That changes things beyond just liability - it also makes it appear judgement proof. And the dollar amounts indicate that companies may just settle because there’s nothing to win by a counter suit.

Hardly effective for gauging HN readership, given the abundant use of ad blockers. Based on no evidence whatsoever, 100x that and you should have a reliable estimate.

While I get what the judge is going for here, there's nothing about renting an office space somewhere that makes a patent more valid.

If anything, the contracts that allow the parent company to take 90-95% of the income should also entitle them to the same level of liability and that should have nothing to do with the shell company address. As soon as that is addressed, hopefully by law, all of this stuff goes away very quickly.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45622

See pages 30-33:

> during the Trump presidency, with 81.0% of district court nominees confirmed by roll call vote

> During the Trump presidency, in contrast to the two immediately preceding presidencies, only 15 (10.6%) of 141 district court nominees confirmed by roll call vote received zero nay votes at the time of confirmation. A plurality of nominees (36, or 25.5%, of 141) received more than 40 nay votes when confirmed by the Senate, while another 20 nominees, or 14.2%, received 31 to 40 nay votes at the time of confirmation.

As I said, that's what I suspect. The actual scam may be different.

So essentially the scam removes liability from the (dubious) patent owner - it removes the downside to (allegedly) abusing the law, and subverts the intent of the legislation.

The One Click patent would be like patenting just the idea of an air conditioner because once you have that idea any software developer worth his salt could implement it.

The search tools are acceptable, but could be improved a lot. To get ideas for improvements, you should talk to actual examiners and try searching for patents yourself. Unfortunately, too frequently people who don't know much about how patent searching actually works propose "improvements" that aren't actually improvements.

Case in point: https://www.priorartarchive.org/

While well-intentioned, this site is doomed to mostly be unused by examiners. The classification search doesn't work. Classification search is a critical feature for patent examination. And the classifications are produced by machine learning, which usually produces poor quality classifications (despite loud pronouncements about how great machine learning is for this task).

The internal search tools work mostly by keyboard, and this search site works mostly by mouse. Mouse is much slower in my experience, and this matters a lot for time-constrained people like patent examiners. The main advantage of the internal USPTO search tools is speed, not anything fancy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978043

The documents on the "Prior Art Archive" have tons of broken images, too.

> I've seen a lot of patents whose prior art could be found by spending a bit of quality time with a thesaurus, or a halfway decent index.

Most of the time this is not the case. If it's something that simple, it would be easily rejected. Keep in mind that when the media says a patent covers X, it probably doesn't actually cover X. It probably covers something far more specific that isn't a problem for anyone.

(Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)

Trademark also has a good few issues, aside of being abused to the point where it becomes obviously stupid (like trademarking colors, common words and similar idiocies). It also cannot prevent counterfeits, which is more a game of whack-a-mole than anything else.

As I agreed. However, you're wrong that a troll necessarily goes after the infringer you know about, and in fact they may not even bother.

Secondly, "broadness" is a term of art in patents. It doesn't mean what you think it does. It doesn't mean "advancing technology." It means the scope of things covered by the claims.

Nice round of victim-blaming. Don't like the random mob vigilantism? Well, it's probably your fault and that's the modern society for you, and again your fault for not embracing it enthusiastically. In fact, you are a bad person for it! Nice.

That's not proof of non-obviousness. And even if it were, it's still not a reason to allow 'what' patents (which the law actually doesn't allow! But they get granted anyway).

> Demanding the patent goes into the specific details

You are arguing a strawman. A patent must describe the invention in sufficient detail for someone skilled in its art to reproduce. Incidental details shouldn't be (and I believe aren't, legally. What the USPTO actually does in practice is a different matter) grounds for calling an alternate implementation non-infringing.

What you're describing is a hideous perversion of the patent system. It allows patenting any obvious [1] idea so long as you are first to file [2]. Alternately, if the idea is novel and non-obvious, it grants patent protection without requiring disclosure of implementation. It basically grants patent protection to trade secrets.

[1] A test for non-obviousness: does an implementor care to look at your patent or reverse-engineer your implementation, or is a description of what the invention does sufficient?

[2] And eventually implement.

You may be thinking of trademarks, which can be granted on the basis of an intent to use the mark in the market with a time limit thereafter to keep them.

Do you have a reference for that ? I've never heard of any such "duty". There are many patents that have never been implemented yet remain valid.

Beyond that my point is not that they didn't show the "how" but that the "how" in that case was absolutely trivial and completely undeserving of patent protection.

Also judges in general don't like people being "clever".

But on this point:

> And while search technology has improved, it hasn't become orders of magnitude better.

In general it has, it is just that the USPTO's software hasn't. I imagine a team of the right 2-5 people could make something better than you would wish for in your wildest dreams. But how to actually make that happen is another kettle of fish. Anyone capable of fixing this would most likely be better remunerated doing something else, but nerds are easy to snipe and even just reading your gripes here and in the subreddit has made me want to solve this problem if for no other reason than the humanitarian one.

If an inventor just wants to sit on a patent and not produce anything based on it, they should be forced to (eventually, though I have no idea what timeframe would be optimal) release their rights.

I have explained why it should not be, but Mgmt does not care.

Everyone's doing it. We NEED to do it.

I believe we are in a mix of FOMO, resume-driven development and empire-building.

Ok, I can tell that you want me to expand. Here goes:

Cloud may offer:

1) improved scalability (both horizontal and vertical)

2) improved availability

3) reduced cost

None of these are guaranteed and will require much expertise in both initial choice-making and continuing execution.

We don't really have that expertise.

Do you?

And end up with not much gain. :(

    You pack your bags And you move to the cloud
    There's somethin' missin' here at home

    When you, you gonna move to the cloud?
    Into the cloud where it all began

    I'm always buyin' With the local and the junkies
    This cloud life is one big pain!
    But you, you had to move to the cloud
    Into the cloud where it all began

It's really dumb.

I mean the marketing blabla behind patents is always the little inventor who found something incredible but will be eaten by the large corps, right? Which means they should be interested in actually creating a product out of it to make money, and the patent gives them a "safety" period before the big corps stomp the little guy to the curb. Or ... maybe this whole thing was a pure marketing ploy and patents have been misused in all kinds of ways in the 19th century already?

I'm not familiar with the invention of flash freezing. Did the inventor just patent the idea of freezing food fast? That sounds like a pretty obvious idea that should not be patentable. Why give someone a monopoly on quick freezing?

Or did the inventor patent a non-obvious mechanical device that is capable of quickly freezing food? Giving the inventor a short term monopoly on that device in exchange for publishing the blueprints sounds like a reasonable deal.

"After years of work on his own process, Birdseye invented a system that packed dressed fish, meat, or vegetables into waxed-cardboard cartons, which were flash-frozen under high pressure"

I’m not suggesting you love or support these things, but I am concerned that you’ve taken a sarcastic defensive position instead of naming specific people to rebut my points. An omission of defeat perchance?

My point is that mob justice will continue until the government deigns the problem bad enough to enshrine these behaviors into law as crimes. Why are you having such a hard time understanding that this is a fixable problem directly resulting from negligent government?

The registered agent is responsible for getting served, receiving legal mail, and other government correspondence on behalf of the company and forwarding it along in a timely manner.

This is different than a mailing address because a process server or government employee must be able to physically walk into the premises of either the principal place of activity or registered agent, deliver the notice/correspondence/etc. to someone, and record who they handed it off to at what time.

Certainly, their LLCs could be subject to attorneys fees if the Court awards fees (which it generally only does in exceptional cases) or for sanctions based on attorney behavior.

However, normally, only their LLCs would be liable rather than the owners personally--unless they fail to observe the corporate formalities.

It spreads downside risk directly. It also makes unraveling the real interests harder.

It's a clever, evil hack of the justice system. It's very cool this judge uncovered it. I hope they get nailed and I hope we close these loopholes.

For example, Coca-Cola never patended their formula. So you might think: I can copy it and sell my own right? Well, yes, legally yes, if you ever found their formula, somehow. They been successful for more than a hundred years now in hiding that formula.

Thing is, software patents allowed people to actually patent ideas, concepts, stuff that is obvious and don't need sharing, for example: "ghost racer" is a patented concept, for a while any game that wanted to display to the player his past run by showing a slightly different copy of himself so he can compare, had to pay patent royalty. But the concept is obvious, it is simple, it is there, nobody used a ludicrous amount of money and time to invent it.

This is different than the patent for Michael Jackson dance moves that requires specialized devices, he patented physical objects that required time and money to make, they had a non-trivial purpose on his dance and he had to work to create them to make his dance moves possible. And now that he is gone, the awesome stage tricks he invented can keep existing, because he wrote detailed patents explaining how to repeat his feats.

In general, the software world sees plenty of innovation, and would continue to see that innovation without patents. Besides, software is much closer to mathematics. The idea that e.g. long-division is patentable is ridiculous, but if you write "long-division, but on a computer" the only thing that prevents a patent is how glaringly obvious the prior-art is.

The days of the full cloud lift-and-shift are going away, and we're getting to the point where people make that decision rationally.

As an aside, I actually believe in the cloud enough that I am working on a startup for a piece of cloud infrastructure.

Yes

This is hard to do.

Finding prior art is inherently a “graphy” problem and current AI is getting better at graphy problems by the day (probably even by the hour). I have zero doubt that AI could solve this problem, but am unsure whether it will be allowed to.

Lovely.

As my local county attorney told the court, "We will not be using the cloud because it is not secure," this doesn't surprise me. The bane of local governments strikes again.

Blocking cloudflare blocks half the internet so I presume there’s something else going on somewhere.

Usually people talking about shell companies are referring to companies with no business interests at all or if they are bring expansive only contracts/ip agreements. A construction company is doing actual business. Land owned in a corporation has an actual asset etc.

Most startups start as shell companies, you sort of can’t create a corporation without being one for some amount of time.

So I’m ok with the idea of corporate ownership reform but I think you’d need to get more specific than “shell companies == bad”

It's apparently based on the training examiners get.

The USPTO also posts a lot of the slides they use for training: https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/examiner-traini...

Otherwise, I'm confident there's information out there on how to search patents, but I haven't seen it.

But I think examining an actual application will be more useful for you. You can do this yourself as practice. Find a patent application that was examined. Be sure to pick an application and not a granted patent. In the US the number will be formatted like USYYYYXXXXXXXA1. You want to do an examined one so that you can compare against what the examiner did. That will be pretty easy if you pick one that was published a while back, so YYYY could be like 2015. On Google Patents for the application you picked, look for "External links" on the top right and go to "USPTO PatentCenter". Then under "Documents & Transactions" on the left, look for "Non-final rejection". If there's a rejection posted then you can see what the examiner did and compare against what you did when you're done.

Look at the independent claims of the application and find prior art that fits the claims. Don't check what the examiner did before you search, just try searching on your own. Write an office action (the report listing why it's the same). "Map" the claims by putting in parenthesis after each claim element why the prior art shows this feature. For example:

> A widget (Bob fig. 6 shows a widget) with blue lights (Bob fig. 6 shows the lights; para. 0076 says that the lights are blue).

When you're done, compare against what the examiner did.

Be aware that it probably will take you several weeks or longer to do your first one.

Here's the USPTO's new public search tool, which is similar to the one used by examiners (main difference is that the public version only has US patent documents): https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/static/pages/landing.html?...

You could also read a book like Patent it Yourself by David Pressman to better understand the legal aspects than what you'll get from the USPTO's slides.

You also might be interested in some other suggestions I've made here on designing patent search systems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33519398

(Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)

https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fact-sheet-benefic...

Which is all to say that it wouldn't surprise me if there were a legal requirement for an "original document", and if that requirement could only be met by physical mail or fax.

(Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)

AFAIK email to fax (and vice-versa) converters have existed for a while ?

I'm much more annoyed that in 2022 we are still misusing pdf, treating it as a digital-first format rather than one more appropriate for archival of paper documents... (and with the associated "pdfs cannot be modified" myth)

Different things. In this case you have a pathological outcome in the process. "Free real estate" as it were because you've got an organizational structuring that is essentially censure proof by the Court unless you pierce the corporate veil.

Remember, corporations are suffered to exist as a courtesy, and a means to distribute risk, but our Court system is very much tuned to "there is a person, get them in here now, and lets get this sorted."

If the Court has to choose between being ineffectual and exploitable, and piercing the veil in order to get to the bottom of duplicitous behavior, one can only hope the Judge will settle in and push the issue.

Surely the basis of all corporations is to trade and to undertake usefull economic activity.

We spesifically don't want them to limit liability where profit is made upfront, owners take off with the money, and there is no-one left to pay the costs.

Ideas may also require intellectual labour. But one may not receive the protection of the government for them to give temporary advantage over competitors. Ideas are a collaborative venture, protocols being the very epitome of this - since a "protocol of one" is a bit like a birthday party for one... a bit sad and pointless.

If one wants to make money, by all means invest time in pursuing patentable inventions, but do not presume that mere ideas (most of which are "nothing new under the sun") should be afforded the same protection.

The problem we have today is that the patent system is derelict. The goalposts have shifted to allow almost all and any silly idea to obtain a patent and the system itself is weaponised for extraction. It has not shown any will to reform, so abolition may be its ultimate fate.

Rust's memory management was invented without any such incentive, and the world is richer for it.

Even if it would have stopped java from being a thing it's just not worth it.

Once I had an idea while sitting on the toilet, about how to use past log data to pre-emptively scale up, when the peak hour is about to come.

I had the idea just randomly sitting on the toilet for a few minutes… it was already patented.

I realize a lot of business do this, and have survived fine, but that's not the point I'm making.

The patent system was designed with the assumption that USPTO would do its job, and switching to an adversarial model for patentability would just make it easier to get obvious patents.

A Patent is simply a ticket to start a lawsuit as a plaintiff. So just file, get your ticket, and start suing competitors, putting on them the burden of proving your patent is worthless.

That is the opposite of the way it is supposed to work.

Without some kind of penalty beyond the costs of patent & prosecution, this is massively anticompetitive.

If your point was that we are, in a practical sense, close to this now, then yes, I agree (but that was not clear to me in that comment).

This will skew the issue towards deeper pockets.

whoever has more money for court battles will win the patent case.

Is that what we want?

What you're basically saying is "every country in the world should have nuclear weapons and then let their respective god(s) sort out the winners if there is a dispute"

Blow away USPTO filing/examination process and replace it with straight arbitration.

You can argue that the patent system in the US is partially broken because of how broadly patents are granted nowadays, but that does not support the GP’s contention that there is some kind of distinct line that can be drawn between an idea and an invention, which is why the patent system is what it is now. And, again, your own link underscores how far we’ve come in understanding that unlimited monopolies on technologies/ideas are bad and how limiting patents durationally can help with that. Note that one of the requirements for a patent to issue is called “enablement” which basically means that your patent MUST describe the invention with sufficient particularity that a person with ordinary skill in the art could make and use your invention.

The basic problem is patent cases are inherently highly complex and specific to particulars and context, and the legal system is inherently inefficient and unpredictable.

These are worst case legal situations for good actors, but the best case terrain for bad actors that can carefully select the battles they want!

The only "simple" solution I can think of is, that a pattern of patent troll behavior is explicitly made illegal, and judgements and findings against trolls can puncture normal limited liability protections of corporations and business arrangements.

Taking out the serial trolls could then be made profitable and repeatable for legal entrepreneurs, who can assemble the deep pockets, and accept the large risks, required.

Having run businesses, been involved with patents and the courts, some things are blindingly obvious. So I'll step back a bit.

First, the courts are insanely overworked, so things take forever, lawsuits are insanely expensive for both sides. Most importantly, the entire court system is structured to be anti-scaleable.

Even attempting to use the courts as a scaling solution works against the entire design. If you are sued, you have lost the minute you get served - defendant always pays, and the entire effort and costs are on you, even if you win. The only solution would be to redesign the entire court system, and since the courts are constitutional creations, that means literally re-constituting the entire country (Constitutional Convention, dissolve the old constitution, start from scratch; I can hardly think of anything more dangerous in today's climate).

On the small business side, there is literally nothing that can be done.

Even take a thought experiment where someone magically funds a bottomless supply of money to defend patent cases — no small biz ever spends a penny on attorneys and court costs, and can always afford the best attorneys (nevermind that wrongly accused criminal defendants still need to get by with underpaid & overworked public defenders).

This is still a massive unbearable cost for the small or medium sized business, simply because of the huge of management distraction involved in running a lawsuit. In a lawsuit, it is NOT just "let the attorneys handle it". Every case is unique, and the attorneys are handling only the legal issues — they need to be educated from scratch on the issues in the case, and all that time and effort to educate the attorneys comes from the defendants. Then, the defendants must to sit for depositions (a whole day or more), which need extensive preparation, and be involved in preparing for trial, which just blows entire days or weeks out of the schedule, and so on...

So, even if the external costs are 100% paid, it is still enormously costly. Even if you also paid every exec and employee involved their entire fully loaded employment cost, it is STILL too costly, because of the opportunity cost. Those person-months of time are all taken from the company's productive work on their products.

Now, multiply this by dozens or hundreds of lawsuits on every patent, trying to simply sort out whether the patent is even valid. The overall cost to society would be insanely massive. Giving each patent examiner 10X the time (vs the simple doubling requested by the examiner's comment above), and doubling their pay would not even be a rounding error compared to the costs you would impose on every innovative business with such a court-based plan. And, the results would be worse.

Part of the reason I find this annoying is that I also used to start from a Libertarian perspective. It is very attractive. But every time I started to work through how a Libertarian solution would ACTUALLY work, I found that even the first-order consequences were ludicrous, and usually ludicrously expensive. I would up re-inventing the government structures that we already have. So, it is either naive, or a trope to sucker naive people into trying to tear down the institutions that society has already built. Of course these need to be improved, and they should be, but the L approach really doesn't begin to work.