I'm not sure what's so difficult about this concept in the age of verifiable chains of communications and transactions.
Also, are you genuinely saying that US district courts are corrupt? On what basis?
What their point is. I don't know who sable is, I'm not a mind reader and searching would just require me to make an assumption as to what their point would have been.
> Sable is a patent troll who very famously sued Cloudflare, and recently lost. What else could they possibly mean?
I don't think that's what the word famous means!
All things aside, I don't think pointing to one instance of this occurring is a great argument. Mind you that the invalidity issue went to a jury which means it escaped at least 3 rounds of determination by a judge, including a JMOL. Meaning that the judge felt there was enough evidence for a jury to be able to find the patents were valid. So, again, I don't think it's the slam-dunk some people seem to think.
For a well-known case, consider Hangprinter, by Torbjorn Ludvigsen: a 3D printer without a frame. He had built it and documented the whole thing in YouTube videos. Then someone heard of the idea and went ahead and got a patent on it.
Torbjorn turned on the Internet for help, started a GoFundMe campaign to collect resources, and with the help of an experienced attorney, managed to have the patent limited so much that does not affect almost any other printer. The "experienced attorney" part was the most crucial, in my opinion, and he could not have chosen anyone better than the one he used.
You can read all the details in the entry named "Patent Got Narrowed 5-8-2023" on Torbjorn's blog https://torbjornludvigsen.com/blog/
My assumption was that tagline meant what to said, that it didn't matter when you create or publish something, that the government was open to giving a monopoly to whomever jumps through the legal hoops first.
...which has been a major load of salt I've carried around with me.
First-to-file and first-to-invent are instead what happens if you get two different people who try to file for a patent before that point. In a first-to-invent system, there's an adjudication process that's going to look at all of the internal records to figure out who "invented" the process first (which, in the absence of evidence, is going to default to the first person to file anyways). In a first-to-file system, the first person to get their paperwork in the door is going to get the patent.
This doesn't mean that an unscrupulous person gets to look for public disclosures and rush their own patent applications to beat out the original inventor. You still need to demonstrate independent conception of the idea (although this would likely only be demonstrated in the context of an actual trial).
[1] I don't remember it's length, but I want to say it's like a year.
There are nuances however with prior-filed patent applications. While such applications are not immediately public, once they are published (typically 18 months after filing), they become prior art retroactively, as of their filing date.
Even if a person independently conceives of a patentable idea, they shouldn't be able to get a patent for it if there exists prior art (although it obviously happens sometimes because the patent examination process isn't perfect).
IPRs and PGRs can also be used for this, and are cheaper than doing it at a full-blown trial.
These rules only apply when two people with the same invention both file a patent. If you publish something on Monday and someone files a patent (really - a provisional) for it on Tuesday, you are prior art to their patent and can be used to make it "obvious."
Patents also turn "I got crushed by Google" stories into legal battles done by patent trolls that often have a decent payoff.
Put your great idea up on arxiv and it becomes prior work which the patent office can find. Or publish it in some conference. Etc. It gets officially timestamped and you're all done. You don't need any of this useless verifiable chain of communication nonsense. The world figured out how to do this centuries ago in far simpler ways.
Whether the patent office finds your prior art or not, that's a whole other question. They may still grant a patent no matter how obviously it overlaps with prior art. But then you can use your prior art when they come to try and shake you down, if it comes down to that.