Slashdot Mirror
Patent Troll Bill Clears House With Huge Majority
snydeq writes "The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the Innovation Act, dealing trolls a severe blow despite opposition from universities looking to protect patents, InfoWorld's Simon Phipps reports. The act cleared the House of Representatives with an overwhelming majority of 325 to 91 despite opposition from the organizations most likely to feed new patents to the trolls. 'So bravo to the Innovation Act. It's far from perfect, as the EFF documents and as I commented before the holiday. But it's a step in the right direction, and the tidal surge of support it's seeing suggests legislators' appetite for proper patent reform is finally growing strong enough for them to contemplate substantial change.'"
The House has got it spot on. Now for the Senate and President.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If this actually passes the Senate and Pres, I'll be shocked, shocked I say, that legislating was being done in the legislature.
Now is a good time to call, write, and email your senators to let them know that you want to see this bill passed AS IS.
No, it will just harm people who don't have money to quickly get their patent into the market. It's another FU to small inventor, just like the last patent reform.
Of course, no one has actually made any good reasoning why getting licensing for someone to use a patent is some how bad.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hi, your dishwasher's design infringes on my patent, and you're using it, so you personally are in violation. Give me 5 thousand dollars.
The bill actually does touch on the style of patent litigation used by big tech companies:
But a number of voices, most with vested interests, have been scrambling to protect the trolls even with the concerns of the big trolls taken into account with the reduction of the bill's impact on "covered business methods." This part of patent law is used more by large corporate patent holders and thus opposed by the likes of IBM, Microsoft, General Electric, and Adobe.
(detail)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
"Among those apologists was the EVP of the Association of American Universities, whose press briefing Tuesday took the stance that patents are good for research."
Holy crap I don't even know where to start with that one. First of all, I remember when universities were for teaching. They seem to be under the impression that they're product manufacturers or R&D branches of some non-existent company. I wonder if they have a sign outside the door to the labs at these universities that say "forget teaching students, we need money! Welcome to the R&D Dept."
Oh and here's an idea. If you're doing research and want the final product or some related technology protected, don't let anyone know about it. In other words, don't file a patent. WD40 is not patented. The reason the company stated for that is so it's harder to reverse engineer the formula because if it had a patent, the recipe be out there for everyone to see. Nobody has, to this day, ever successfully figured out how to make a knock off of WD40.
Now the article states that this reduces the ability for 2 different universities to coordinate for fear of ripping the ideas off from each other. How about they either have professors teach students things like for example if they were some sort of university OR they become secret-protecting, profit-driven R&D company that only cares about making a profit off newly developed products. Just pick either one or the other and go with it instead of pretending to be both. Patents + universities don't mix because universities are acting like regular companies when they're not. THAT is the part that doesn't work, not the patent laws themselves.
"Of course, no one has actually made any good reasoning why requiring patents is somehow good."
FTFY.
Most patent justifications only make sense in the context of a patent regime. They're not independently supportable.
1) Patents force inventors to publish their invention so it can be copied.
- The real function of publication is to reduce duplicative patents, and to put potential infringers on notice. Most inventions are discovered simultaneously or nearly so, based on the natural progression of science and the technical arts.
2) Patents provide incentive for large capital expenditure burdened by the free rider problem.
- It's been shown time-and-time again with empirical studies that patents are unnecessary. Just like monopoly concessions are unnecessary in almost every other facet of our free market economy. Do you need a monopoly concession to open a restaurant, to prevent competitors? No. To create Twitter? No. SpaceX? No.
3) By packaging "ideas" into transferable property, you incentive investments because the product concept can be collateralized.
- Patents are often desired by investors, but what investor wouldn't you want to make use of regulatory property, regardless of whether it makes sense for the larger economy. Every investor wants you to maximize opportunities at your disposal.
- More important to a company than inventions are their employees, who create those inventions. And yet, places like Silicon Valley have been shown to be more innovative than others (e.g. Boston/Cambridge), with a healthier startup and investment community, despite the fact that California out-right rejects non-compete clauses in regular employment contracts, unlike almost every other state (including Massachusetts).
Who were the corporate sponsors of this bill?
The big push was from Google. Google, along with Facebook and Twitter (but not Apple) sponsors the Application Developers Alliance, which is a lobbying group against "patent trolls".
To understand why this matters to Google, look at where Google's products came from. Google, despite their reputation for innovation, has obtained most of their technology through acquisitions of smaller companies. Google has acquired 131 smaller companies over the years. Since the original search engine, almost all successful Google products came from the outside. YouTube, AdSense (DoubleClick), Google Earth (Keyhole), Blogger (Genius Labs), Android, Google Docs (Upstartle), Google Analytics (Urchin), Google Talk (Grand Central) etc. all came from acquisitions. In house, Google developed Google Wave and Google Buzz.
As a net buyer of IP, it's in Google's interest to keep the value of patents down. They don't want a small company to be able to say no to Google.
Not much seems to be done about these draconian copyright laws we have.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Once I found out that about 4-8 companies file half of all patent suits (and 90% of the troll ones), I figured it shouldn't be THAT hard to make it unprofitable for those companies to continue. Some say this bill isn't perfect, but if it manages to take enough profit our of trolling to stop those few big trolls, that largely solves the problem.
At least you don't fee like an Oracle error.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
This isn't an anti-patent troll bill. It's an anti-small inventor bill. It's designed to make it more expensive to enforce patents. That won't affect Google vs Apple vs Microsoft, etc. It just makes it harder for a little company to enforce a patent against a big one. That was the intention. (The Leahy bill in the Senate isn't that bad, but the Goodlatte bill that just passed the House is awful.)
This bill has been pushed through by a hate campaign against inventors. It's a well-funded campaign, and it's suckered in many people. The money is coming from Google and Facebook, who are hiding behind front organizations such as the Application Developers Association and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF's effort is funded by Google and Facebook, with $2 million laundered through a clever legal trick.
There are very few real "patent trolls". The EFF has tried to identify every one they can, and they only found 15. They started a campaign to attack "trolled patents" in court and at the USPTO, and and they only found one. There are a few other broad patents being enforced aggressively, notably Ultramercial. That's about it.
Using that thin basis, the "patent troll" problem has been hyped as a major threat. There are hate sites aimed at inventors:
I used to respect the EFF, but once they took Google's money, they, too, turned to the dark side.
Google Talk (Grand Central)
Actually, that's Google Voice, not Google Talk.
In house, Google developed Google Wave and Google Buzz.
And Chrome V8, Gmail, Google+ (including Google+ video Hangouts), Google Wallet, Google Offers, Google News, Google Books, Google Music, Google Now, Google Keep, Google Art, Google Cloud Print, Google Image Search, Google Video Search, Google Music Search, Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine, Google Flights, Picasa, Google Translate, Google Knowledge Graph, Google Shopper, Google Currents, etc., etc., etc. (I got tired of copying entries from the Wikipedia page). And of course there's now all of the hardware -- various tablets and phones, Chromecast, Chromebooks, Google Glass, self-driving cars, and more. Oh, and Google Fiber. Plus a bunch of other Google X projects, most of which not even Google employees know anything about.
In addition, nearly all of the properties that began as acquisitions have been substantially, if not totally, rewritten to provide more features and to enable them to scale to massive volumes. For example, Google Maps was acquired when it was a standalone program written by two guys. It's unlikely that there is a single line of code remaining from that original app in the modern multi-platform, massively scaled system that incorporates many different data layers, including all of the StreetView imagery (another purely Google-originated endeavor).
Actually, even if Google had simply acquired everything, it would still take a lot of innovation to rearchitect it all so it can scale for a billion users. There's a lot of purely internal innovation that is required to make all of this stuff work, like Bigtable (and now Spanner), Borg, MapReduce (and now Flume), plus all of the libraries/dev tools -- including many which have been open sourced like Guava, protobuf, Gson, Gerrit, Keyczar, and many, many more.
"Google doesn't actually invent anything" is a popular /. meme, but it's completely untrue.
As for why this patent legislation matters to Google, Google has always hated the patent arms race; it costs software companies money and agility, and gives them basically nothing in return.
Google is a company of software engineers, right to the very top, and nearly all software engineers hate the ridiculousness of software patents, and the way patent trolls stifle extract cash from the people who are actually doing cool stuff to give it to worthless do-nothings. For a long time Google simply refused to play the patent game at all, until it got seriously burned. So then Google began lobbying hard for patent reform, spending millions per year, and this is just one piece of that large, multi-pronged effort. At the same time, Google realized that it had to get into the patent game itself to survive, and so purchased Motorola and some other large piles of patents, and began rewarding engineers for writing patents. But Google would really prefer to fix the system.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer.)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
No, inventors are not the target of this legislation. I am an entrepreneur, multi-startup founder, product creator of products that have shipped hundreds of thousands of units and products that have failed (always important to add). I hold over a dozen patents or patents pending. I have also had my startups threatened by patent litigation from trolls. A lot of things about creating companies and products are difficult but being assaulted by patent trolls is one of the worst because there is nothing the entrepreneur can do except pay off a thug or pay off lawyers to defend against the thug. Either way, the small inventor loses crucial capital, focus and energy.
I've read the current language of the bill and there is nothing there that harms small inventors. Everything there makes large-scale patent trolling less attractive as a business model. As a small inventor I have no problem disclosing my ownership in my patents. I have no problem specifying what product I believe infringes one of my patents and in what way. I have no problem with a judge being able to shift court costs to the losing party, if the judge determines that party was not acting in good faith in bringing the suit. I wouldn't bring a suit in bad faith, nor abuse the discovery process or otherwise try to egregiously abuse legal tactics to run up costs. That's what trolls do. Not legitimate inventors. All of these provisions PROTECT me as a small inventor. Trolls generally go after small companies because they are the ones that must settle because they can't afford a costly defense.
The small inventor, and the little guy in general, has been FU-ed out of the game for a long time now. Patents are now all about legal fights and trolling, not innovation or rewarding it. It's time for them to die.
May the Maths Be with you!
If so, good then; the sooner the myth of patents being for the small inventor dies the sooner everyone will finally be rid of the impediment of patents forever.
May the Maths Be with you!
From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54564-2005Feb25.html
At long last, Robert Kearns's battles with the world's automotive giants have come to an end. Kearns, who died Feb. 9, devoted decades of his life to fighting Ford Motor Co., Chrysler Corp. and other carmakers in court, trying to gain the credit he thought he deserved as the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper.
From a basement in Detroit, where he devised his invention, to Gaithersburg, where he moved in the 1970s, Kearns carried his lonely fight all the way to the Supreme Court, one man against the might of the industrial world and a patent system he believed had let him down.
Robert Kearns fought for years to be credited as inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. (The Washington Post)
By the time he died at 77 at Copper Ridge nursing home in Sykesville, Md., of brain cancer complicated by Alzheimer's disease, Kearns had gained some vindication in the form of $30 million in settlements from Ford and Chrysler, but he never got what he had sought from the beginning.
"I need the money, but that's not what this is about," he told Regardie's magazine in 1990. "I've spent a lifetime on this. This case isn't just a trial. It's about the meaning of Bob Kearns's life."
All he wanted, he often said, was the chance to run a factory with his six children and build his wiper motors, along with a later invention for a windshield wiper that was activated automatically by rainfall. In the end, his courtroom battles cost him his job, his marriage and, at times, his mental health.
Kearns, who had a doctorate in engineering from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and had taught engineering for 11 years at Wayne State University in Detroit, was no weekend tinkerer. A native of Gary, Ind., he grew up near the giant Ford plant in River Rouge, Mich., and always thought of the auto company as a place that welcomed someone with ingenuity.
He got his idea on his wedding night in 1953, when a champagne cork struck him in the left eye, which eventually became blind. The blinking of his eye led him to wonder if he could make windshield wipers that worked the same way -- that would move at intervals instead of in a constant back-and-forth motion.
After years of experiments at home and on his cars -- "If it ever rained," his former wife, Phyllis Hall, recalled yesterday, "I had to drop everything and go out with him in the car" -- Kearns believed his invention was ready.
He applied for patents, mounted his wipers on his 1962 Ford Galaxie and drove to Ford's headquarters. Engineers swarmed over his car, at one point sending him out of the workroom, convinced he was activating the wipers with a button in his pocket.
Ford's engineers had been experimenting with vacuum-operated wipers, but Kearns was the first to invent an intermittent wiper with an electric motor. After a while, however, Ford stopped answering his calls, and Kearns was left on his own.
In 1967, he received the first of more than 30 patents for his wipers. In 1969, Ford came out with the first intermittent wiper system in the United States, followed within a few years by the other major manufacturers.
After working as Detroit's commissioner of buildings and safety engineering, Kearns moved to Gaithersburg in 1971 to become principal investigator for highway skid resistance at the old National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
In 1976, Kearns's son bought an electric circuit for a Mercedes-Benz intermittent wiper, which Kearns took apart, only to discover it was almost identical to what he'd invented. He had a nervous breakdown soon after.
He boarded a bus, with delusions of riding to Australia and being commissioned by former President Richard M. Nixon to build an electric car. Police picked him up in Tennessee, and his family checked him into the psychiatric ward at Montgomery
This space for rent.
I've read the current language of the bill and there is nothing there that harms small inventors. Everything there makes large-scale patent trolling less attractive as a business model.
The worst part is the remnant of the "loser pays" provision. If you try to enforce a patent against a big company, if you lose you have a good chance of being hit with the big guy's legal bills. There's no cap on that. That provision was amended, which made it "slightly less awful", as one congressman put it. After the amendment, the new language now means you get to litigate over the legal fees. Statistically, the patent holder wins about 40% of the time, and even with a good case, it's easy to make a mistake and lose.
The Leahy bill is better. It's more narrowly directed towards bulk-type patent enforcement operations, doesn't have a loser-pays provision, and proposes a small claims court for smaller patent cases.
Anything with Chrome gets a "half truth" from me. Chrome is based on WebKit, and as such had a lot of stuff that was copied from Apple. I would say collaborated on, but Google put an end to that, so I'll use the word copied, even though it was a legally allowed copy.
V8 is Google's original contribution to WebKit, yes, but it was very similar to WebKit's JavaScript engine (which leapfrogged V8 within public release in months, so V8 didn't really even bring anything unique to the table), and if you'll notice from the V8 license...
https://code.google.com/p/v8/source/browse/trunk/LICENSE
"Strongtalk assembler, the basis of the files assembler-arm-inl.h,
assembler-arm.cc, assembler-arm.h, assembler-ia32-inl.h,
assembler-ia32.cc, assembler-ia32.h, assembler-x64-inl.h,
assembler-x64.cc, assembler-x64.h, assembler-mips-inl.h,
assembler-mips.cc, assembler-mips.h, assembler.cc and assembler.h.
This code is copyrighted by Sun Microsystems Inc. and released
under a 3-clause BSD license."
They didn't even write the assembler, it's Suns.
So their contribution to V8 was to bring a lot of things together, but it wouldn't have been possible with, again, outside companies and acquisitions.
I don't have much sympathy for Google in the patents arms race. Google was aware what the rules of the game were, they were aware Apple had patented the wazoo out of the iPhone ("And BOY have we patented it!" - Steve Jobs, iPhone Introduction), and yet they copied anyway. You can complain about the rules, but Google can't say they were ignorant about the rules, and boy, these patents were unexpected. They very directly released something in conflict of patents, that's on them. I don't have much sympathy for companies that go out of their way to incur legal wraith and then complain they get sued. There is no "not playing the patent game." That's like playing soccer but saying you're "not playing the no hands on the ball game." It is what is it. Ignorance isn't a legal defense, nor is it a sound corporate strategy.
Picasa acquired by Google - New York Times, 2004. "'They came to the conclusion that it would be easier to buy this business than to build it themselves. It's the type of acquisition you can expect Google to do more of in the future.'' The self-driving car technology was acquired from Stanford, along with Sebastian Thrun. Google did do a lot with language translation in-house; that's probably the most innovative area. Most of Google's big-name products, though, came from elsewhere.
Google is good at scaling, and yes, many of the acquired products had to be rewritten to scale up. Still, Google Earth today looks a lot like the Keyhole Earth Viewer I had in 2003.
So their contribution to V8 was to bring a lot of things together, but it wouldn't have been possible with, again, outside companies and acquisitions.
Which is precisely what Apple did with the iPhone.
Apple had patented the wazoo out of the iPhone ("And BOY have we patented it!" - Steve Jobs, iPhone Introduction), and yet they copied anyway.
Which is bullshit because the context of the quote was that they "invented" this thing called "multitouch", and you are a fool if you believe that to be true. Apple tried to scare other companies off by claiming this but those other companies called their bluff in knowing Jobs was a liar and that they did not invent multitouch.
The use of the term "Ta-ta" should have clued you in that the poster was likely non-American and using the British convention of writing. Therefore, the use of the full stop (that's the British term for period) inside quotations is correct as per British convention.
Don't fornicate. Seriously, just don't do it.
This is exactly the kind of idiotic "inventions" I want to see obliterated. An enhancement obvious to any expert in the field.
I design machines all day long as a profession. Most of the time, we know years in advance of various things we can make to improve the design, we just did not implement it yet for whatever reason. Cost. Complexity. Unneeded. Add it later when everything else is operating predictable and well.
Then comes some fool and claims to be a genuis for thinking of the same things. "Say, would it not be great to have an indicator light showing when the toaster is hot? I want a million bucks!"
Fuck him in his Dunning Kruger ass.
It would be good if it weren't true that patents were something for the small inventor.
Among novel machines I've looked at recently, there one was invented by a university professor, Kais Atallah (whose invention was a type of magnetic gear, to which he obtained a patent, which got the whole thing funded), Torbjörn Lembke, whose invention was a magnetic bearing, who worked in industry, had an idea for an improvement of today's magnetic gears, wrote a PhD dissertation about it, patented it before publishing and is currently manufacturing it.
You might not call these real garage inventors, but I have a last example. Glenn Thompson, an Australian programmer, who, after what must have been quite careful thought, found a way to make a new kind of constant velocity joint (now called a Thompson Coupling). He patented this, having gotten the patent, got investors and has now, have now, having gotten funded, been manufacturing and selling these joints for some years.
If it weren't for patents these people would likely have obtained minimal reward for their work. If you have an invention, patents do protect it. You might say that they if they were "real small inventors" wouldn't have money to sue, but I imagine that such even a small inventor, with no money and only a good patent, would even in America, be able to take his case to court and win with enough probability to deter patent infringment. At worst such an inventor might be forced to find a lawyer to take his case on contingency.