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.