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.
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 spent a couple months between gigs building a bicycle from parts, and sourcing the parts was the biggest timesink.)
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!
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
[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...
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.
And this is a much bigger ask than picking up litter.
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!" ?
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.
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.
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. ;)
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.
"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.
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.
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".
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.
If you do the numbers, yes it can. There are a lot of people who could do this searching.
This battle took 2 years, I think ?
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.
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.
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.
> Says something we hate
"Why do you hate what I said?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not saying CloudFlare shouldn’t reward them better.
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.
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.
GP’s comment was about how they value their own free time, not the market value of that time.
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.
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.
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 reckon many of the submitters have the same vision. The name/fame is enough. The money is a show off and a legitimizer.
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.
Otherwise I agree with your snark.
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.
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.
Don’t worry. Your job is safe. Most firms are too scared to engage in our strategy.
And for what it's worth, I'm not an attorney, and I haven't worked in patents since leaving the USPTO.
(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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s not what I’m talking about here though.