The best patent troll-killing bill yet | Hacker News Reader

The best patent troll-killing bill yet

action.eff.org

258 pointsbeauzero31 comments

Oh, cool - DeFazio (one of the sponsors) is my representative. I guess that saves me from having to call him. Anyone know if they tally calls for people calling to say thanks or good job or whatever?

> Anyone know if they tally calls for people calling to say thanks or good job or whatever?

Probably wouldn't hurt. In fact, it might inspire similar bills on issues such as this.

Happy voters are repeat voters after all!

Whether they do or not, I think this is a great idea. For all the flak they get -- despite much or most of it usually being justified -- encouraging reps that do this sort of thing can only possibly help.

You can bet that the opposition is going to have people calling him. My guess is that if they tally anything, they'll tally both.

> Anyone know if they tally calls for people calling to say thanks or good job or whatever?

A number of my friends work in the policy-and-politics sphere - I can assure you they definitely do tally those, and it does make a huge difference, even if your Congressman is one of the sponsors of the bill.

Aside from the official counts that they have to keep whenever constituents call them, the main thing to remember is that these offices are small - even the main offices for senators like Schumer or Gillibrand (who represent big states) in DC are only staffed by a few people at a time. If they're flooded with calls from any particular group, what do you think they're going to be talking about over lunch, or at the (figurative) water-cooler, etc.?

A friend of mine worked for Senator Clinton around 2007, and she loves to tell the story of how they got flooded with fake "Valentines" from the Association for Heart Disease[0] the week of February 14th, in support of some bill. It was a pretty uncontroversial bill and passed with wide support, but just fielding those letters and calls took up so much of their time that week that she still remembers it, years later.

In short, please do call them - they'll remember it the next time they consider sticking their neck out for something that they believe is the right thing to do but may be politically risky.

[0] I don't know the name - you get the idea

If it was 2007, then it was probably the Heart Disease Education, Analysis and Research, and Treatment for Women Act (acronym HEART). The bill died in the House. Identical bills were passed by the House in 2008 and 2009 but were not voted upon by the Senate.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/110/s573

Thanks for looking this up.

I thought I was fairly certain that my friend was working for a senator at the time, not a congressman, but I should check with her. And now that I think about it, I actually don't remember whether the final bill passed, but I do remember that it had the support of the relevant senator/congressman.

It also may have been in support of a committee vote, not a final vote. Again, I'd have to ask my friend.

> I thought I was fairly certain that my friend was working for a senator at the time, not a congressman

Not to be too pedantic, but a senator is a member of Congress.

You can still call him. "Best yet" is not the same as "best possible."

I still think the idea that customers of an infringing product can be liable is completely bonkers.

Devil's advocate: I want to use your technology so I create another company to develop an infringing product and sell it to me cheap.

Then your new company is at issue not you as a customer.

Simple, open the new company in China.

Foreign companies may be penalized by a domestic court, as liens or other pecuniary penalties may be assessed on their transactions with entities in the court's jurisdiction.

That new company is probably entitled to limited liability. So you can sue it, but all the patent holder can get is whatever assets that company has (which, if end users are paying a very cheap price for the patented technology, may not be very much). In contrast, you would personally face essentially unlimited liability if the patent holder could sue you directly.

I don't see a moral objection to building your own versions of patented products for your own use, either, though.

Putting aside stuff that shouldn't be patented: 1) Selling a product with someone else's patent seems like something that should be discouraged. Giving it away counts here, as do other distribution methods. 2) Making your own product, for your own use, that someone else has a patent on seems perfectly reasonable and should be legal, in my opinion as a layman.

I'd add in "for your own non-commerical use". If you're in a market where there are only a handful of customers (e.g. the U.S. mobile market) but your invention generates an incredible amount of value for each customer, if those customers make the patented invention for their own use, that could deprive the patent holder out of a significant amount of income.

A court can pull back the corporate veil, and penalize the shareholder(s) or director(s) of any company if these individuals are deemed to have been using the company's separate legal personality for the purpose of wrongdoing.

This is a point that I think technical people miss: the law does not execute like code. Humans are in the loop, and are allowed to apply their own judgement.

This can be hard to win in practice though, especially if the infringing party's lawyers do a good job of maintaining the fiction that the corporation is a separate entitiy.

Discussed extensively here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6602902

I'm having a hard time pulling my jaw from the floor after reading Lamar Smith in the name of sponsors.

Yeah, I am shocked to say the least after he authored SOPA.

Why? its not that he hates technology people - he didnt propose SOPA just to piss you off. He's bought and paid for by the content lobby, that's a copyright issue and not at all related to patents. Patent trolls and Hollywood aren't the same entity - lots of us in technology feel the same way about both groups but that's because of our unique perspective. To Lamar Smith and many others this can be viewed as a bill to help the (innovation) economy, his position on SOPA can likewise be viewed as a way to protect (one slice of) the economy. His position is basically a pro-business position - you just happen hate some of the business he supports and love other business he supports. From his perspective your views seem contradictory - why are you pro-business and anti-business?

It turns out that politicians aren't actually divided along "good/evil" lines, no matter how much we'd like to paint them that way.

SOPA was supported by money, not ideology. This bill is narrowly targeted towards NPEs, by making their business model unprofitable. It’s not going to stop Qualcomm from extracting rents or Apple from going after Google.

This proposal more or less codifies the status quo. It's not at all a "patent troll-killing bill".

This doesn't seem to be the case, and I kind of trust the EFF, given that they're a bunch of lawyers and have experience in this kind of thing. The "winner pays" thing alone seems like it would go a long way towards stopping frivolous patent lawsuits. Why do you think that it changes nothing?

I was just as shocked to see John Cornyn on the list. Shock and awe.

By the way, what happened to another important bill to repeal the wicked DMCA 1201 (by Reps. Zoe Lofgren and others)?

http://lofgren.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=a...

Regarding "fee shifting" if the loser can be made to pay the winner fees, couldn't that be an even scarier proposition for a troll target?

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