Hacker News Reader

Comment by btrettel | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

>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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com