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'Troll' Loses Cloudflare Lawsuit, Has Weaponized Patent Invalidated (arstechnica.com)
A federal judge in San Francisco has unequivocally ruled against a non-practicing entity that had sued Cloudflare for patent infringement. From a report: The judicial order effectively ends the case that Blackbird -- which Cloudflare had dubbed a "patent troll" -- had brought against the well-known security firm and content delivery network. "Abstract ideas are not patentable," US District Judge Vincent Chhabria wrote in a Monday order. The case revolved around US Patent No. 6,453,335, which describes providing a "third party data channel" online. When the case was filed in May 2017, the invention claims it can incorporate third-party data into an existing Internet connection "in a convenient and flexible way."
That description sounds more like hacking than a beneficial tool.
That or serving ads at will.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
This decision was brought to you in part by the Supreme Court ruling against the logic that anything on the internet that's accessible in the Eastern District of Texas could be filed there.
Oh, please let this be a strong precedent in nullifying crappy patents.
SO many patents are "a system and methodology for doing something kinda like this, which is an analog for a real world scenario we have, but with a computer and a network".
I would love to know how many patents would be vacated under this, because a patent should not encompass "doing something we do every day but with a computer".
The process, take any existing patent, add "But on the internet" to the description and file. That used to work so well.
Internet itself was an abstract entity to most judges, so they did not even understand how trivial these ideas were before. Finally once they learned to post selfies on the net and log in to see the pictures of their grandkids, they seem to see these stupid patents under different light. May be.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
USPTO keeps validating these bullshit patents because their system rewards passing patents but never punishes passing bad patents. The result is that just about anything can be patented and is expensive to fight in court. If you're lucky, you will win and by win I mean you will have spent millions of dollars fighting a bad patent and get nothing in return.
This is a serious problem.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
For those too lazy to read the article and patent, it's a patent on intercepting traffic with a device (e.g. proxy) and altering the data based on third party settings, like changing a 404 page to an ad.
It was tossed out because it was broad enough to basically say "intercept stuff and change it."
Specifically, the "examiner(s)" that ultimately approved the "patent", causing waste of taxpayer money in not only the worthless approval process, but also in the resulting pointless court case (though I guess you could argue the case has the merit of proving the PTO is run by a bunch of rubber-stamping monkeys).
AC comments get piped to
The news covers spectacular car crashes. They don't cover the millions of car trips that go well every day.
About once a month, Slashdot covers another patent application that sounds rather questionable, based on the summary posted to Slashdot. Maybe half of those ARE actually bad patent applications, so several per year. There are half a million patent applications, and 250,000 patents issued, every year that don't make an interesting article, because they are bog-standard patents, with everything good and proper.
The ruling in this case is exactly what we'd expect. Like "arriving safely at your destination", it's the normal course of things. The patents and applications that make the news are the highly unusual ones - that's why they're news.
> if you want to keep it secret do so.
So your suggestion is that products should be made impossible to open, no matter what tools a competitor uses, so that can't see how it works? Some kind of self-destruct mechanism that sets off burning metal if the case is opened?
> If someone can copy it then your idea wasn't that innovative in the first place
You do realize that "a new idea" and "hard to copy" have nothing whatsoever to do with each other, right? For millennia people lifted water in buckets. They tried to find easier ways. They all thought Archimedes screw was an amazing new idea, though once you see how it works it's pretty simple. Probably millions of hours were spent by scribes copying books. For a thousand years nobody thought of the printing press, until someone done. It was MAJOR, world-changing innovation, which is easy to copy once you've seen one.