Join Us In The Fight Against Patent Trolls | Hacker News Reader

Join Us In The Fight Against Patent Trolls

rackspace.com

109 pointsgrimey2723 comments

I think perhaps repositories of prior art might be a bit of a red herring here. Prior art doesn't matter to trolls. Patents don't matter to trolls. There's so much worthless paper at the patent office now that everything you might ever do with a computer is covered a thousand times over by useless 'data on a server!' "patents".

The patents are pretense. The troll picks a company that looks like the kind he's used to suing, checks their financials, then looks through his pile of bathroom tissue for some vague scrap of language to paste into the lawsuit template.

The problem is that the legal system allows asymmetric attack where there is no downside for the attacker and guaranteed losses for the defender. Until this gets fixed it doesn't matter at all what happens at the patent office or what prior art gets posted where. By the time prior art enters the picture, who will win the case is irrelevant. The defendant has already lost.

So what they should be advocating is a change to loser pays for patent cases.

I've definitely seen a HN'er suggest that a losing patent troll should have to at least cover the defendant's legal fees.

That's probably enough to put them out of business isn't it? The guy who's patent trolling Hipmunk is a one man shop, so getting hit with a 7 figure legal fee upon losing will force him to liquidate all his assets (read: Patents!). Though I'm not sure what would happen if various patents and assets were partitioned off into separate C corporations that would effectively protect the guy himself :(

The latter is what the assholes at IV are doing. It seems to work pretty well for them.

We need a way to pierce the corporate veil in very frivolous lawsuits. Like, "did prior art exist that didn't require extensive search to find? $1 million damages to the defendant from you, personally, Myrvolds."

There was a terrific interview on NPR with the author of the recent NYTimes article on the patent wars among tech companies large and small. The patent system as become directly hostile to startup companies and to innovation generally. All power to Rackspace for getting active in this fight.

NPR interview: http://www.npr.org/2012/10/11/162717373/in-digital-war-paten...

NYTimes piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-amo...

I wish companies that oppose software patents would cede all their patents to some central 3rd party... and in exchange, that 3rd party with a large patent portfolio would promise to crush anyone else who initiates a patent suit.

How do you suggest to crush a non-practicing entity? Having a war chest of defensive patents can be a useful deterrent against, eg, Apple or Samsung, but not against people whose business model is to reach a settlement in Eastern Texas.

It's a systemic issue.

Be careful of what you wish for. This was the strategy of Intellectual Ventures setup by microsoft in ~2000. This was during microsoft's "we must use patents to protects ourselves from other patent holders" phase.

Now they are one of the world's largest patent trolls.

Not exactly what you are describing, but not too far off and probably can be used for the purposes you describe: Open Invention Network: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Invention_Network

This is great. Makes me proud to be a Rackspace customer.

> While nothing short of eliminating software patents will satisfy us [...]

This seems to be a surprisingly mainstream view in the (software) tech world. I've yet to hear an argument for total abolition that addresses the impact of such a change outside of software tech realm. For all the bad the patent system does, I'm glad that medical breakthroughs are disclosed and protected (for a limited period) rather than locked up a la the Coca Cola recipe.

The generally held view is that software patents should be abolished, not that patents in general should be abolished. As such, the reason you don't see arguments that address the changes outside the software world is because most people are't arguing that there should be changes outside the software world.

I don't believe patents are necessary for solving this problem. The threshold pledge system [1] can solve it without involving the legal system.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system

And yet Coca-Cola stayed a nickel for 70 years[1].

I think going back to guilds and trade secrets isn't right, but it's not completely wrong, either.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4788659

Sometimes, anyway. Recall that the Canadian Supreme Court invalidated the parent on Viagra last week for failing to disclose the active ingredient.

> Not one of these suits comes from a competitor. No one claims that we surreptitiously “copied” their technology. And in our opinion, not one of the so called “software patents” being used against us and other businesses that are actually developing software is valid or infringed.

> Instead, all of these suits are from patent trolls . . . .

That's a false dichotomy if I've ever seen one.

Patent trolls are the symptom, not the problem. Instead of feeding the trolls, fix the ecosystem that allows them to exist.

Awesome way to fight against patent trolls, by hiring people on eLance. Though "Creating descriptions of OpenStack technologies for prior art publication" is a relatively complex project, I bet RackSpace may find great help from university students on eLance, Guru or Freelancer. I wish more tech companies did this.

Rather than have them host this on Elance, we've offered to help them get that prior art written on Scripted.com.

404'd

Not for me - maybe a momentary aberration? Anyway, glad to seem someone doing this. As I said in response to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4548583, finding prior art is an externality of submitting a patent claim - the cost of stopping a dubious patent from causing damage is borne by the victims, rather than the instigator. If these schemes are successful, the next step should be to make filers of such patents pay a fee to those who found the prior art.

My mistake. Rackspace doesn't redirect HTTPS.

If you are using HTTPS Everywhere addon on Firefox, you will have to disable it on this site to read the article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com