Lessons from the Gnome Patent Troll Incident

Lessons from the Gnome Patent Troll Incident(blog.hansenpartnership.com)

7 points by gdamjan1 5 years ago | 3 comments

I think the best way to neutralize bogus patent claims would be to sue the patent office, and the involved examiners themselves, once a patent is found to be invalid (it shouldn’t have been granted in the first place).

Why? Because it shouldn’t be someone else’s burden (time, cost) to have to clean up the mess they created (not to mention the waste in public money with court proceedings).

But, as usual, government employees/agencies have “sovereign immunity”, which means they can get away with doing a bad job any other type of private employee would get fired for, without repercussions.

rbecker 5 years ago |

> expecting that the cost of at least getting into court would be around US$200k, even with pro bono representation

Where do these costs come from, if not from lawyers?

sebastien_b 5 years ago | |

Pro bono doesn't always necessarily mean "for free" or "no fee" - could be reduced fees.

Besides this, there's probably filling fees to the court; I also suspect there's outside work required (think research for current or prior cases - PACER comes to mind), which is not necessarily covered by regular "lawyer fees"