Halliburton Applies For Patent-Trolling Patent

An anonymous reader writes "Halliburton, the company many folks know as Dick Cheney's previous employer, has apparently taken an interest in methods of patent trolling. In fact, according to Techdirt, the company has applied for a patent on patent trolling. Specifically, it's applied for a patent on the process of finding a company that protected an invention via trade secret, figuring out what that secret is, patenting it ... and then suing the original company. Hopefully, the patent office rejects this patent, because I somehow doubt that Halliburton is trying to get the patent as a way to block others from patent trolling."

Comments

hmm...

[MorderVonAllem]

...I would think that the very act of finding "prior art" (the very fact they found an invention) as described in this system would invalidate any patent attempt of the trade-secret...

Re:hmm...

[TheMCP]

Moreover, their attempt to patent this procedure would seem to indicate that they were knowingly violating prior art, in fact intentionally doing so, which would seem to imply that they could be charged with fraud or something similar.

I'm surprised they filed this patent attempt, and that their lawyers let it happen - it's like saying "I would like explicit government recognition of my plans to violate the law to ensure that when I do so everyone will recognize exactly what I did."

Re:hmm...

[shimage]

The patent system was created to encourage people (or companies) to reveal their trade secrets. That is, in return for fully documenting your idea, the USPTO will grant you a temporary (say, 20 year) monopoly on that idea. The point of a trade secret is that no one else knows what it is. If you want to own an idea for longer than 20 years or so, then you can't patent it. If, on the other hand, you don't think you can keep an idea secret for that long, it's best to patent it. Ergo, I'm not entirely sure what the patent system is good for. If your idea is not patentable in the first place, then I guess you can hide your method's mediocrity by claiming it's a "trade secret", although I was under the impression that this did not happen all that often. That said, I could easily be wrong.

Re:This

[Corpuscavernosa]

Seriously hilarious. Though as long as it's not illegal, and it meets all the 102 requirements and is not obvious, it will probably be granted.

Maybe the best we can hope for (besides dying in our sleep) is that this kind of slap-in-the-face application can spur some of the much needed reform.

In re Bilski

[John Hasler]

This is a silly business-methods patent application that will certainly be rejected by the PTO after Bilski. And no, a trade secret certainly does not qualify as prior art in the US. Nor should it.

It's in the USPTO's best interest to grant it

[kimvette]

"Hopefully, the patent office rejects this patent, because I somehow doubt that Halliburton is trying to get the patent as a way to block others from patent trolling."

It's in the USPTO's best interest to grant this patent because their revenue is largely driven by trolls patenting prior art and mechanisms/methods which are obvious to those skilled in the trade/art/science.

Take DAC (digital analog converters) for example: radio was there, then someone came along and said "Zomg! I'm gonna patent using a DAC to send voice over the radio waves using digital" and "ZOMG! I'm gonna use a DAC to send ethernet over the radio!" and so forth. The DAC is a physical implementation and ought to have been given a patent, but the uses for which DACs are implemented are obvious to anyone skilled in the trade and ought to not be granted patents.

But, if the USPTO rejects such patents, where is their job security? Or, if their jobs would still be secure, why, not rubber stamping a patent would require actual WORK. They can't have that now, can they? Just rubber stamp the patent application and let the courts sort it out, letting the little guys go bankrupt in the process.

Re:Need a better search function.

[gnick]

It's not "patenting patent trolling" that needs to be non-obvious, it's the action they're trying to patent - "patent trolling". Patent trolling, although it may not have been obvious back when it became a major problem, is now so common as to be laughably obvious. Unfortunately, prior art exists everywhere.

Re:Let Them Patent It

[Anonymous Coward]

The methods of figuring out trade secrets are almost always illegal, and can be sued over.

Only if those methods involve illegal methods of corporate espionage. I was recently co-author of a patent for a product with a certain chemical formulation. Some details of the formulation & production were deliberately left out of the patent in order to retain trade secrets. But figuring out those secrets is easy enough by either 1) research or 2) espionage. The former is perfectly legal, but may involve large expenditure of resources - i.e., difficult enough that it might not be worth a company's time and money to re-create the R&D of the original patent.

So in a way, you can see that our current patent system tends to discourages inventors from complete disclosure and tends to incentivize corporate espionage.

Huh?

[SpinyNorman]

Well, IANAL, and in /. tradition I didn't RTFA, but what's the point of applying for patents in cases where you specifically know there's already prior art?

That's a rhetorical question - I don't even want to know the answer.

Re:This

[hedwards]

I doubt it, more likely they'll just take a small piece of each settlement as a licensing fee.

But, it's not like nobody saw this one coming so I'd suspect that it'll get blocked on the grounds of the inherent obviousness of it.

Re:This

[Daniel Dvorkin]

It sounds like you're assuming that Halliburton will indiscriminately go after anyone who violates their patent, thus making patent trolls everywhere tremble in fear. I don't think it will work out that way. What seems more likely is that they'll hold onto it, using it only against their competitors when it's to their advantage and having little effect on the world of patent trolling as a whole -- and meanwhile, setting yet another precedent for the granting of truly horrible patents. The best thing is for this and every other business method patent (and software patent, and patent on a naturally occurring gene, etc.) to be denied until people get the message that patents are intended to cover physical inventions, and nothing else.