Before I discovered HN (of which I'm on daily), I was a frequent reader of Groklaw[0]- a site primarily devoted to covering the fragile intersection of the technology sector and legal system; where the two are often at odds with one another. We're more than a decade beyond it's voluntary closure after the Snowden revelations and it's left a large void on substantive coverage of these issues. The site was the blog of an anonymous tech reporter named Pamela Jones that did detailed deep-dives into the parties & issues involved in high-profile lawsuits between tech companies, like Apple vs. Samsung on the issue of design patents for rounded corners, over what have often been patents containing broad language that resulted in hindrances to innovation ranging from being unwilling to license to extortion of revenue streams for entire product lines. Part of why I find the technology industry to be continually interesting is its desire to innovate instead of litigate- there needs to be a check on bad faith actors whose goal is capture of a niche through regulatory means instead of fair competition; else we get these cases relegated to the infamous eastern district of Texas which has historically played favor towards non-practicing patent trolls. I'll be submitting my comment and suggest others do the same.
Now that I have seen groklaw.net/about-us page, I have seen it all.
Here is the new Groklaw mission statement:
Our Mission
Our mission is simple: to guide you toward safe, rewarding, and responsible crypto gambling experiences. We believe in transparency, player protection, and giving you the tools to make informed choices — whether you want massive Bitcoin bonuses, ultra-fast withdrawals, or niche altcoin gaming.
I don't remember the exact name for this marketing strategy, but that's how some of the black- and grey hat marketers made millions upon millions the past decades.
One marketer I know made his fortune (as in tens of millions) buying up dead sites, often for dissolved companies / organizations / etc., kept the design somewhat relevant to said entities, but filled the site with ads and referral links to gambling sites / credit cards / etc.
And as seen with Groklaw, it still works. Whenever I see some old semi-popular website call it quits, it just takes a couple of months until it becomes a landing or referral page for something crypto.
---innovate instead of litigate.
Agreed, but there has to be a balance. In some cases, it could also be looked at as favoring marketers over innovators.
On the copyright side, you could also argue about why ChatGPT should have to be slowed down by these copyright trolls (i.e. authors) who want to extract funds from them. Just let them innovate!
> On August 20, 2013, a final article appeared on Groklaw, explaining that due to pervasive government monitoring of the Internet, there could no longer be an expectation of the sort of privacy online that was necessary to collaborate on sensitive topics. Citing the closure of Lavabit earlier that month, Jones wrote "I can't do Groklaw without your input.... and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate." and "What I do know is it's not possible to be fully human if you are being surveilled 24/7... I hope that makes it clear why I can't continue. There is now no shield from forced exposure."
Just on the pervasive passive monitoring aspect, I think an under-discussed aspect of the time frame covered in the material of Snowden's leaks is that sites/services by and large wasn't using encrypted protocols (HTTPS).
So much could be intercepted back then because of this. It wasn't until 2010 that various large services—including Yahoo Mail and Facebook—got a kick in their ass by a whitehat browser plugin that allowed anyone on the same network to trivially hijack session cookies of others, stimulating an adoption of HTTPS[1] during 2011-2012.
By the time the Snowden leaks occurred in 2013 the trend was heading toward encrypted-by-default and governments were having to adapt.
I thought these “lawful intercept” organisations had their taps inside the data centers after https tsl to the user had already been terminated. And so the infamous ssl removed here slide from prism.
Like let’s say you have a proxy server like Nginx on a server with a public facing ip address and then it also has access to a private subnet where your application servers are running. A visitor to your website’s browser make a secure https connection the nginx server where https would be terminated and then it would proxy traffic in plain http over your internal private subnet to the app server. And your are in a five eyes country where your intelligence services took it on themselves to follow the nsa or fbis instructions and plug a network device into those private subnets of all the big service providers inside their datacenters that is configured in something like a promiscuous way so it receives all the packets for any device on the network. Then those packets somehow end up in a big nsa datalake.. or something along those lines
That's a fancy of way of saying "not using HTTPS" which may be what average incompetent shops were doing, but isn't using HTTP everywhere which is the security standard.
The real problem is just that patents are way too long for software. Long patents make sense for things in a slow changing industry. If it takes 10 years in pharma for research and another 5 years to pass trials, then 20 years of protection seems reasonable to recoup the investment. But for software, I'd argue that most patents are granted on things that are pretty obvious, and in many cases, I'd suspect probably writing up the patent takes longer than actually coming up with the idea and implementation. Certainly, if an engineer is churning out multiple patents a year, then I don't think it's likely that they have enough value to society to warrant issuing a patent for.
Let's not even forget the original motivation for patents, which was to increase knowledge sharing so that companies didn't keep their technology secret, and conferring an advantage on companies who chose to share their methods for others to copy and build upon. That's clearly a totally different outcome to when patent trolls are suing people for accidentally infringing a patent they didn't even know existed.
- measuring how well a patent office works by how many patents they grant (their purpose is to reject bad patents, it's 100% the opposite of the metrics often used)
- a standard where patents are often written with the most obtuse complex language as multi layered onions, instead of clear straight forward language
- no relevant consequences for most companies systematically deceiving the patent office about what they actually try to patent using artificial complex language, systematically fail to do the research into prior art and "happen" to overlook all prior art all the time
- patents require a certain level of innovation _in the aspects they patent_, but in practice patent offices rarely do enforce this. A solution anyone can trivially find if they run into similar "normal" problems isn't innovation. The abstract concept of applying a concept from IRL onto games (or similar) isn't innovation. A minor tweak(1) or trivial re-combinations of existing patents isn't innovation either. etc. etc.
- the patent office tends to be severely under-stocked, especially in context of AI making it easier to mass generate nonsense patents and non-clear-straight-forward language being the norm
- allowing people to not (relevantly) use their patent and still sue others for using it (which is directly harming innovation and really shouldn't be allowed)
- allowing absurd prices for usage permissions of patents (outside of certain especially fundamental/core patents, forgot how they are called), everyone should be able to buy _any_ patents usage right for a _reasonable_ price. Patents are for making sure companies doing innovation can re-coupe their investments, not for preventing marked competition and enforcing quasi-monopolies
(1): Like a minor tweak which doesn't require tons of research, don't make a fundamental difference etc. Like think
99% of modern software is complete shit, deserves no "my idea" protection, and will definitely not get any better with a higher barrier to competition. The real innovation these days is to make software that is usable, performant, and actually fucking works - and barely any company has the motivation and technical capability to achieve that. And when they do, as rare as that is, that simply cannot be copied.
I am surprised this hasn't gotten more attention. I feel like HN used to love nothing more than complaining about patent trolls. Anyway, this article suggestions an action through regulation.gov which, based on the content of the page, seemed worth doing to me.
The current internet zeitgeist is ironically anti-tech and pro AI doomer communism.
Patent trolls hurt tech so thats now a good thing on new HN (now filled with normies like most tech companies these days). The enemy of my enemy is my friend sort of thing.
Nobody has any real values or beliefs anymore. We’re all just swimming in vibes.
AI has rather superceded intellectual property, since it's apparently fine to distil a derived work of everything on the planet if you have enough investor money.
Remember when the FCC had one of these for Internet independence and it got completely astroturfed? Sadly, I can’t be bothered to add a comment there because I assume the site will be overwhelmed by posts for the proposed laws by very concerned homemakers from all over America.
I believe that by now patents have transformed from a tool to protect little guy and encourage research and creativity to a dick wielded by big corps to stall the rest of the world.
If it was up to me I would probably eliminate patent enforcements against small entities completely. If they grow over some certain size then sure, let 2 big gorillas fight each other
There is a fairly vocal contingent of patent people on LinkedIn swearing this is good for the solo guy, the small independent inventor. But yes, it does feel like it will be trolls that are in favor -- maybe some pharma wants this.
Anything "good for trolls" is good for the "small guy" because anything that's not "good for trolls" is good for the "big guy" and anything good for the "big guy" is not good for the "small guy"
Except patent trolls, do not strictly go after big guys. In fact, quite the opposite. They first go after little guys who cannot afford to defend themselves, and - after racking up a series of victories - only then do they go after the big guys. Patent trolls are bad for everyone.
People who are paying for it to happen ... which is the standard mode of operation for this administration. This is just one of many such disasters they are generating.
So... If you were a patent troll, you would get a friendly party to file a complaint that you know you will win, then nobody will ever be able to challenge your patent again?
honestly i think the whole patent framework is quite literally ready for the dumpster. the spirit of a patent is quite worthy, but the execution over the years has been pretty piss poor and I think the bad is almost out weighing the good; perhaps we only heard about the bad bits. Surely readers of hacker news can chime in good parts of patent? living off fruits of of your knowledge labour and earning that sweet sweet patent licencing fees into the sunset days of leisure?
Most small inventors/innovators don’t benefit. In recent times it’s mostly been good for large companies who can afford to hoard patent portfolios, for defense against other large companies and to crush potential upstarts. Everyone complaining about the smartphone duopoly should look here for a big reason why there are no meaningful competitors.
From the perspective of policy makers, the biggest advantage of the modern patent system was to give US companies a leg up over foreign competitors, as we had the largest patent portfolios, better R&D, and legal frameworks we could use to our advantage. But this no longer works, as our biggest competitor understandably decided this wasn’t a fair bargain and has ignored IP rules to their own benefit. (Why nobody saw this coming is a mystery.) IMHO most patents now harm the economy more than they help.
I have been one of the small inventors who wrote patents and ultimately sold them to a company that makes most of its money suing over patents.
Patents are a form of business insurance you can get on expensive R&D work. When you go into the market to sell your products, your marketing material and the function of your product naturally leaks how it works. Motivated competitors can then reverse-engineer what you did or otherwise figure out how to enter the market that you revealed was valuable. If they do it by actually out-innovating you, your patents don't really protect you, but if they just take what you're doing, the patent is there so you can claim the fruits of your labor regardless. In general, you cash in on this insurance contract by either contracting with lawyers to sue the infringers (usually on contingency or with litigation financing to remove the cash cost) or by selling your patent portfolio to someone who will sue the infringers.
In return for this insurance contract, you have to publicly disclose the details of your inventions in a way that a motivated party can read and understand (it's patentese, not English, but you can decipher it if you know the language). It also frees you up to publish internal details through other fora like scientific journals because this disclosure becomes pure upside (raising your company's reputation) rather than making you balance that upside against the downside of revealing information. Google is a good example of a firm that does a lot of balancing there: they publish a lot of their old, antiquated work while keeping the new stuff secret because it's mostly software and software is mostly unpatentable. In electrical engineering, small companies are much more likely to publish a lot more details on their newest devices because their devices are usually patented.
On HN, people mostly think about software patents. Many of these are stupid patents, and almost all of them have been invalidated through a decision called Alice Corp. vs CLS Bank. The digital shopping cart is one of these patents that Alice invalidated. By value, most patent litigation is about drugs, and after that you have things like computer hardware. The patent system really isn't for the HN crowd, and it really doesn't make sense for these software patents to be a thing - there's usually no expensive R&D to insure, and you have to write your patent before finding out if you have PMF.
> If they do it by actually out-innovating you, your patents don't really protect you, but if they just take what you're doing, the patent is there so you can claim the fruits of your labor regardless.
The trouble is there are ways to nominally do the first one without really doing anybody any good.
You invent a way to improve efficiency by 10 points, they need to do the same to be competitive, so they come up with a different, incompatible way to do the same thing. Now your product isn't any better than theirs so you can't charge higher prices or increase your market share any more than you could without the patent. But now we've collectively had to pay to invent the wheel twice in exchange for no benefit.
Worse, suppose that the different ways of improving the product are compatible with each other. So now your product is 10 points better than what's in the public domain, but Megacorp's product is 20 points better because they invented two things. If you could combine all of them together it would be 30 points better and give you an advantage over them, but you can't use their patents. And you also can't profit from selling your product yourself, because 10 is less than 20 so everybody wants theirs instead of yours. Meanwhile they don't really need your patent for the same reason since they're going to get the customers either way, so they have you over a barrel in negotiations.
Then they get to underpay to buy your patent because they don't actually need it, but selling it is your only option to get anything out of it. Which in turn makes their product 30 points better than what's in the public domain and makes it even worse for the next little guy, who now can't compete even if they made a contribution worth 25 points.
This is critically important and I filed a comment on behalf of my 250 full time employees at Coalition Technologies. We have been harassed by patent trolls and it is a nightmare.
Well, that's what happen when you apply patents to software.
There are large corporations (IBM, Qualcomm, Nokia, etc...) lobbying Congress and the Senate to restore software patents via the PERA bill, while the lobbying from small and medium software companies is very low.
Am I crazy or was there a strategy reason that inter partes review at USPTO was disfavored over trial? Like the legal standards are easier for the patentholder at USPTO or something like that?
It's not really about cost for most people who really like the IPR. It's a way to get a second chance to invalidate a patent and a way to drag out litigation. The cost of an IPR is actually not that much less than the cost of invalidation during a trial (although it saves you on other discovery because you can often stay the trial during your IPR), but it's a second invalidation path you can take at the same time.
The reality is that you get multiple bites at the apple. You challenge at trial and in an IPR. Lose both, challenge with an EPR and appeal the trial. IPRs were initially created to simplify trial and cost, but once the estoppel provisions were determined not to have much teeth, it just became something you did because there was no downside.
USPTO doesn't really have the budget or even often the expertise/depth.
> Like the legal standards are easier for the patentholder at USPTO or something like that?
It is much easier to get a patent than it is to use that patent successfully in legal proceedings. The bar that you have to clear to get it through the USPTO has never been particularly high.
So this is kinda, if you squint at it a little, just writing down what the status quo already is.
(As sibling mentions - if it did work, of course it's way cheaper to nip it in the bud earlier. You just can't really guarantee that you'll get enough expert eyes to get a reasonable decision out of the USPTO)
I would have to ask more to be able to explain more, but that's how things have been explained to me growing up.
> USPTO doesn't really have the budget or even often the expertise/depth.
Oh yeah, there are so many patents with obvious prior art, or that are so much "the obvious way to do it" (to anyone with expertise in the field) that they're inherently unpatentable, but which get through the US Patent and Trademark Office because the reviewers have no experience in software development, so they get fooled by language designed to conceal what the patent is really about.
I still remember a case from the early 2000's or perhaps late 1990's, which I can't dig up now since I don't remember enough keywords to get a search engine to find it for me. So no link, sorry, you'll have to rely on my could-be-missing-a-detail memory. But I recall reading a patent and realizing that under the complex language, it was essentially patenting scrollbars, which at that point had been around for years. But to someone who didn't understand programming terminology, they might have thought this was a novel idea, rather than a snowjob designed to hide the fact that prior art on this patent submission had existed for over a decade, making the patent submission invalid on its face.
There have been other patents which, when I read them, I realized were patenting something that had lots of prior art, but I don't remember them. Maybe someone has more examples. But that patent that boiled down to "clicking a mouse on a designated area to scroll a page" stuck in my mind for years. (At least two decades, in fact).
> Oh yeah, there are so many patents with obvious prior art, or that are so much "the obvious way to do it" (to anyone with expertise in the field) that they're inherently unpatentable, but which get through the US Patent and Trademark Office because the reviewers have no experience in software development, so they get fooled by language designed to conceal what the patent is really about.
Yea that's exactly what I mean
One solution would potentially be to increase the USPTO budget by a lot. But... nobody does that I guess. So here we are.
If you want the patent holders to lose, NPEs or otherwise, then you want to fight through litigation and not the incredibly high bar set by the IPR. IPRs are expensive, time consuming and difficult. I've mainly seen them used strategically to encourage the court to grant a stay. Continuing litigation by focusing on invalidity contentions in response to infringement contentions is a better path forward.
A successful IPR will most likely need multiple forms of prior art. Each prior art must cover every independent and dependent claim of the patent in question, either through anticipation or combined obviousness.
Typical infringement contentions will not cover every claim and are therefore easier to defend.
> Patents are a pest. They're just another mechanism to pump money from below to above.
Patents are a way to make sure inventors are getting compensated for their R&D work and risk.
I do agree with your observation though - IMHO, the "exclusivity" period of a patent should last five years, and for the 15 years after that, patent holders should be mandated to license out their patent at reasonable pricing.
IPR's are generally used by Big Tech companies and I have no idea how EFF's position could be construed as in the interest of the general public at all.
You can thank them properly by submitting a comment on this matter and add your voice to the chorus so the proposed ruling gets shoved right back into the orifice it was pulled from.
After you click the "SUBMIT A PUBLIC COMMENT" button (on the page you linked), you then see a message that says, "Comments are due 12/02/2025 at 11:59 pm EST."
I think a better UI design would be to show that info before you press the button, but my main point is that they are apparently still accepting comments.
Could someone make an LLM that is only trained up to the day before a patent was filed, then ask it to solve the problem at hand.
Hopefully it would come up with the patented idea and thus 'prove' it is obvious and thus not able to be patented. Then you could make different vintage LLMs and basically spam them at trolls to invalidate the patents.
Um, the public comment form lists first and last name as required fields (with address and phone number optional), then at the bottom includes this warning:
"Do not submit personally identifiable information through this form."
The form gives the option to identify as an individual, an organization, or anonymous, and below the selections gives this note: "Note: If you choose to identify as Anonymous, the option to enter your email address for submission confirmation is not available."
Before I discovered HN (of which I'm on daily), I was a frequent reader of Groklaw[0]- a site primarily devoted to covering the fragile intersection of the technology sector and legal system; where the two are often at odds with one another. We're more than a decade beyond it's voluntary closure after the Snowden revelations and it's left a large void on substantive coverage of these issues. The site was the blog of an anonymous tech reporter named Pamela Jones that did detailed deep-dives into the parties & issues involved in high-profile lawsuits between tech companies, like Apple vs. Samsung on the issue of design patents for rounded corners, over what have often been patents containing broad language that resulted in hindrances to innovation ranging from being unwilling to license to extortion of revenue streams for entire product lines. Part of why I find the technology industry to be continually interesting is its desire to innovate instead of litigate- there needs to be a check on bad faith actors whose goal is capture of a niche through regulatory means instead of fair competition; else we get these cases relegated to the infamous eastern district of Texas which has historically played favor towards non-practicing patent trolls. I'll be submitting my comment and suggest others do the same.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groklaw
Oh dear. Its digital tombstone has been relegated to be adware for crypto gambling.
Now that I have seen groklaw.net/about-us page, I have seen it all.
Here is the new Groklaw mission statement:
Our Mission
Our mission is simple: to guide you toward safe, rewarding, and responsible crypto gambling experiences. We believe in transparency, player protection, and giving you the tools to make informed choices — whether you want massive Bitcoin bonuses, ultra-fast withdrawals, or niche altcoin gaming.
I don't remember the exact name for this marketing strategy, but that's how some of the black- and grey hat marketers made millions upon millions the past decades.
One marketer I know made his fortune (as in tens of millions) buying up dead sites, often for dissolved companies / organizations / etc., kept the design somewhat relevant to said entities, but filled the site with ads and referral links to gambling sites / credit cards / etc.
And as seen with Groklaw, it still works. Whenever I see some old semi-popular website call it quits, it just takes a couple of months until it becomes a landing or referral page for something crypto.
I think this tell you more than you need to know about the state of affairs in tech.
Every website eventually becomes a funnel for ad-based shadow companies.
---innovate instead of litigate. Agreed, but there has to be a balance. In some cases, it could also be looked at as favoring marketers over innovators. On the copyright side, you could also argue about why ChatGPT should have to be slowed down by these copyright trolls (i.e. authors) who want to extract funds from them. Just let them innovate!
In Texas, trolls are bigger.
why would Snowden reveals cause it to close?
"everything is so bad it's hopeless" or smth?
> On August 20, 2013, a final article appeared on Groklaw, explaining that due to pervasive government monitoring of the Internet, there could no longer be an expectation of the sort of privacy online that was necessary to collaborate on sensitive topics. Citing the closure of Lavabit earlier that month, Jones wrote "I can't do Groklaw without your input.... and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate." and "What I do know is it's not possible to be fully human if you are being surveilled 24/7... I hope that makes it clear why I can't continue. There is now no shield from forced exposure."
Just on the pervasive passive monitoring aspect, I think an under-discussed aspect of the time frame covered in the material of Snowden's leaks is that sites/services by and large wasn't using encrypted protocols (HTTPS).
So much could be intercepted back then because of this. It wasn't until 2010 that various large services—including Yahoo Mail and Facebook—got a kick in their ass by a whitehat browser plugin that allowed anyone on the same network to trivially hijack session cookies of others, stimulating an adoption of HTTPS[1] during 2011-2012.
By the time the Snowden leaks occurred in 2013 the trend was heading toward encrypted-by-default and governments were having to adapt.
[1] https://threatpost.com/facebook-kills-firesheep-new-secure-b...
I thought these “lawful intercept” organisations had their taps inside the data centers after https tsl to the user had already been terminated. And so the infamous ssl removed here slide from prism.
> I thought these “lawful intercept” organisations had their taps inside the data centers after https tsl to the user had already been terminated.
How would that actually work?
TLS runs on the client and the server. There's no "TLS magic box" in between.
https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/security-controls/t...
Like let’s say you have a proxy server like Nginx on a server with a public facing ip address and then it also has access to a private subnet where your application servers are running. A visitor to your website’s browser make a secure https connection the nginx server where https would be terminated and then it would proxy traffic in plain http over your internal private subnet to the app server. And your are in a five eyes country where your intelligence services took it on themselves to follow the nsa or fbis instructions and plug a network device into those private subnets of all the big service providers inside their datacenters that is configured in something like a promiscuous way so it receives all the packets for any device on the network. Then those packets somehow end up in a big nsa datalake.. or something along those lines
That's a fancy of way of saying "not using HTTPS" which may be what average incompetent shops were doing, but isn't using HTTP everywhere which is the security standard.
But the private subnet does not leave your server.
For large sites, the private subnet is an actual network, with dozens or potentially hundreds of machines on it.
(Or was, back then. These days you can probably collapse all of that into a single medium-sized epyc or something.)
> (Or was, back then. These days you can probably collapse all of that into a single medium-sized epyc or something.)
I know where there are Sun V880s still running Oracle databases in a biggish cluster.
Their processor power, memory capacity, and storage capacity are exactly equivalent to a Raspberry Pi 4 with a biggish SD card.
We have come a long way.
> TLS runs on the client and the server. There's no "TLS magic box" in between.
If there was it'd be called Cloudflare :)
Too soon :-D
The real problem is just that patents are way too long for software. Long patents make sense for things in a slow changing industry. If it takes 10 years in pharma for research and another 5 years to pass trials, then 20 years of protection seems reasonable to recoup the investment. But for software, I'd argue that most patents are granted on things that are pretty obvious, and in many cases, I'd suspect probably writing up the patent takes longer than actually coming up with the idea and implementation. Certainly, if an engineer is churning out multiple patents a year, then I don't think it's likely that they have enough value to society to warrant issuing a patent for.
Let's not even forget the original motivation for patents, which was to increase knowledge sharing so that companies didn't keep their technology secret, and conferring an advantage on companies who chose to share their methods for others to copy and build upon. That's clearly a totally different outcome to when patent trolls are suing people for accidentally infringing a patent they didn't even know existed.
another problem is
- measuring how well a patent office works by how many patents they grant (their purpose is to reject bad patents, it's 100% the opposite of the metrics often used)
- a standard where patents are often written with the most obtuse complex language as multi layered onions, instead of clear straight forward language
- no relevant consequences for most companies systematically deceiving the patent office about what they actually try to patent using artificial complex language, systematically fail to do the research into prior art and "happen" to overlook all prior art all the time
- patents require a certain level of innovation _in the aspects they patent_, but in practice patent offices rarely do enforce this. A solution anyone can trivially find if they run into similar "normal" problems isn't innovation. The abstract concept of applying a concept from IRL onto games (or similar) isn't innovation. A minor tweak(1) or trivial re-combinations of existing patents isn't innovation either. etc. etc.
- the patent office tends to be severely under-stocked, especially in context of AI making it easier to mass generate nonsense patents and non-clear-straight-forward language being the norm
- allowing people to not (relevantly) use their patent and still sue others for using it (which is directly harming innovation and really shouldn't be allowed)
- allowing absurd prices for usage permissions of patents (outside of certain especially fundamental/core patents, forgot how they are called), everyone should be able to buy _any_ patents usage right for a _reasonable_ price. Patents are for making sure companies doing innovation can re-coupe their investments, not for preventing marked competition and enforcing quasi-monopolies
(1): Like a minor tweak which doesn't require tons of research, don't make a fundamental difference etc. Like think
Software patents shouldn't be a thing, period.
99% of modern software is complete shit, deserves no "my idea" protection, and will definitely not get any better with a higher barrier to competition. The real innovation these days is to make software that is usable, performant, and actually fucking works - and barely any company has the motivation and technical capability to achieve that. And when they do, as rare as that is, that simply cannot be copied.
I am surprised this hasn't gotten more attention. I feel like HN used to love nothing more than complaining about patent trolls. Anyway, this article suggestions an action through regulation.gov which, based on the content of the page, seemed worth doing to me.
Fast and easy to take action on that page.
Submitted. We’re still here!
The current internet zeitgeist is ironically anti-tech and pro AI doomer communism.
Patent trolls hurt tech so thats now a good thing on new HN (now filled with normies like most tech companies these days). The enemy of my enemy is my friend sort of thing.
Nobody has any real values or beliefs anymore. We’re all just swimming in vibes.
"Nobody has any real values or beliefs anymore."
Have you heard of the concept called projection?
Cultural wars are strong as ever
"I feel like HN used to love nothing more than complaining about patent trolls."
Lamenting that everything is about AI, seems to be the thing of today.
AI has rather superceded intellectual property, since it's apparently fine to distil a derived work of everything on the planet if you have enough investor money.
Meta treatment vs aaron swartz made this crystal clear.
I submitted a comment on Regulation.gov, and if any of you actually give a shit about tech, I suggest you do it too.
Remember when the FCC had one of these for Internet independence and it got completely astroturfed? Sadly, I can’t be bothered to add a comment there because I assume the site will be overwhelmed by posts for the proposed laws by very concerned homemakers from all over America.
regulations.gov
Right, can't fix a typo this late. HN really needs to extend that window a bit.
I believe that by now patents have transformed from a tool to protect little guy and encourage research and creativity to a dick wielded by big corps to stall the rest of the world.
If it was up to me I would probably eliminate patent enforcements against small entities completely. If they grow over some certain size then sure, let 2 big gorillas fight each other
I guess the fear is always then we suddenly would have a lot of little guy conjured up from thin air
I think it would be better to abolish patents entirely, but maybe that could potentially be another alternative way.
Who wants this? Is it just patent troll regulatory capture?
There is a fairly vocal contingent of patent people on LinkedIn swearing this is good for the solo guy, the small independent inventor. But yes, it does feel like it will be trolls that are in favor -- maybe some pharma wants this.
Anything "good for trolls" is good for the "small guy" because anything that's not "good for trolls" is good for the "big guy" and anything good for the "big guy" is not good for the "small guy"
Except patent trolls, do not strictly go after big guys. In fact, quite the opposite. They first go after little guys who cannot afford to defend themselves, and - after racking up a series of victories - only then do they go after the big guys. Patent trolls are bad for everyone.
I did not state that "patent trolls" "strictly" go after "big guys"
People who are paying for it to happen ... which is the standard mode of operation for this administration. This is just one of many such disasters they are generating.
All patent aggressors I'd guess, especially with a big pile of patents they weaponize.
So... If you were a patent troll, you would get a friendly party to file a complaint that you know you will win, then nobody will ever be able to challenge your patent again?
No
And this just after the USPTO gained some good karma for re-examining a bad patent from Nintendo in the Palworld vs Pokemon feud:
https://www.sportskeeda.com/mmo/news-nintendo-vs-palworld-po...
honestly i think the whole patent framework is quite literally ready for the dumpster. the spirit of a patent is quite worthy, but the execution over the years has been pretty piss poor and I think the bad is almost out weighing the good; perhaps we only heard about the bad bits. Surely readers of hacker news can chime in good parts of patent? living off fruits of of your knowledge labour and earning that sweet sweet patent licencing fees into the sunset days of leisure?
Most small inventors/innovators don’t benefit. In recent times it’s mostly been good for large companies who can afford to hoard patent portfolios, for defense against other large companies and to crush potential upstarts. Everyone complaining about the smartphone duopoly should look here for a big reason why there are no meaningful competitors.
From the perspective of policy makers, the biggest advantage of the modern patent system was to give US companies a leg up over foreign competitors, as we had the largest patent portfolios, better R&D, and legal frameworks we could use to our advantage. But this no longer works, as our biggest competitor understandably decided this wasn’t a fair bargain and has ignored IP rules to their own benefit. (Why nobody saw this coming is a mystery.) IMHO most patents now harm the economy more than they help.
I have been one of the small inventors who wrote patents and ultimately sold them to a company that makes most of its money suing over patents.
Patents are a form of business insurance you can get on expensive R&D work. When you go into the market to sell your products, your marketing material and the function of your product naturally leaks how it works. Motivated competitors can then reverse-engineer what you did or otherwise figure out how to enter the market that you revealed was valuable. If they do it by actually out-innovating you, your patents don't really protect you, but if they just take what you're doing, the patent is there so you can claim the fruits of your labor regardless. In general, you cash in on this insurance contract by either contracting with lawyers to sue the infringers (usually on contingency or with litigation financing to remove the cash cost) or by selling your patent portfolio to someone who will sue the infringers.
In return for this insurance contract, you have to publicly disclose the details of your inventions in a way that a motivated party can read and understand (it's patentese, not English, but you can decipher it if you know the language). It also frees you up to publish internal details through other fora like scientific journals because this disclosure becomes pure upside (raising your company's reputation) rather than making you balance that upside against the downside of revealing information. Google is a good example of a firm that does a lot of balancing there: they publish a lot of their old, antiquated work while keeping the new stuff secret because it's mostly software and software is mostly unpatentable. In electrical engineering, small companies are much more likely to publish a lot more details on their newest devices because their devices are usually patented.
On HN, people mostly think about software patents. Many of these are stupid patents, and almost all of them have been invalidated through a decision called Alice Corp. vs CLS Bank. The digital shopping cart is one of these patents that Alice invalidated. By value, most patent litigation is about drugs, and after that you have things like computer hardware. The patent system really isn't for the HN crowd, and it really doesn't make sense for these software patents to be a thing - there's usually no expensive R&D to insure, and you have to write your patent before finding out if you have PMF.
> If they do it by actually out-innovating you, your patents don't really protect you, but if they just take what you're doing, the patent is there so you can claim the fruits of your labor regardless.
The trouble is there are ways to nominally do the first one without really doing anybody any good.
You invent a way to improve efficiency by 10 points, they need to do the same to be competitive, so they come up with a different, incompatible way to do the same thing. Now your product isn't any better than theirs so you can't charge higher prices or increase your market share any more than you could without the patent. But now we've collectively had to pay to invent the wheel twice in exchange for no benefit.
Worse, suppose that the different ways of improving the product are compatible with each other. So now your product is 10 points better than what's in the public domain, but Megacorp's product is 20 points better because they invented two things. If you could combine all of them together it would be 30 points better and give you an advantage over them, but you can't use their patents. And you also can't profit from selling your product yourself, because 10 is less than 20 so everybody wants theirs instead of yours. Meanwhile they don't really need your patent for the same reason since they're going to get the customers either way, so they have you over a barrel in negotiations.
Then they get to underpay to buy your patent because they don't actually need it, but selling it is your only option to get anything out of it. Which in turn makes their product 30 points better than what's in the public domain and makes it even worse for the next little guy, who now can't compete even if they made a contribution worth 25 points.
They could have just licensed the technology!
Netflix could license all their content to Disney etc. and vice versa so that all the streaming services have all the content, but they don't.
So infringe and pay the reasonable license fee...
This is critically important and I filed a comment on behalf of my 250 full time employees at Coalition Technologies. We have been harassed by patent trolls and it is a nightmare.
Well, that's what happen when you apply patents to software.
There are large corporations (IBM, Qualcomm, Nokia, etc...) lobbying Congress and the Senate to restore software patents via the PERA bill, while the lobbying from small and medium software companies is very low.
Am I crazy or was there a strategy reason that inter partes review at USPTO was disfavored over trial? Like the legal standards are easier for the patentholder at USPTO or something like that?
Cost -- it is way cheaper to use IPR and avoid discovery associated with the other factors that happen at trial. Speed, the PTO is generally faster.
It's not really about cost for most people who really like the IPR. It's a way to get a second chance to invalidate a patent and a way to drag out litigation. The cost of an IPR is actually not that much less than the cost of invalidation during a trial (although it saves you on other discovery because you can often stay the trial during your IPR), but it's a second invalidation path you can take at the same time.
The reality is that you get multiple bites at the apple. You challenge at trial and in an IPR. Lose both, challenge with an EPR and appeal the trial. IPRs were initially created to simplify trial and cost, but once the estoppel provisions were determined not to have much teeth, it just became something you did because there was no downside.
USPTO doesn't really have the budget or even often the expertise/depth.
> Like the legal standards are easier for the patentholder at USPTO or something like that?
It is much easier to get a patent than it is to use that patent successfully in legal proceedings. The bar that you have to clear to get it through the USPTO has never been particularly high.
So this is kinda, if you squint at it a little, just writing down what the status quo already is.
(As sibling mentions - if it did work, of course it's way cheaper to nip it in the bud earlier. You just can't really guarantee that you'll get enough expert eyes to get a reasonable decision out of the USPTO)
I would have to ask more to be able to explain more, but that's how things have been explained to me growing up.
> USPTO doesn't really have the budget or even often the expertise/depth.
Oh yeah, there are so many patents with obvious prior art, or that are so much "the obvious way to do it" (to anyone with expertise in the field) that they're inherently unpatentable, but which get through the US Patent and Trademark Office because the reviewers have no experience in software development, so they get fooled by language designed to conceal what the patent is really about.
I still remember a case from the early 2000's or perhaps late 1990's, which I can't dig up now since I don't remember enough keywords to get a search engine to find it for me. So no link, sorry, you'll have to rely on my could-be-missing-a-detail memory. But I recall reading a patent and realizing that under the complex language, it was essentially patenting scrollbars, which at that point had been around for years. But to someone who didn't understand programming terminology, they might have thought this was a novel idea, rather than a snowjob designed to hide the fact that prior art on this patent submission had existed for over a decade, making the patent submission invalid on its face.
There have been other patents which, when I read them, I realized were patenting something that had lots of prior art, but I don't remember them. Maybe someone has more examples. But that patent that boiled down to "clicking a mouse on a designated area to scroll a page" stuck in my mind for years. (At least two decades, in fact).
> Oh yeah, there are so many patents with obvious prior art, or that are so much "the obvious way to do it" (to anyone with expertise in the field) that they're inherently unpatentable, but which get through the US Patent and Trademark Office because the reviewers have no experience in software development, so they get fooled by language designed to conceal what the patent is really about.
Yea that's exactly what I mean
One solution would potentially be to increase the USPTO budget by a lot. But... nobody does that I guess. So here we are.
Or we could stop giving patents for software, that would probably dramatically reduce the number of applications USPTO has to review.
And if we reduced the length of patent validity, then invalid patenta would expire sooner and wouldn't be quite as much of an issue.
I would guess USPTO (or at least some people at it) probably wants it, because they would rather not deal with these reviews.
If you want the patent holders to lose, NPEs or otherwise, then you want to fight through litigation and not the incredibly high bar set by the IPR. IPRs are expensive, time consuming and difficult. I've mainly seen them used strategically to encourage the court to grant a stay. Continuing litigation by focusing on invalidity contentions in response to infringement contentions is a better path forward.
A successful IPR will most likely need multiple forms of prior art. Each prior art must cover every independent and dependent claim of the patent in question, either through anticipation or combined obviousness.
Typical infringement contentions will not cover every claim and are therefore easier to defend.
Did you notice that LFP batteries became more prevalent and much cheaper recently? That's because some key patents expired.
The same thing happened with 3D printing a while ago. It only took off after the patents expired.
Patents are a pest. They're just another mechanism to pump money from below to above.
> Patents are a pest. They're just another mechanism to pump money from below to above.
Patents are a way to make sure inventors are getting compensated for their R&D work and risk.
I do agree with your observation though - IMHO, the "exclusivity" period of a patent should last five years, and for the 15 years after that, patent holders should be mandated to license out their patent at reasonable pricing.
Should the way they get compensated not be by creating a useful output with said development?
And everyone has access to the capital to do so? Or the business acumen?
IPR's are generally used by Big Tech companies and I have no idea how EFF's position could be construed as in the interest of the general public at all.
Thank you EFF.
You can thank them properly by submitting a comment on this matter and add your voice to the chorus so the proposed ruling gets shoved right back into the orifice it was pulled from.
I submitted a comment.
Ah, more IP sclerosis. Great.
The deadline for comments was November 17.
It’s December 2 as explained in the article and the page on regulations.gov. Where do you see Nov 17?
Via the link in the article to: Revision to Rules of Practice Before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/10/17/2025-19...
It would be nice to have some confirmation, but I'm assuming there was an extension.
Given that EFF and the comment form at regulations.gov cite Dec 2nd.
In any case, I'm filing my comment now, and encouraging others to do so as well.
Anyone who's ever been through any kind of patent process should understand just how egregious this is...
After you click the "SUBMIT A PUBLIC COMMENT" button (on the page you linked), you then see a message that says, "Comments are due 12/02/2025 at 11:59 pm EST."
I think a better UI design would be to show that info before you press the button, but my main point is that they are apparently still accepting comments.
There was an extension. I don't have link handy, but an extra 15 days were provided.
As of now the web page indicates "Comment Period Ends: 12 Days"
Could someone make an LLM that is only trained up to the day before a patent was filed, then ask it to solve the problem at hand.
Hopefully it would come up with the patented idea and thus 'prove' it is obvious and thus not able to be patented. Then you could make different vintage LLMs and basically spam them at trolls to invalidate the patents.
...just a thought from a lurker
Um, the public comment form lists first and last name as required fields (with address and phone number optional), then at the bottom includes this warning:
"Do not submit personally identifiable information through this form."
The form gives the option to identify as an individual, an organization, or anonymous, and below the selections gives this note: "Note: If you choose to identify as Anonymous, the option to enter your email address for submission confirmation is not available."
The form will accept "Anonymous" for first, last. It would be nice if it actually said this...
Um, the point is to not associate personal information with your name, which would make that information "personally identifiable".