are infinitely accretive. Odd.

Perhaps you are this magical being I can’t imagine exists. In the meantime, and regardless, irregardless even, facts are: a whole bunch of people submitted prior art that helped us defeat a patent troll that was a net drain on society. As if, mission matters more than money in some cases. Many cases? Most cases? All cases?

I wish you luck rationally optimizing your time. If you figure that out, being the market maker probably will prove more lucrative than being a participant. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Hope you find lots and lots of opportunities for you to… search Google? Good work if you can find it.

The poster claimed to be a ex patent examiner. Most USPTO examiners aren’t lawyers, they’re people with technical degrees and most of them are there because they couldn’t make it in industry right out of school and are trying to bulk up their resume before trying to pivot.

Otherwise I agree with your snark.

I found this comment funny. Have an upvote.

But finding a critical security issue on Cloudflare in 2020 while doing testing for one of your customers, and then learning what the bounty for breaking that large of a chunk of the internet was, was still disappointing.

It's nice to see that it's gone up since then. But your company isn't the literary Robin Hood.

> Personally, I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate

Would you mind elaborating? Because I would argue that, by engaging daily with your employer in a trade of your time for money, you value your time exactly your job’s hourly rate.

Sure: My willingness to work more hours decreases as the number of hours I work increases. My marginal hourly rate could be viewed as the amount of money I require to work an additional hour. My employer pays an effective hourly rate. If I worked more hours, the effective hourly rate would be higher.

Interesting. I think I agree with this, though the hourly rate curve might be more of a inverse bell curve. Very little work means I need a lot of pay to support myself from just a few hours of work. Medium amount of work means I can get by on a relatively lower per hour rate. But to get me motivated to work extreme hours then I might need extreme rewards. The curve is, however, distorted by things like especially interesting projects and a somewhat obsessive drive to produce something I'm proud of.

It’ll be back when we get sued by a troll again. We’ll get as many submissions. We’ll kill another troll. We’ll pay another round of bounties. We’ll not pay patent search agents like you. And life will go on.

Don’t worry. Your job is safe. Most firms are too scared to engage in our strategy.

Good luck.

And for what it's worth, I'm not an attorney, and I haven't worked in patents since leaving the USPTO.

I was a "technical advisor" in Google's patent lit dep't. Searching prior art was my favorite thing to do, but not the whole job by any means.

(If you're wondering: my least favorite task was finding the sections of code that supposedly infringed someone's patent, and then getting the PM's approval to turn it over to the other side. They can't actually say No, but they can be a PITA.)

I killed this patent:

https://searchengineland.com/google-maps-might-be-banned-in-...

after many, many people failed to find the prior art that I found. It's only easy once someone tells you.

Interestingly, now I can't find it! Maybe they took it down. It WAS the first result on scholar.google.com if you searched "client-server maps." This is the same project:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20040006300/downloads/20...

Your former role Google must have many great stories and experiences. Did you ever blog about it? I am sure HN crowd would love to read and discuss!

Well, legal matters are a different kettle of fish, as it were. They tend to be a little touchy about what you say in public.

[flagged]

You’ll be receiving a bill from me soon for me giving you my time to read and respond to this remark.

It's against the site guidelines to post like that, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Doesn't seem like this should be flagged/against site guidelines, because this isn't a "you're an astroturfer, so how much are you getting paid for this post?" comment, it's a "you say you don't do anything for free, so how much are you getting paid for this post?" comment.

> I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate

And you can do with your own time whatever you want.

If you want to go to the beach, you go the beach, and you wouldn't expect the beach to pay you for the privilege.

If you want to fight patent trolls...

Wait until you find out how much open source contributors get paid. Haven’t you ever worked with people passionate about something?

[flagged]

You unfortunately crossed into personal attack and broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. That's not allowed here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, so please don't do it again.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

This is no different than security bug bounties. The pay out for those are generally way way below industry rates.

The reason they are succesful is because they signal to people that the person on the other side actually cares about the report somewhat. If they are paying for it, even just a little, they are unlikely to immediately throw your report in the garbage or threaten to sue you. Its not really about the money.

Yeah. This sort of thing isn't about it being a job. It's a thank you for letting them know you stumbled on something they might be interested in and that you can expect a friendly reception in telling them about it. You're not being paid for the stumbling on, but for taking the time to tell them what you stumbled on.

I’m perfectly willing to spend some time in an area I enjoy to make the world better for other entrepreneurs. If you always need money to use your talents, that’s saying an awful lot about you. And if you feel to keep ripping on someone else’s program that does achieve good, well that says even more.

The people who do this value making the world a better place. I find the blatant selfishness and arrogance of your comment offensive.

Seems to me you are not valuing the removal of a painful obstacle to business.

It is essentially a public type service. An investment.

Secondly, a bug bounty exists because of how disclosure works. Someone could camp on a bug and or sell it, use their knowledge of it to do nefarious, harmful and certainly expensive things.

There are actual risks too.

The bounty is an alternative to those actions. Responsible disclosure is encouraged (rewarded) in the hope bug hunters do the right things.

Prior art works very differently.

"Not Very expensive"

Maybe that is true. It seems hard to say. Both efforts can take considerable time.

How you feel about your time is exclusively your problem. If you were personally interested, motivated, or needed some resume padding, you’d probably be a community member and a volunteer in addition to a “rational economic actor” or whatever you fancy. L

In other replies, I've made it clear that if people really do want to spend their time searching for prior art, fine, go ahead.

I've also been clear that I won't be doing that because I found patent searching to be a real grind. I think most people would agree with me on that point if they've done it. It's much harder than people here think it is. (To be clear, on something that I enjoy learning about or is relevant for a project of mine, I'm happy to search deep and for far longer than I did when I was an examiner. I can't say anything I was assigned at the USPTO was ever that interesting to me.)

I also don't view this as a public service because Cloudflare can easily afford to pay market rate. And honestly, now that I've thought more about it, this Whac-A-Mole approach likely won't stop all patent trolls. There are way too many bad patents. Trolls will just find new bad patents! The best way to stop trolls is to raise the bar on patent quality by giving examiners more time and making legal changes to raise the bar even more.

All this stuff about how I must be unaware that people have passions, aren't paid for open source, and are not "rational economic actors" is extrapolating beyond anything I've said.

I also value my time more than my averaged hourly rate, but there are some things that to me are ideologically worth more to me than the monetary value on my time. There’s a reason people volunteer, or make art, or are involved in politics. Some of us even give money to be involved in those things.

This comment is an example of why people are hesitant to publicly do good things. If a company donates to open source and writes a blog post about it, but it's not "enough," then they get a bunch of hate. If they never donated to open source in the first place, then there'd be no hate. Likewise, I've never heard of a company paying random people on the Internet to help fight patent trolls, yet Cloudflare did, won, neutralized the patents, and it's still not enough.

The capitalistic view is that a company low-balled folks with knowledge to win a case.

Both views are valid. It mostly depends on the intent of the company and you can't know that for sure. As their interest in that program is quite obvious, it's understandable that some people interpret this in two ways.

Now it's not like they forced people into that program. You are free to not participate.

Thanks. I upvoted your comment because it's a valid point that I had not considered that was stated without aggression. Many of the other comments here strike me as particularly aggressive or making false assumptions about what I believe and who I am.

There's an interesting blog post[0] that calls this concept The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics.

[0] (the original no longer loads for me, so here's an archive) https://web.archive.org/web/20230105070226/https://blog.jaib...

Cloudflare is shrewdly calculating that there is a lot of latent, unexpressed hate toward patent trolls but that most people don't want to make a career out of it, but might very well make a little hobby out of it, and so they get to take advantage of people who are motivated by something other than money.

More deeply, the very idea of a "patent examiner" has never made sense to me. It requires being expert in all things, which is impossible. It makes more sense to take someone who is an expert in a field, and put a "patent examiner" hat on them for a little while. Ideally the patent system is not so complex that it itself requires as much or more study to be expert in than the actual subjects of the patents -- this would be a very bad sign.

Patent Examiners do specialize in their fields. It isn't something that is just a common pool subject to any patent that comes into the pipe.

From the USPTO[1]

What kind of degree do I need to apply, and which vacancy do I need to apply to? The minimum degree required to be a utility patent examiner is a bachelor’s degree. There are dozens of STEM-related bachelor’s degree types that qualify, even if they are not the exact discipline listed in the title of the job vacancy.

For example, professionals with bachelor’s degrees ranging from engineering, mathematics, astronomy, space science, geophysics, oceanography, or hydrology could all apply to the "Patent Examiner (Physics)" vacancy when it is open. To see more details about which degrees best fit with which patent examiner vacancies, view this chart[1]. You can also attend one of our upcoming webinars or office hours to chat with a current patent examiner, or email us at JoinUSPTO@uspto.gov with your specific question.

[1] https://www.uspto.gov/jobs/become-patent-examiner [2] https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/patent-e...

There aren't any consequences to their decisions though.

Patent examiner shouldn't be a civil servant's job.

Rather, it should be a "bond" process given to private, accredited individuals / organizations.

If your issued patents are found invalid, your bond (which would be in the millions) is raided to pay back damages.

> Ideally the patent system is not so complex that it itself requires as much or more study to be expert in than the actual subjects of the patents

Unfortunately, "patent law" is a complex body of laws, legal decisions, and specialized procedures large enough to be its own distinct specialization for lawyers. While it's not impossible to become an expert in it without years of study, it is definitely not possible to be excellent at it.

Just to put it in perspective, the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure alone weighs in at over 4K pages of text.

https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/index.html

> Cloudflare is shrewdly calculating that there is a lot of latent, unexpressed hate toward patent trolls but that most people don't want to make a career out of it, but might very well make a little hobby out of it, and so they get to take advantage of people who are motivated by something other than money.

I don't think this is a good strategy. These folks tend to have a poor understanding of patent law in my experience, and you need to understand the basics to do this right. (You fortunately don't need to know too much law to handle 90% of cases.) And these folks probably aren't very effective at patent searching even if they understand the legal parts. I think most people overestimate their own search abilities. I certainly did. Examining patents didn't level me up as much as humble me in that regard.

> More deeply, the very idea of a "patent examiner" has never made sense to me. It require being expert in all things, which is impossible. [...]

As saratogacx pointed out, at the USPTO, the vast majority of examiners have a specific technology they are assigned to. While the matching of examiners to their "art unit" is often pretty bad (I could go on a rant...), the situation is not as bad as you described. There are some generalist examiners, but as I understand it, they are in (basically) QA roles and don't need to know the technologies as much. Unfortunately, USPTO upper management seems to want to make examiners into generalists, which I doubt will work out as they want.

I agree that periodic rotations of industry folks into patent examiner positions is a great idea. It would help the patent system and give the industry folks some appreciation for what examiners do.

If you're worried about lack of expertise, you should be more worried about the courts. Judges and juries almost never have a background in the technology of the case they are working on.

>It would help the patent system and give the industry folks some appreciation for what examiners do.

The examiners regularly approve absolute bullshit patents in my field that either obviously have prior work, and shouldn't be patentable anyway such as game mechanics. They clearly don't understand the work they're meant to be doing. Either patent law is horribly designed and needs to be razed to the ground, or it's being horribly applied.

If you go to a hospital that lacks the resources to provide proper treatment, should you be surprised to receive poor treatment even if your doctor was highly competent? That's basically the situation the USPTO is in. Examiners are on a quota system and they don't get enough time to do a good quality job.

With that being said, the majority of the time, the examiner made the right decision. You should check whether a patent was actually granted, for instance. Often when people are complaining about a dumb patent they're actually complaining about a dumb patent application that the USPTO rightly rejected. You should be complaining about the people writing such applications, not the USPTO.

Further, the USPTO is funded purely by fees, not taxes. Applicants want patents. That creates a perverse incentive to reduce patent quality to make it easier to get patents.

I've elaborated on these issues at length on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36563611

>If you go to a hospital that lacks the resources to provide proper treatment

I don't have the energy to diffuse false analogies. We're not talking about a hospital.

The parent clearly said that approved parents were bullshit, and I agree. I have several patents, and have seen how nonsense the process is. When lawyers obfuscate the text enough to confuse the patent examiner, the patent gets approved. I can't tell if an individual patent examiner is competent or knowledgeable, but patent decisions have nothing to do with factuality or novelty.

I do remember your comments from past threads too. It really interesting to hear the perspective from the patent office's side, but the idea that the patent office had some secret and specialized method of evaluating novelty is ridiculous. Any expert can read a sample of granted patents and tell you that. I'd estimate maybe 5% of patents in my field have any novelty, and that's being generous.

I'm sure this has more to do with incentives and the overall system, and that individual patent examiners would prefer to do a good job. But you have to admit that the results are atrocious.

> The parent clearly said that approved parents were bullshit, and I agree.

Just because they said it was granted, doesn't mean that it was. A lot of people here don't seem able to distinguish between a granted patent and a rejected patent application. Here are two examples that I bothered to reply to in the past:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38766101

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36563425

> the idea that the patent office had some secret and specialized method of evaluating novelty is ridiculous

I don't think they do and I never said they do. The USPTO follows some legal standard that I personally don't agree with. I agree with you that too few granted patents have genuine novelty.

> But you have to admit that the results are atrocious.

No, I don't. You've seen a small selection of what the USPTO outputs. Only the bad cases appear in the news. In contrast, I've seen a far larger and unbiased selection and know that the majority is fine. Most applications are rejected. I probably rejected over 75% myself.

I have seen the results from searches of patents in my field, and the patents that my colleagues get granted. It's hard to find even a single good patent in the bunch.

Is there a way to sample 5 random ML patents? I'd be surprised if half were any good.

I think I haven't been clear on a few things.

I think the quality of examination and search is excellent given how little time examiners have. But mistakes still happen too frequently, and the mistakes can be highly costly. Better to stop problems upstream in my opinion by giving examiners more time.

Patent quality is related but different. I agree that patent quality is awful, but there's only so much an examiner can do to influence that. Attorneys have basically gamed the system to write vague legalese that's patentable but basically useless. And to paraphase a supervisor I knew at the USPTO, "Just because it's stupid doesn't mean that it's not patentable". I can't reject them if it meets the legal standards but is stupid.

Anyhow, I think there might be a random sort feature that can do what you want in the USPTO's public search (no time to check, though): https://www.uspto.gov/patents/search/patent-public-search

What is your opinion on US20200413106A1, which was granted?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_numeral_systems#Pat...

https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/13/microsoft_ans_patent/

I have no personal opinion. If you want the opinion of the examiner, you can go here:

https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/applications/16456602/ifw/doc...

Look for "Notice of Allowance and Fees Due (PTOL-85)" and click on "PDF" on the right. Scroll to page 10 and look for the "Reasons for Allowance" section where the examiner describes in detail why it differs from the prior art.

I was more looking for your opinion on the patent in general.

While there are minor technical differences in exactly how rANS has been encoded/decoded before, and how Microsoft does it, the fact that Microsoft was granted this means they now have a weapon with which they can cause fear, uncertainty and doubt around ANS, much to the chagrin of the ANS's actual inventor, Jarek Duda, who wanted it to be public domain and implementable by anyone.

I'm not an expert but Duda and fellow compression experts looked at the claims themselves: https://encode.su/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-Stor...

It seems to me like Microsoft got a patent on "doing ANS a little bit different" - they didn't have to, they could just do it the normal way, but this little bit of difference lets them secure a patent, and now they can pursue anyone who implements ANS to intimidate them with "how sure are you don't do ANS like we do? Let's get our multi-billion legal team, and your legal team, and find out. You have a legal team, don't you?"

In particular, this patent already had a final rejection in 2020. But Microsoft then took advantage of the "After Final Consideration Pilot" program, which sounds more like the USPTO trying to drum up trade, to get it re-re-re-examined.

> Microsoft was granted this means they now have a weapon with which they can cause fear, uncertainty and doubt around ANS

This is due more to people not understanding what the patent covers. The right response in my view is to educate people. Just because someone has a patent on a particular variation of X, doesn't mean that working on X is risky or what not. Just don't infringe their variation. When I was at the USPTO, I examined a lot of little variations of common things in my area (water heaters and car air vents, mostly) and I never worried that it would stop innovation as usually the point of novelty was not particularly groundbreaking, or even necessarily of interest to anyone aside from the applicant.

I'm wonder now if people working in patent offices actually think they're doing something good and are just overworked, while being completely unaware of the evil they're supporting. It sure sounds like you think there's value in it.

The patent office can be sued for not granting but not for granting. So they bias towards granting things they shouldn't and let the courts deal with the mess later.

Wow that actually explains a lot. TIL.

> my area (water heaters and car air vents, mostly)

Do you feel qualified to discuss patents related to software? If so, why?

Proof is in the pudding, as they say. I've been astonished by the quality of the submissions we've received the times we've fired up Project Jengo. And it's helped us successfully beat — and literally put out of business — the two patent trolls that have come after us.

Did you all pay for a normal invalidation search as well? I'm glad it worked for you all, but I think "spray and pray" is typically not a good strategy. I suppose you all had enough scale to reach the right people.

I’m sorry we’ve shown that going to law school is less valuable than some may have thought. My parents had that angst too when I decided not to practice law after going to law school myself. It worked out.

The proof is not in the pudding. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

While I don’t disagree with any of your points, it seems like they are using a “platform/UGC/crowd” model to change the economics of the business model.

In the same way that TV networks find/vet/pay for the supply of shows and take on the risk per-show, YouTube (at its core) doesn’t do any of that and all of the content creators do those things with the hope it will take off and a share of the ad revenue, while YouTube’s risks are related to the opex cost of the incoming supply/demand.

Instead of cloudflare paying per examiner, they give a non-guaranteed slice to a bigger group of people.

Strangely, this sounds like a great use case for LLMs? To just grind through entire datasets attempting to surface prior art.

Edit: Found this with a search, so it can be done: https://xlscout.ai/novelty-checker-llm/

(also, thanks Cloudflare! Keep on grinding patent trolls!)

After I quit the USPTO, I tried using ChatGPT 3.5 for some basic patent examining activity out of curiosity, and I can say that it did an absolutely horrendous job. This wasn't prior art search, just analyzing the text to do a rejection based on the text alone (35 USC 112).

And the AI search technologies I used tended to not be particularly good. They typically find "background" documents that are related but can't be used in a rejection.

I don't anticipate LLMs being able to examine patents in general well. Many times a detailed understanding of things not in the text is necessary to examine. For the technologies I examined, often search was basically flipping through drawings. I'd love to see an AI search technology focus specifically on patent drawings. This can be quite difficult. Often I'd have to understand the topology of a circuit (electrical or flow) and find a specific combination of elements. Of course, each drawing could be laid out differently but be topologically equivalent... this surely can be handled with computers in some way, but it's going to require a big effort right now.

The patent office is also horrendous at evaluating novelty, so I suppose ChatGPT has already reached human level performance on this task!

Similar to the way in which software developers are terrible at delivering quality software on-time and on-budget, so I suppose ChatGPT has already reached human level performance on this task!

ChatGPT is a mirror where we don't look too good ...

My point was more that just because humans are terrible at something doesn't mean ChatGPT can't be much worse.

As others have said, ChatGPT is great for writing fluff content that has no right or wrong answer. But it is still weak when a correct answer is needed, like in legal analysis. It can write a great 10 page summary of the history of the use of strawberries. But when it comes to telling how many r's are in the word strawberry, it's not very trustworthy.

I wonder if most people realize that your observation is a fundamental problem with LLMS. LLMs simply have no means to evaluate factuality. Keep asking ChatGPT "Are you sure?" and it will break eventually.

The inability to answer basic facts should be a dealbreaker.

Then you need to go over each item with just as much care as you would any probably-irrelevant item pulled from a keyword search, because the LLM is incapable of evaluating it in any way other than correlation.

Also, you don't necessarily have a real dataset to begin with: prior art doesn't need to be patented, it just needs to be published/public/invented sufficiently before the patent. Searching the existing patent database is insufficient.

Going over a better curated list is a significant upgrade and time saver.

Let’s not pretend that “correlation” isn’t very powerful

> Also, you don't necessarily have a real dataset to begin with: prior art doesn't need to be patented, it just needs to be published/public/invented sufficiently before the patent. Searching the existing patent database is insufficient.

I would caution against making assumptions with regards to dataset access and size. I agree effectiveness of the effort I mention would be a function of not only gen AI engineering, but also dataset size and scope.

There are, in fact, startups working on using AI for legal matters. I know one of the principals in one personally.

I don't know if they're tackling this issue, though.

Gene Quinn (in 2015) estimated that patent search with the attorney's opinion on patentability for software costs around $2500 to $3000 [1]. Obviously the cost is going to be higher now. Compare that alone against the $1000 ("at least") per winner that Cloudflare's offering.

But Cloudflare isn't asking for an opinion on a particular invention. A patent searcher could come back and say there is no prior art that reads on the invention in that case and still be paid. Instead, Cloudflare's asking for invalidating prior art, which I think sets the bar even higher and should increase the payout to account for the fact that much of the time there won't be invalidating prior art and thus won't be a payout.

If the platform is not taking on as much risk, the payouts should be higher.

[1] https://ipwatchdog.com/2015/04/04/the-cost-of-obtaining-a-pa...

I doubt the program’s aimed at patent lawyers. They’re probably casting a wide net hoping to reach people who happen to be close to invalidating prior art to begin with, skipping the search. Or maybe people who’s sued by the same patent troll, in which case the program serves to pool findings. If I can write up something I already know in less than an hour and possibly win $1k, why not.

At Google we did a comparison of many, many "patent search" firms: giving them all the same task. Unfortunately I couldn't tell you the results even if I remembered them (which I don't). Most were garbage but a couple were spot-on.

It's more than $3,000; I can tell you that.

Secondly, it's detective work; you might get the answer right away, and you might spend days searching fruitlessly. Making a claim chart is what take the time: you have to hit every single element.

I really don't understand these posts on "it should be higher". Dozens and dozens of people contributed so the payout was either fair or irrelevant.

Thousands, technically.

But is there any potential disproportionate upside for any of the group of people who are searching? The sued company avoids paying $100 million in damages, and my upside as a searcher is $1000? Correct? Like, I don't have a potential super high upside like a YouTube content creator.

FOSS has almost unlimited upside and is based on contributors who are barely paid anything.

Agreed. I do think, however, that FOSS contributors may get some "social capital" from contributing (approval from the cool crowd, putting it on their resume and walking employers through what they did) that I doubt would go to some dude who spent 100 hours researching and finding an old patent or publication that kills a patent. Though I may be wrong.

You are being misguided for the same reason in both FOSS and this patent thing.

You just cannot see that for many people it's their genuine interest.

I know plenty of open source contributors and most of them do not give two damns about social capital or resume (some don't even work in software, but contribute to OS), they just like solving problems with code.

There is an aspect of collective contribution to a collective good here. Patent trolls impose costs on everyone, not just Cloudflare. Making life difficult, expensive and unprofitable for patent trolls benefits everyone, not just Cloudflare. I expect that many of these people didn't see themselves as helping Cloudflare, but the community of everyone who might be targeted by patent trolls.

It seems like it worked out quite well for Cloudflare. You typically only increase bounties if you aren't seeing the results you want.

"I could contribute to open source project that benefits millions, but I'm better off writing Java for a one mid sized company. I'm struck how corporate funded bounties for OS contributions are."

Valid stance to take but not exactly unique. That's just the world we are living in.

Note that this is the kind of reasoning that would also stop resources like wikipedia from existing. Why do for free what could be done for (good) pay instead? So it feels like you're telling people to not participate because a good payday is more important than doing good.

That reasoning might work for your dayjob (why put in effort that your employer doesn't reward?), but this is not an employment situation, that line of reasoning simply does not apply to volunteer work: these folks did not put in the work to draw a check, they put in the work to combat patent trolling. And it worked: everyone who helped won.

But then some folks even won an extra prize without any expectation of a reward beyond the one they did it for. How nice is that?

The fascinating thing for me about this comment, and why I find myself weirdly obsessing over it, is how wrong it is about human nature and why we do things. There’s a small set of things we get paid for. There are a lot of other things we do, and even derive value from, that we don’t get paid anything for. Does that mean they have no value? Absolutely not. Every job I’ve taken is not the one that, on paper, I’d make the most from. Every term sheet I’ve accepted didn’t have the highest implied market cap. Am I an idiot? Perhaps. But it’s worked out. Lots of reasons people do things. Sometimes it’s about money. But those tend to be the most boring. Certainly in the short/medium term. I used to think missions were bullshit. Now I can’t imagine how you could ever possibly run a company without one.

PS - we killed a patent troll. A bunch of you helped. How cool is that??! Thank you.

I think you're extrapolating a lot from my comment that wasn't intended.

You should try searching for prior art some time to get an idea about why I'm not happy about the payment being low. Patent examining's a real grind, and by far the hardest job I've ever done. It's boring and extremely time consuming. I doubt many people do it for pleasure or a higher calling.

If some people want to volunteer to find invalidating prior art, more power to them. I won't be joining them, though.

If it was about paying an examiner to dig up prior art, they could just do that privately. Crowdsourcing like this is typically much cheaper, but putting money aside, many people would be happy to help simply out of principal. There are lots of people who want to see patent trolls eliminated and they would spend their own time to do it without expecting to be paid for it.

If you would only consider doing this as a form of employment, so be it, but many others are happy to do this just to try and make the world a better place for us all.

Just a big company pretending to be the little guy being picked on so they play up the little guy with no resources except crowd sourcing aspect. Some people that don't value their time but want to help the little guy that's "protecting the web".

People here have an interesting duality of wanting the big 200k+ faang job, but also expect you to work for free on opensource projects.

Given the result, it seems 125k was a bit too high since they got so many submissions so easily.

The market sets the price, regardless of what we personally think is "fair".

The payments could increase in the future as this approach becomes more successful and the ROI is better understood. Before this most companies would give into the trolls. Now there may be an increasing incentive to fight back. Few companies have the time, capital and governance freedom to do so.

I have this stubborn cognitive bias that CloudFlare is a good thing, I think it’s because OG hackers from HN started it: jgrahamc and that lot are the real deal.

Time and time again it’s like: “CloydFlare discovers way to be evil that even Google didn’t figure out! News at 10.”

Dear Jesus, all I want for Hanukah is that fly.io doesn’t end up like that.

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