I'm not a troll. I'm an inventor and I made a real product. I'm also someone well known for having dealt with intellectual property theft as a victim. I also spent a year at Stanford Law School poking around as a fellow as I developed what is now the most accurate patent assignment database there is--far more accurate than the official one--on PlainSite.
I'll be deliberately terse with my comments here, but the upshot is that the problem here isn't the idea of patents. They are a lottery ticket to a lawsuit as Elon Musk has said, but they're also an important insurance policy for serious innovators. (Another such insurance policy is VC, but not every serious innovator has VC backing.) The problem is the legal profession. Patent trolls (and other sorts of IP trolls) are by and large the creations of corrupt lawyers. Inventors are slighted in favor of large corporations because of "upstanding" lawyers. Transparency is impeded everywhere you turn in the patent world courtesy of the patent bar. And unlike the USPTO TTAB, where corporations can represent themselves at virtually no cost, in the USPTO PTAB, the patent bar has seen to it that you must hire a lawyer.
It's not a coincidence. The system is incredibly broken, but if you want to blame someone, blame the lawyers for ruining what might have been a workable and necessary paradigm.
I'm afraid that I (and surely many others on Hacker News as well) will not be cheering you on. It's pretty much the definition of something I do not want to be patentable.
I understand it will probably not be possible to convince you to change your mind, so I won't insult you by trying. However, keep in mind that your stance really is diametrically opposed to many groups who do not want software patents.
It's the "for payments" version of all those "but on a screen" patents that people here hate on so much. Prior work includes but is not limited to Facebook tag suggestions, and and just about everything done in facial recognition on any laptop in the world.
If patents were granted fairly and litigated fairly and efficiently, sure, they'd be great.
But they just can't be. Many millions of dollars are spent gaining bad patents and litigating them unfairly. In practice, they're a tool which enables and amplifies the worse parts of human and societal nature, a tool for the abuse of power.
I say we just give them up. There may be fewer published inventions, but not that many fewer really. Some inventors will be motivated to invent for its own sake. Others will profit from being involved in the implementation and commercialization of their own inventions combined with others. Some inventors will get "screwed" when others get rich off their creations. But that happens today anyway. There will likely be disagreements about who really came up with the core of an idea first, or who's idea is really more core to the product, and without patents, those arguments won't cost millions of dollars and stifle creation. Everyone would be better off IMHO.
A huge part your argument comes down to "it will all be the same as now but magically better" but you didn't bother to make a case, just list out some very assertive predictions.
Also, Its very likely that the invention will be reinvented by someone. Is not there a public patent review process before a patent is granted so the other inventors can provide alternative solutions ? This would solve most if not all problems.
No need to downvote a comment that exposes an opinion you disagree with (and I disagree too). The patent is clearly a joke: "A method for transferring an electronic payment between a purchaser and a merchant etc...". Instead of downvote, send a letter to your congressmen to stop this ludicrous software patent thing, it will be more useful.
Nothing wrong with sending a clear message to someone actively trying to do harm to innovation. That kind of behavior should not be welcome in our industry.
Your message's clarity gets muddied by your overzealousness I'm afraid.
It's absurd to say that I am "actively trying to do harm to innovation." I filed for patents on novel processes to protect myself. That's inherently defensive, not offensive.
Smart people can disagree on this topic. I understand that a lot of people don't think there should be software patents, or patents at all. I don't think it's that simple.
> It's absurd to say that I am "actively trying to do harm to innovation." I filed for patents on novel processes to protect myself. That's inherently defensive, not offensive.
You sued Square, right? Square benefited in no way from your work or from your patent, but now you're either expecting payment from them for no services rendered, or forcing them to waste their resources fighting your shakedown attempt. In what worldview is that not harming innovation?
Based on your response, I'm guessing you didn't take the time to read the complaint. And why bother when you can spew factually incorrect vitriol at someone over the internet?
Not to mention that Square's fundamental innovation, its credit card reader, is premised on intellectual property theft. See http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/lawsuit-questions-s.... So in addition to holding a hundred more patents than my company, Square isn't even being honest about who deserves credit for theirs. Yet you argue that they're the pro-innovation good guys, and non-VC backed independent inventors are actively destroying innovation, because they hold patents? I have to disagree.
The idea of facial recognition as a form of security has been around significantly longer than the technology itself. It's in sci-fi and spy movies dating back to the 80s. The idea to use it as a means of authorizing payment should have been considered obvious by the clerk that granted your patent, but it wasn't, and that's where software patents are failing hardest today.
I think a lot of folks would agree that face-based payment authorization as an option would have come along eventually, just as every other biometric and security device will eventually get applied to everything anyone might want to secure.
> Based on your response, I'm guessing you didn't take the time to read the complaint.
You were right at the time, but I just flipped through it now (the meat seems to be in attachments 4 and 5 at the bottom of the original link) and it doesn't change my argument.
What service did you render to Square to earn the payment you claim to deserve? Did they get the idea for their product from your patent? Did they learn how to implement their process from patent?
Are you just trying to get a slice of the pie because of some childish "I thought of it first" garbage, and because our broken patent system allows it?
I suspect it's that last one.
> Yet you argue that they're the pro-innovation good guys
I never argued that. I argued that you are trying to extort money out of Square despite providing them with no real service or benefit, and that this does real harm to innovation.
The "'I thought of it first' garbage" is part of the U.S. Constitution, and if you don't agree with it, that's fine, but generally speaking reactionary and incendiary (and often libertarian) arguments like yours are part of the problem. Like it or not, the system is run by patent lawyers, both inside and outside of government, who are not receptive to that kind of language (e.g. "extort"). What they are responsive to is carefully constructed, specific reasons why the system needs to be improved.
If you have any of those, I'd encourage you to file a public comment with USPTO, as I have repeatedly. Otherwise, yeah, in this case I thought of it first, and I filed a patent on it, and I added a number of important limitations, and it was granted.
> What service did you render to Square to earn the payment you claim to deserve?
the service rendered was he made public the details of the invention. Whether Square read or did not choose to read the patent is beside the point.
> Did they get the idea for their product from your patent? Did they learn how to implement their process from patent?
You are assuming that Square did not read his patent - which if true suggests that Square inefficiently re-invented the wheel. You know, that whole standing on the shoulders of giants thing.
However, what we find happening lately is the concept of efficient infringement where large corporations have found it more cost effective to infringe and fight with their lawyer muscle than to pay inventors their due rights.
>I filed for patents on novel processes to protect myself.
I think the people here are challenging the "novel processes" part of your patent. I can't look at it myself currently, but based on the replies, I'm a bit skeptical myself on the "novel" part of it. Unless the replies are misrepresenting what your patent is about. Which is totally possible.
> I own a few patents, as I'm sure many on Hacker News do. As I write this, I'm in the middle of a patent lawsuit with Square (http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/24u13j6tr/california-northe...). I don't apologize for it. I'm not a troll. I'm an inventor and I made a real product.
That's great you made a real product. So many who file patents don't end up creating real products. But the problem here is you made a real product that's pretty generic much akind to the patents of "input devices changes display on output device" kind of patents. It's an abuse of the system that many are working to eradicate.
So I don't think you're going to find any support on HN for it. It's great you're not like the typical patent troll since you claim you made a product (of which I have not verified but I give you the benefit of the doubt) but obvious design patents hurt innovation. Hell to some degree all patents hurt innovation but the obvious designs are the most egregious in my opinion.
> I'm not a troll. I'm an inventor and I made a real product.
Doesn't matter. You're trying to take ownership of an obvious idea. Your patent did not inspire anyone at Square, nor did anyone at Square learn how to perform this process by your patent. They don't owe you a cent. It is only by a shitty quirk of the system, which you are taking advantage of, that allows you to try to extort money out of them. You are part of the problem.
question is how do we distinguish between patents that "inspired" and those which did not?
Or does inspiring even matter - anyone can see the "inspiration" on Android from the release of the 1st iPhone (e.g. before and after designs) - yet this fact plus all of Apple's $billions were unable to stop/prevent Android from their clearly inspired copying.
Is it still considered a quirk when it's by design and it's the entire point of the system? If we're only talking about damages for when designs are copied (instead of independently developed), we're basically talking about trade secret misappropriation.
You're misreading parent's comment. What s/he is saying is that if someone flat-out copied your design, then that would presumably be trade secret appropriation.
Patents are SUPPOSED to cover the case where someone else invents the same thing in parallel, independently. You might not like it, but that's a legal fact. Clearly, you have a different moral opinion of when someone should be able to enforce their patent rights.
Since no one else has said it yet, thanks for contributing your insight to this discussion. You must have known it would be a hostile audience, and that many wouldn't agree with you, but we benefit from hearing your side and being able to talk about the disagreement. Genuinely, thanks for your bravery and openness in discussing it.
Honestly I think the apology is a bit unnecessary but I'm glad many are turning around on the ideal of technology patents. Yeah patents on obvious designs not only hinder but hurt innovation (one click, anyone?) but even patents on non-obvious but obviously-trending designs can slow progress in many areas.
I'll be honest though I wish patents worked. It would be nice to have a way to protect the "little guy" when they figured out a break through, showed it to the "big guy" and was then ripped off. But in practice the "little guy" would need millions of dollars just to create the case and go after the "big guy". That practically makes the patent system a place where only the "big guys" can play which defeats its purpose.
So maybe it's time to do something radical and just completely end or retard its abilities. I'm not sure if the current political environment will change this system any time soon though. Most patent holders have large sums of political influence.
I don't mean in the form that they exist today but the original ideal behind them: that they can protect someone with little to no money from being steam rolled when they come up with a new invention / novel idea that is taken by the bigger guys. At least this felt like the original intent of patents but it simply can't work like that today.
And yeah owning an idea is terrible. It would have been nice to at least be required to demonstrate the idea being patented. But that opens all sorts of issues.
> But in practice the "little guy" would need millions of dollars just to create the case and go after the "big guy".
This is the exact problem that many patent trolls solve. If your patent is strong enough, they will take your case on "contingency" and take a (huge) cut of the winnings, if any. Patent trolls can help even the imbalance between the big guys and the little guys.
Not surprising then that the loudest complaints about patent trolls come from the "big guys". Unfortunately for them, multiple studies, including by the GAO and professors like Michael Risch and Coleen Chien show that there is no real patent troll litigation crisis. Fortunately for them, tech media is happy to regurgitate their PR for the rage-view value, and most people are happy to accept it uncritically.
People criticize the patent trolls that are using generic/obvious patents that somehow got approved when they should have been rejected.
"Interface for opening a door by use of hand and twisting motion" (aka: a doorknob)
Those types of patents. The ones worded ever so carefully as to try and sneak by being declined. When people refer to patent trolls they are mostly referring to the companies that purchase the rights to these kinds of patents and go on a litigation hunt of any big fish they find infringing to try and sucker out payments.
I do not see it as patent trolling when someone who say... invented a jetpack and has a patent on the technology in use going through a firm to sue an infringing superbody who has infringed upon the patent to sell their jetpack because they can mass manufacture and undersell the small business. That's what I see as a "legitimate use" of patents.
On the other hand, "Backpack to be worn to fly through the air through means of jet propulsion technology" (aka: jetpack with no working functionality patented) is not a legitimate patent in my eyes and is sat on to prevent anyone from making jetpacks because the moment they invent a jetpack they'd be sued. That's what stifles innovation.
As with my reply to monochromatic, I guess the issue here is the definition of the term "patent troll". People often use the term anytime a patent they don't like is asserted. However, studies suggest that patent trolls don't assert patents any worse or better than those that practicing entities assert. See for instance,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1792442 for a limited by illustrative empirical study which also references several other related papers. This study also indicates that NPEs are probably a significant avenue for assertion of patents from individual inventors.
I will agree that there is a substantial patent quality problem, with a number of overly broad and poorly-defined patents being asserted by firms, non-practicing or otherwise. However, from my observation over almost a decade, I would also say that this problem is declining rapidly, as most of these patents were issued during a period when the PTO had no idea how to deal with them two decades ago.
I have seen the term "patent troll" being applied to law firms who take patent cases on contingency. I guess the issue here is the definition of the term "patent troll". People tend to twist it freely to mean "somebody using some patents in a way that I don't like".
> It would be nice to have a way to protect the "little guy" when they figured out a break through, showed it to the "big guy" and was then ripped off.
It was the "big guys" that lobbied for increased IP protections in the 1990's, for a pretty good reason: protection from foreign competitors. I worked with a big router company once, who told me that a Chinese company had ripped off their router designs down to the English silk-screened assembly instructions on the PCBs. All of the little-company versus big-company stuff is small potatoes compared to that overarching concern.
That's why a lot of big technology companies are still strong supporters of patents. They don't want Chinese companies copying their chips down to bugs in the firmware and undercutting them on the market because they don't have any need to recoup R&D costs.
your statement is contradictory - you claim large corps increased IP protection yet what we see today is that patents are the weakest they've ever been.
That's not true. While recent Supreme Court decisions have cut back certain kinds of patents, the U.S. has successfully exported its patent system abroad through treaties and the WTO. Protection of IP in say China is a lot stronger now than a couple of decades ago.
sure, there are numerous jurisdictions outside of the U.S. where patents have become stronger, but enforcing a U.S. patent is the weakest it's ever been.
> for a pretty good reason: protection from foreign competitors
How do US patents protect from foreign competitors? Are you referring only to the US market or otherwise? Depending on the industry outside of the US might be a far larger market so I don't know how successful patents are in this area. I'm curious as to the data about this.
Releasing the patents is a bad idea. A prior discussion on Schneier's blog about dealing with the patents came to a different conclusion: amass patents to use in self defense. It's what all the big names do. Otherwise, you're just going to be sued into oblivion by big names and the trolls with little leverage to use.
So, if the concern is innovation, then it's best to patent everything possible into non-profits and public benefit corporations that promise to never use or charge any open developments. Not just promise but in their charters, etc. Might have a small membership fee just to keep it going. Then, any threats to open projects are made with lawsuits from this organization going against them. I think there's already an alliance in OSS doing something similar.
Yet, the lesson from prior discussion was: "a good offense is the best defense" given virtually anything can be patented and sued over. Too broken for an avoidance strategy or even fair, payment strategy.
I'm not sure leverage counts for much anymore, considering Oracle was still able to go after Google recently despite Google's own massive patent holdings.
Regarding point 1, what's stopping Google from leveraging those patents now, if point 2 allows for even a sliver of potential? I mean, a single function seems to be causing Google quite a bit of grief in this lawsuit, so that seems to be enough.
Regarding point 3, I had forgotten that part, but I don't quite get the distinction where it affects the "mutually assured destruction" feature of patent libraries. Even though the sword Oracle swings at Google says "copyright" on the hilt rather than "patent", can Google still not file patent-based countersuits regardless? In other words, if Person A and Person B are in a standoff with guns leveled at each other, why would Person A simply allow Person B to stab them instead?
You're better off looking at Apple vs Samsung or another case where it's apples to apples in the portfolio. Having leverage doesn't guarantee anything. However, a smaller vendor would likely not have lasted that long or cut a similar deal that preserved the bottom line. So, size of income plus patent portfolio helps.
There's been a number of suits and countersuits between companies in similar industries with overlap in portfolio that got resolved way differently than big companies coming after startups or SME's with nothing. It would probably be worth a law student in this area doing a full survey and analysis to see how the variables involved contribute to the situation.
Exactly. The likes of Microsoft and Oracle have diverse software while patenting every improvement that they can. For instance, Microsoft has patents on cut and paste, Oracle probably has patents on key database/ERP tech, and Apple had patents on common smartphone idioms. Patents on popular, must-have features give considerable leverage against a company that has little to bring to the table. Google wasn't about to give up PageRank, their cash cow. They'd rather risk a long lawsuit and financial loss.
Anyone that thinks patents aren't leverage can try to force IBM out of their market or take most of their money with lawsuits. Just like IBM themselves have successfully done directly or with indirect threats of it supporting acquisitions. Just try. Spoiler: it's not going to work and their countersuits might be interesting.
The fact I can sit down and solve a problem and then get sued for it because someone else happened to solve it the same way without me even being aware of it is terrible.
Agreed. I believe a reasonably qualified engineer would produce similar solutions to those same problems. With this patent system, you have to search the patent databases before your start to implement your idea. I've had several buzzkills on ideas because I found them to have been patented. Perhaps my implementations would have made the world better, but we will never know because of the daunting prospect of facing a legal battle.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadI'm not a troll. I'm an inventor and I made a real product. I'm also someone well known for having dealt with intellectual property theft as a victim. I also spent a year at Stanford Law School poking around as a fellow as I developed what is now the most accurate patent assignment database there is--far more accurate than the official one--on PlainSite.
I'll be deliberately terse with my comments here, but the upshot is that the problem here isn't the idea of patents. They are a lottery ticket to a lawsuit as Elon Musk has said, but they're also an important insurance policy for serious innovators. (Another such insurance policy is VC, but not every serious innovator has VC backing.) The problem is the legal profession. Patent trolls (and other sorts of IP trolls) are by and large the creations of corrupt lawyers. Inventors are slighted in favor of large corporations because of "upstanding" lawyers. Transparency is impeded everywhere you turn in the patent world courtesy of the patent bar. And unlike the USPTO TTAB, where corporations can represent themselves at virtually no cost, in the USPTO PTAB, the patent bar has seen to it that you must hire a lawyer.
It's not a coincidence. The system is incredibly broken, but if you want to blame someone, blame the lawyers for ruining what might have been a workable and necessary paradigm.
That's not really the fault of lawyers, either.
I'm afraid that I (and surely many others on Hacker News as well) will not be cheering you on. It's pretty much the definition of something I do not want to be patentable.
I understand it will probably not be possible to convince you to change your mind, so I won't insult you by trying. However, keep in mind that your stance really is diametrically opposed to many groups who do not want software patents.
But they just can't be. Many millions of dollars are spent gaining bad patents and litigating them unfairly. In practice, they're a tool which enables and amplifies the worse parts of human and societal nature, a tool for the abuse of power.
I say we just give them up. There may be fewer published inventions, but not that many fewer really. Some inventors will be motivated to invent for its own sake. Others will profit from being involved in the implementation and commercialization of their own inventions combined with others. Some inventors will get "screwed" when others get rich off their creations. But that happens today anyway. There will likely be disagreements about who really came up with the core of an idea first, or who's idea is really more core to the product, and without patents, those arguments won't cost millions of dollars and stifle creation. Everyone would be better off IMHO.
It's absurd to say that I am "actively trying to do harm to innovation." I filed for patents on novel processes to protect myself. That's inherently defensive, not offensive.
Smart people can disagree on this topic. I understand that a lot of people don't think there should be software patents, or patents at all. I don't think it's that simple.
You sued Square, right? Square benefited in no way from your work or from your patent, but now you're either expecting payment from them for no services rendered, or forcing them to waste their resources fighting your shakedown attempt. In what worldview is that not harming innovation?
Not to mention that Square's fundamental innovation, its credit card reader, is premised on intellectual property theft. See http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/lawsuit-questions-s.... So in addition to holding a hundred more patents than my company, Square isn't even being honest about who deserves credit for theirs. Yet you argue that they're the pro-innovation good guys, and non-VC backed independent inventors are actively destroying innovation, because they hold patents? I have to disagree.
I think a lot of folks would agree that face-based payment authorization as an option would have come along eventually, just as every other biometric and security device will eventually get applied to everything anyone might want to secure.
You were right at the time, but I just flipped through it now (the meat seems to be in attachments 4 and 5 at the bottom of the original link) and it doesn't change my argument.
What service did you render to Square to earn the payment you claim to deserve? Did they get the idea for their product from your patent? Did they learn how to implement their process from patent?
Are you just trying to get a slice of the pie because of some childish "I thought of it first" garbage, and because our broken patent system allows it?
I suspect it's that last one.
> Yet you argue that they're the pro-innovation good guys
I never argued that. I argued that you are trying to extort money out of Square despite providing them with no real service or benefit, and that this does real harm to innovation.
If you have any of those, I'd encourage you to file a public comment with USPTO, as I have repeatedly. Otherwise, yeah, in this case I thought of it first, and I filed a patent on it, and I added a number of important limitations, and it was granted.
the service rendered was he made public the details of the invention. Whether Square read or did not choose to read the patent is beside the point.
> Did they get the idea for their product from your patent? Did they learn how to implement their process from patent?
You are assuming that Square did not read his patent - which if true suggests that Square inefficiently re-invented the wheel. You know, that whole standing on the shoulders of giants thing.
However, what we find happening lately is the concept of efficient infringement where large corporations have found it more cost effective to infringe and fight with their lawyer muscle than to pay inventors their due rights.
I completely disagree.
1) http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...
2) www.google.ca/patents/US8396808
3) http://pat2pdf.org/patents/pat8396808.pdf
if not publicly disclosed?
I think the people here are challenging the "novel processes" part of your patent. I can't look at it myself currently, but based on the replies, I'm a bit skeptical myself on the "novel" part of it. Unless the replies are misrepresenting what your patent is about. Which is totally possible.
You have to look at the claims if you want to know what the patent is actually about.
That's great you made a real product. So many who file patents don't end up creating real products. But the problem here is you made a real product that's pretty generic much akind to the patents of "input devices changes display on output device" kind of patents. It's an abuse of the system that many are working to eradicate.
So I don't think you're going to find any support on HN for it. It's great you're not like the typical patent troll since you claim you made a product (of which I have not verified but I give you the benefit of the doubt) but obvious design patents hurt innovation. Hell to some degree all patents hurt innovation but the obvious designs are the most egregious in my opinion.
Doesn't matter. You're trying to take ownership of an obvious idea. Your patent did not inspire anyone at Square, nor did anyone at Square learn how to perform this process by your patent. They don't owe you a cent. It is only by a shitty quirk of the system, which you are taking advantage of, that allows you to try to extort money out of them. You are part of the problem.
question is how do we distinguish between patents that "inspired" and those which did not?
Or does inspiring even matter - anyone can see the "inspiration" on Android from the release of the 1st iPhone (e.g. before and after designs) - yet this fact plus all of Apple's $billions were unable to stop/prevent Android from their clearly inspired copying.
Is it still considered a quirk when it's by design and it's the entire point of the system? If we're only talking about damages for when designs are copied (instead of independently developed), we're basically talking about trade secret misappropriation.
Patents are SUPPOSED to cover the case where someone else invents the same thing in parallel, independently. You might not like it, but that's a legal fact. Clearly, you have a different moral opinion of when someone should be able to enforce their patent rights.
I'll be honest though I wish patents worked. It would be nice to have a way to protect the "little guy" when they figured out a break through, showed it to the "big guy" and was then ripped off. But in practice the "little guy" would need millions of dollars just to create the case and go after the "big guy". That practically makes the patent system a place where only the "big guys" can play which defeats its purpose.
So maybe it's time to do something radical and just completely end or retard its abilities. I'm not sure if the current political environment will change this system any time soon though. Most patent holders have large sums of political influence.
I'm glad patents don't work. I've always felt there's something very deeply wrong with owning an idea.
And yeah owning an idea is terrible. It would have been nice to at least be required to demonstrate the idea being patented. But that opens all sorts of issues.
This is the exact problem that many patent trolls solve. If your patent is strong enough, they will take your case on "contingency" and take a (huge) cut of the winnings, if any. Patent trolls can help even the imbalance between the big guys and the little guys.
Not surprising then that the loudest complaints about patent trolls come from the "big guys". Unfortunately for them, multiple studies, including by the GAO and professors like Michael Risch and Coleen Chien show that there is no real patent troll litigation crisis. Fortunately for them, tech media is happy to regurgitate their PR for the rage-view value, and most people are happy to accept it uncritically.
People criticize the patent trolls that are using generic/obvious patents that somehow got approved when they should have been rejected.
"Interface for opening a door by use of hand and twisting motion" (aka: a doorknob)
Those types of patents. The ones worded ever so carefully as to try and sneak by being declined. When people refer to patent trolls they are mostly referring to the companies that purchase the rights to these kinds of patents and go on a litigation hunt of any big fish they find infringing to try and sucker out payments.
I do not see it as patent trolling when someone who say... invented a jetpack and has a patent on the technology in use going through a firm to sue an infringing superbody who has infringed upon the patent to sell their jetpack because they can mass manufacture and undersell the small business. That's what I see as a "legitimate use" of patents.
On the other hand, "Backpack to be worn to fly through the air through means of jet propulsion technology" (aka: jetpack with no working functionality patented) is not a legitimate patent in my eyes and is sat on to prevent anyone from making jetpacks because the moment they invent a jetpack they'd be sued. That's what stifles innovation.
I will agree that there is a substantial patent quality problem, with a number of overly broad and poorly-defined patents being asserted by firms, non-practicing or otherwise. However, from my observation over almost a decade, I would also say that this problem is declining rapidly, as most of these patents were issued during a period when the PTO had no idea how to deal with them two decades ago.
It was the "big guys" that lobbied for increased IP protections in the 1990's, for a pretty good reason: protection from foreign competitors. I worked with a big router company once, who told me that a Chinese company had ripped off their router designs down to the English silk-screened assembly instructions on the PCBs. All of the little-company versus big-company stuff is small potatoes compared to that overarching concern.
That's why a lot of big technology companies are still strong supporters of patents. They don't want Chinese companies copying their chips down to bugs in the firmware and undercutting them on the market because they don't have any need to recoup R&D costs.
How do US patents protect from foreign competitors? Are you referring only to the US market or otherwise? Depending on the industry outside of the US might be a far larger market so I don't know how successful patents are in this area. I'm curious as to the data about this.
Not true at all. If you have a good case, you can probably find a law firm willing to handle it on contingency.
So, if the concern is innovation, then it's best to patent everything possible into non-profits and public benefit corporations that promise to never use or charge any open developments. Not just promise but in their charters, etc. Might have a small membership fee just to keep it going. Then, any threats to open projects are made with lawsuits from this organization going against them. I think there's already an alliance in OSS doing something similar.
Yet, the lesson from prior discussion was: "a good offense is the best defense" given virtually anything can be patented and sued over. Too broken for an avoidance strategy or even fair, payment strategy.
2. There's probably both much overlap in Google's patents and Oracle's technology.
3. The Oracle v. Google case is now primarily about copyright rather than patents.
Regarding point 3, I had forgotten that part, but I don't quite get the distinction where it affects the "mutually assured destruction" feature of patent libraries. Even though the sword Oracle swings at Google says "copyright" on the hilt rather than "patent", can Google still not file patent-based countersuits regardless? In other words, if Person A and Person B are in a standoff with guns leveled at each other, why would Person A simply allow Person B to stab them instead?
There's been a number of suits and countersuits between companies in similar industries with overlap in portfolio that got resolved way differently than big companies coming after startups or SME's with nothing. It would probably be worth a law student in this area doing a full survey and analysis to see how the variables involved contribute to the situation.
Anyone that thinks patents aren't leverage can try to force IBM out of their market or take most of their money with lawsuits. Just like IBM themselves have successfully done directly or with indirect threats of it supporting acquisitions. Just try. Spoiler: it's not going to work and their countersuits might be interesting.
2: There's probably not much overlap in Google's patents and Oracle's technology.