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'Unpatent' Begins Crowdfunding Challenges To Bad Patents (unpatent.co)
"Unpatent is a crowdfunding platform that eliminates bad patents," reads their web site. "We do that by crowdsourcing the prior art -- that is all the evidence that makes clear that a patent was not novel -- and filing reexamination requests to the patent office." An anonymous Slashdot reader reports:
"Everyone in the world can back the crowdfunding campaign against the patent," explains their site, which includes a special section with "Featured stupid patents". The first $16,000 raised covers the lawyers and fees at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and "The rest is distributed to those who find valid prior art...any evidence that a patent is not novel. We review all the prior art pieces and reward those that may invalidate a claim... Then, we file an ex partes reexamination to the USPTO."
Their team includes Lee Cheng, the legal officer at Newegg, "worldwide renowned as the patent trolls' nightmare," as well as Lus Cuende, who created his own Linux distro when he was 15 and is now CTO of Stampery, a company using the Bitcoin blockchain to notarize data.
They're currently targeting the infamous US8738435 covering "personalized content relating to offered products and services," which in February the EFF featured as their "stupid patent of the month." Its page on Unpatent.co argues that "Taking something so obvious such as personalizing content and offers...and writing the word online everywhere shouldn't grant you a monopoly over it." Unpatent's slogan? "We invalidate patents that shouldn't exist."
Their team includes Lee Cheng, the legal officer at Newegg, "worldwide renowned as the patent trolls' nightmare," as well as Lus Cuende, who created his own Linux distro when he was 15 and is now CTO of Stampery, a company using the Bitcoin blockchain to notarize data.
They're currently targeting the infamous US8738435 covering "personalized content relating to offered products and services," which in February the EFF featured as their "stupid patent of the month." Its page on Unpatent.co argues that "Taking something so obvious such as personalizing content and offers...and writing the word online everywhere shouldn't grant you a monopoly over it." Unpatent's slogan? "We invalidate patents that shouldn't exist."
Filing patents has both non-zero cost, and non-zero latency.
You need to make a patent that is good enough to make it past the USPTO (which is harder than people think), spend money on the filing, and hope this program is still around in 2 years when your patent is actually approved. In the grand scheme of things if you can actually write a good patent you can almost certainly make better money by just using that skill to write patents.
You are making the lawyers lot of money though I guess
How? Read their site -- the donated money in excess of the PTO filing fees gets paid to the prior art searchers.
which is probably why the Newegg lawyer thought of this brilliant idea
Or maybe it's because every bad patent that's killed through this process is one less bad patent that Newegg may have to pay real money to fight later on.
... and hope this program is still around in 2 years when your patent is actually approved.
Two years if you're lucky.
good enough to make it past the USPTO (which is harder than people think)
Which in itself is part of the problem, though Slashdotters would rather just whine about the Big Bad Gubmint.
It's traditionally been, and remains to be, difficult to get a patent. As a result, patent law is structured such that once a patent is approved, it's almost certainly some kind of groundbreaking new technology. Then if someone else end up with the same technology, they must certainly have copied the patent, and it's effectively the burden of the defendant to show that their design process excluded the duplicated patent, effectively requiring proving a negative and undermining the public good for which the patent system was created. In essence, the patent system is assumed to be infallible, so its failures have a significant impact.
I've put some consideration into a system in which the first step in any patent lawsuit is a mandatory reevaluation of the patent claims, paid for by the USPTO (and amortized into filing fees), and waivable if the reevaluation was done recently enough to remain relevant to current societal standards. Part of that evaluation would weigh whether the patent is really a specific application, or a new technology that will have wide use. In essence, once a patent is granted, it's only partially valuable until it's been tested in court, and its value as a commodity (especially for trade between NPEs) depends significantly on the likelihood of the patent to stand up to a fresh examination. On the other hand, a novel patent with specific demonstrable products would be more likely to survive a trial, so it would be more valuable to investors interested in creating products.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Hi there, Luis from Unpatent here. I agree the patent system is broken. However, the same way as we cannot cure VIH right away, we gotta treat the symptoms at least. It's the same for our crowdfunding platform. We're actually in the process of automating the lawyers' task in the process, so no, our aim is not to make lawyers rich(er).