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IBM Seeking 'Patent-Protection-Racket' Patent
theodp writes "Wikipedia defines a protection racket as an extortion scheme whereby a powerful non-governmental organization coerces businesses to pay protection money which allegedly serves to purchase the organization's 'protection' services against various external threats. Compare this to IBM's just-published patent application for 'Extracting Value from a Portfolio of Assets', which describes a process by which 'very large corporations' impress upon smaller businesses that paying for 'the protection of a large defensive patent portfolio' would be 'a prudent business decision' for them to make, 'just like purchasing a fire insurance policy.' Sounds like Fat Tony's been to Law School, eh? Time for IBM to put-their-money-where-their-patent-reform-mouth-is and deep-six this business method patent claim!"
I don't suppose anyone has considered that they might use said patent to sue trolls out of existence. Which would be neat, and altogether too ironic.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
If IBM receives the patent, then it can disallow others from participating in the practice. This patent alone could be a jury-rigged bit of patent reform, for this particular abuse. (Assuming IBM doesn't go crazy and utilize the patent itself.)
I'd tend to think this is more their purpose, than to become the master bully.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Why do I see the potential justification of this being similar to Amazon's justification of patenting 1-click ordering?
It may also be used as the example of just how screwed up the patent system has become. If any company has to have this patent, I can think of much worse companies than IBM to have this one granted.
I'm sorry, but this is beautiful. For IBM to patent the process of patent abuse raises legal sarcasm to a fine art form. This is a legal hack of the first order.
;)
Whether it ought to be allowed or not is a different question, but it still brings tears to my eyes.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
At first, I thought this was a joke from The Onion, but holy guano, Batman! It's for real!
I'm not particularly upset, though. I.B.M. already is known to systematically exploit their huge patent portfolio, as would be expected by their shareholders, but I've not heard of them doing so, recently at least, in an offensive manner. I.B.M. has been trying hard, for business reasons, to be a "good citizen". If anyone has to have such a patent, best that it be them. If nothing else, it'll put a bit of a damper on the true patent trolls.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
This might be a great thing for small software companies. At the moment, they can't possibly afford defensive patent portfolios. This makes them extremely vulnerable to malicious suits from big companies that want to squash them.
Being able to buy a slice of protection from IBM would eliminate one of the biggest risks that small developers face. Of course, small companies can't pay millions of dollars in legal fees. IBM will have to offer to defend their clients in court in order to make this work.
To er is human.
If the patent system is really as screwed up as all that, will the prior art in this case matter? Because as far as I can tell, patent trolls have existed since nearly the very beginning of the system.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
Possibly karma whoring, but I haven't heard the phrase deep six in a while and wondered where it came from.
That bastion of knowledge, The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, says this:
This phrase is derived from the noun "deep six," meaning burial at sea and referring to the depth of water necessary for such a burial. The term was later used as slang for a grave (customarily six feet underground) and, by extension, as a verb meaning "to kill."
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Then let the fun begin.
...What else could it really be?
How many joke have been writing about patenting the patent process?
Well looks like a very large patent portfoilo company has money to toss at such a joke..
Do realize ladies and gentlemen this is a bold and rather cavalier move on behalf of IBM. It's more tongue in cheek really, laughing at patent trolls and a majority of large corporations long bereft of the spirit of true competition.
It a rather elegant, subtle, and expensive way of inviting said patent trolls to "kiss my hairy ass". hehe
go go IBM
Hope is the currency of fools
1. A method for extracting value from a portfolio of assets, comprising:granting a privilege to a second party by a first party at time t1 to permit the second party to exercise the privilege upon the occurrence of a predetermined event occurring at time t2 where t2>t1, and wherein the exercise comprises obtaining an interest in one or more assets residing in a dynamic pool of assets comprised of assets from the portfolio of assets at time t2, wherein zero or more assets are in the dynamic pool at time t1 and said zero or more assets are not in the dynamic pool at time t2.
So a company has a pool of assets. It gives somebody else a right to in the future, after some event has occurred, gain one or more of those assets. Some of the assets may have left the pool by the time they do this. Basically, we're talking about the standard financial instrument known as an "option", but over any of a pool of assets rather over a specific asset.
2. The method of claim 1, wherein the privilege is defined in a floating privilege agreement between the first and second parties, the floating privilege agreement having a term and specifying the predetermined event and the type of interest to be conveyed to the second party upon execution of the privilege.
The right can be time limited, and constrained to a certain kind of selection of assets.
3. The method of claim 2, wherein a number of assets in which the second party receives an interest is limited based on the floating privilege agreement.
The selection can be the number of assets acquired.
4. The method of claim 2, wherein the assets are intellectual property assets.
5. The method of claim 4, wherein the intellectual property assets are patents.
6. The method of claim 4, wherein the intellectual property assets are copyrights.
7. The method of claim 4, wherein the intellectual property assets are trade secrets.
Obvious.
8. The method of claim 2, wherein the assets include intellectual property assets selected from the group consisting of patents, copyrights and trade secrets.
But it doesn't have to be only IP. There can be other stuff as well.
9. The method of claim 4, wherein the privilege is exercised by the first party transferring rights in one or more of the assets in the dynamic pool of assets to the second party.
Pretty obvious, really.
10. The method of claim 9, wherein the transfer is by assignment.
11. The method of claim 9, wherein the transfer is by license.
12. The method of claim 11, wherein the license is an exclusive license.
OK, so there are multiple ways of transferring the rights.
13. The method of claim 4, wherein an occurrence of the predetermined event is a trigger event defined in the floating privilege agreement.
14. The method of claim 13, wherein the trigger event is a litigation-related event.
15. The method of claim 13 [sic, should clearly be 14], wherein the litigation-related event is a filing of a complaint against the second party.
16. The method of claim 15, wherein the complaint against the second party alleges that the second party infringes an intellectual property asset of a third party.
Now we get to the meat of the patent. This is not a patent on patent-trolling, it's a patent on a mechanism for defending against patent trolling. What they're patenting is a legal agreement that says "if you get sued for patent infringement, we'll grant you a patent license for one of our patents so you can smite the bastards".
17. The method of claim 13, wherein exercising the privilege comprises the second party selecting an asset from the dynamic pool of assets in response to occurrence of the trigger event.
18. The method of claim 17, wherein exercising the privilege further comprises the first party qualifying the selected asset for transfer to the second party to ensure the selected asset is appropriate for use by the second party f
Patents like this are proof that America has too many lawyers and MBAs and not enough engineers. Or maybe I'm just nostalgic for the good 'ole days when patents actually had to be material... a new and novel application of a technology or product feature that was a result of, you know, actual WORK originated by the person/company submitting the patent. This patent is basically a patent on a business type. It's kind of like patenting the concept of a bank, whereby you erect a building with a "vault" that allows "customers" to "withdraw" and "deposit" money. The American patent system is starting to exist primarily to employ lawyers... patent everything (no matter how stupid or obvious), and sue everybody.
Isn't it true that IBM invented this in the 50s and 60s? They held Microsoft's place long before Customer Assurance was a gleam in Bill Gates' eye. Maybe a kinder, new millennium IBM wants a patent so they can sue any other company that uses the tactic instead of relying upon government prosecution?
IBM seems to get that technical support is a better way to make money than bundling software.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
My take on this is as follows:
I'm a small company developing some new kind of networked mass storage system with what I think are novel ways to manage the backup and restoration of applications and data. Given that many others have done similar things I run the risk of infringing some obscure patent out there. Rather than devote resources I don't have to lawyers and research, I subscribe to IBM's new "super-patent" service.
I get sued by a patent holder over a method of deciding where and when to backup a file. I enter said patent into the search function of my uber-patent GUI. I get a hit on something IBM has patented that could allow me to counter sue the troll. I hit the "license now" button and now I have a patent that I can use to discourage the troll's suit.
I like it.
That's a nice patent you've got there. We wouldn't want anything to happen to it. ... well.
It'd be a real shame if
My brother and I have got a little proposition for you.
We can guarantee you that not a single patent will get done over for fifteen hundos a week.
Except it isn't a patent troll patent. Read it, not the summary or the conclusions other people have jumped to. The patent is about patent-pooling for mutual defence from patent claims.
This is a wonderful, delightful piece of work!
If this patent is to be successfully contested on the basis of prior art, some corporation is going to have to go public with the details of its patent protection racket. That company would be exposing itself to a lot of nasty business risks (possibly RICO, possibly anti-trust measures, more probably loss of sales and market cap, very definitely some image problems). I doubt that there are very many CEOs who would like the risk/benefit ratio of such a plan, especially as this kind of thing could break their personal career even if it is successful in blocking the patent.
If IBM is awarded the patent, it can use it to publicly expose the backroom details of the MS - SCO deal, the MS - Novell deal, and similar deals where there is good cause to suspect that some form of patent protection was involved. Through lawsuit and discovery, the secret clauses in those contracts would become public. This would stifle a lot of those kinds of activities, which would be a Good Thing for anyone favoring competition of products based on their technical merit.
IBM could also put the patent in the Linux patent protection pool. I cannot see anything negative for FOSS coming out of that.
But basically I see this patent as a way of demonstrating just how absurd the entire business model patent structure is.
Go IBM!
Though I have to laugh at the "patenting of being a patent troll", I can see ultimate irony if IBM donated the patent to the Open Invention Network, Open Source Patent Protection pool.
Consider the potential outcomes, it just has to bring a smile to your face!
And hey, maybe the absurdity of the patent, coupled with its devastating use against a few notorious patent trolls, would wake someone in power up to the need for a return to the protections for IP the Founding Fathers intended. Instead of the obscene mega-business pandering mess we have now.
Never ascribe to malice or conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Sounds like Fat Tony's been to Law School, eh?
Nah. Me and Fat Tony go waaay back, and that gnocchi-eating paisan couldn't fit through the door of law school, much less graduate from one. If youse'a askin' me, my money's on Benny the Brain.
Nonaggression works!
Well if so they better stop it. I already filed a patent on filing a patent before others can file the same patent. The patent office approved it on account of being really fucking confused.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"