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Comment by easytiger | Hacker News Reader

I remember trolling the linked list patent people 10+ years ago. I sent them an email saying my software made extensive uses of linked lists and it had come to my attention that they had patented them. They sent me to their legal department to arrange an agreement.

Insane.

I wonder how influxdb et al will receive this news.

Here is the list of people who should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves:

Lin; Jerry (Latham, NY), Aggour; Kareem Sherif (Niskayuna, NY), Courtney; Brian Scott (Naperville, IL), Interrante; John Alan (Scotia, NY), LaComb; Christina Ann (Schenectady, NY), Mathur; Sunil (East Walpole, MA), McConnell; Christopher Thomas (Latham, NY), Snell; Quinn (Salem, UT)

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Bear in mind that sometimes the people on a patent listing aren't in favor of the idea being patented. A company I worked for started down the patent road for some processor emulation stuff I worked on; my name would have been on the patent even though I (a) didn't think it was patentable, and (b) didn't think it should be patented.

Because of the company's rules my name needed to be on the patent despite my objections.

>> Because of the company's rules my name needed to be on the patent despite my objections.

Then you had the ability to stop it.

Even if I had quit my name would have been on the patent. I'm interested in hearing how I could have stopped it once the process started.

(Without changing my name.)

>> Even if I had quit my name would have been on the patent. I'm interested in hearing how I could have stopped it once the process started.

Then you'd be a patent owner and could sue for infringement. OTOH you probably agreed to sell them all your IP for $1 or something when you hired in.

>you probably agreed to sell them all your IP for $1 or something when you hired in

usually a condition of employment. FMI see Assignment of Inventions clause - all companies should have employees sign before hiring.

No, the patent would be owned by the company.

Trolling aside, the linked list patent doesn't cover what we think of as linked lists. We've had this conversation before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8231954

I don't see many folks here who've actually read the claims of this patent and analyzed them for validity. For all we know, this could be a legit difference over the art. But hey, claims are hard, let's go shopping. Or shame people, whatever.

If people want some chance of expert analysis, they should submit this to askpatents.com

The uniqueness of a variant on a linked list which I imagine many people have reinvented with variance over the years, is not important. These debates are meaningless because creating a system penalising people for creating something that solves their own problems with no external reference is being made a crime and hurting business. I myself have worked for companies who have had to spend years in legal disputes for trolls. It has a real cost. These people are a cancer and this is a tax on abstract thought.

1. This patent is on a variation that, as I mentioned in my comment, is very unlikely to ever be infringed when "people solve their own problems". Really, if you can think of a problem that that linked-list problem solves, I'd be very interested in knowing.

2. There is no tax on abstract thought. There is only a dispute if you make, use or sell infringing products. You are free to think whatever abstract thoughts you want. Given the vast majority of patents are a) highly specific and b) unlikely to be infringed anyway, it's unlikely any of your "abstract" thoughts turn into infringing products. Do you know of anything you've developed that has ever been the precise thing that infringed a specific patent?

Pretty much in no way whatsoever. RRDtool as a prior art example.

kdb as well, I would imagine them having some kind of patent.

So I don't know the first thing about software patents, but most central banks (including the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, etc.) -- offer web interfaces for manipulating and retrieving economic time-series (say, taking logarithms, adjusting for inflation or PPP, etc). Does this count as "prior art"?

The European Council also has a large, useful system called Eurostat.

Unfortunately, USPTO only considers other patents or academic papers as prior art.

RRDTool: Logging and Graphing. J Sellens - USENIX Annual Technical Conference, General Track, 2006

The GE patent pertains to metadata indexing and query resolution against a distributed block store, so RRDTool doesn't really apply anyway. Maybe something using HDF5 hyperslabs on a parallel distributed file system would though.

Are you sure? I've been involved in several instances where demonstrable systems were enough.

Sorry, that was just what two different patent officers told me. If they were wrong, I wouldn't be surprised.

Thankfully that is incorrect.

http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2010/10/02/what-is-prior-art/id=12...

InfluxDB CEO here. I've already forwarded to our lawyers to ask. Reading through the patent there are some key differences between what they describe and what we built.

Your probably fine but only because this is a company with a business. They aren't an IP litigation based business who would use it against you. The idea of incorporating business in north america frightens me. ITTP will make this a global problem.

While I in no way agreeing with this decision why are these people responsible for the terrible decision of the USPTO? They just get to apply for a patent, not issue one. The employee(s) at the USPTO that approved this patent are the ones that should be ashamed.

Because flooding the USPTO with an unending flow of bogus patents are partly why those same patents get approved. They're taking part of a system that takes advantage of an underfunded and understaffed agency in order to profit from it in the long term, knowing that they will get away with it for years and be able to milk millions through the courts long before anyone big enough shuts them down.

Patent trolling effectively begets more patent trolling, and everyone partaking of it should indeed be ashamed of themselves.

The USPTO is a profit center for the US government. Every extra patent submitted reduces the amount of tax everyone else has to pay. If the USPTO is approving bogus patents then should not the effort be on solving this rather than stopping people applying?

No, it isn't. Look at their budget[1]; very little money enters or leaves the office. The billions collected in the patent and trademark process are all spent on the patent and trademark process.

[1] http://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fy16pbr.p...

The most interesting thing about the USPTO report is the decline in patent applications and hence revenue. They have gone from making profits year to year to making a loss last year. It seems people have realised the lack of value of most patents.

If people stop putting in bogus patents applications the US tax payer is going to have to start paying to support the USPTO. Lets hope with less applications coming in that the staff at the USPTO have more time to stop these dubious patents being issued.

Not everybody that patents a [generic description of] a system they're developing has any intention of doing anything other than protecting themselves from others' claims.

Aside: I had an interesting conversation a couple of months back with a guy who had a very broad patent on methods of operating a digital auction dating back to the early 2000s which as worded clashed with everything from Betfair to Priceline. He's still far more interested in building a consumer business once he can find people to run it and fund it rather than flogging it to a troll.

Why did he file a patent in the first place?

Garden shed inventor type thinks idea is goldmine; doesn't want anyone else to get there first.

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