[ajross]

I'm thinking the same thing. I mean... this whole article just smells off. It's a press hit about one patent claiming that somehow this invalidates the Waymo case in a dispute that is fundamentally about trade secrets anyway. I mean, he found prior art on a LIDAR patent. Good. But... why do we care?

[Fricken]

It doesn't invalidate Waymo's whole case, just Waymo's infringement claims against patent 936. Now the case is only about trade secrets.

I'm not seeing what it is about the article that makes it a hit piece. Mark Harris, the guy who wrote it has been covering Uber, Waymo, and self driving cars for years. He's always digging up weird stuff like this. When Apple's project Titan was rumours and hearsay it was Mark Harris out there digging up tangible evidence about what was going on. Harris is pretty good at his job.

He can only report on Swildon's stated reasons for going to all the trouble he did, and Harris can't actually prove that Swildon's efforts were the real reason Waymo withdrew it's infringement claim, only that it seems that way.

[golfer]

Wired fell for this guy's story. This feels incredibly fishy. A random guy feels sorry for Uber, the lovable plucky underdog of all companies... and invests lots of time and $6K to invalidate patents?

It just doesn't compute. There must be a tie between this guy and someone at Uber. Or it's VC backers.

[asabjorn]

Why would it benefit Uber or its backers to hire him unofficially instead of hiring experts directly?

It seems like he was able to make a solid case for invalidating the patent, and hiring experts to investigate patent claims is pretty standard in patent lawsuits. It makes me wonder why Uber didn't hire such experts, or if they did and this guy beat them to the punch.

[rhino369]

You don’t have to invalidate the patents at the USPTO. You can argue invalidity in court. Uber almost certainly looked for prior art.

And in most cases uber wouldn’t use ex parte re-examine. They’d do an inter partes review, which would them to stay in the proceeding and argue for invalidity.

[asabjorn]

What is the difference between inter partes review and ex parte re-examine?

[rhino369]

The biggest difference is ex parte re-exam doesn't allow the requester to participate. It's just the patent owner and the examiners. If the patent owner makes an incorrect statement to try to keep the patent there is nothing you can do. An IPR is a full hearing on the validity. With evidence, depositions, briefing, and oral arguments.

[Buge]

Yeah, it makes Uber look kind of incompetent, like they didn't do their research (Google too). If he was hired by Uber to do the research, only Google would look incompetent.

[jrf6]

It makes their experts look incompetent. Quite a bit of what this guy found should have been low-hanging fruit for an expert witness.

[bonesss]

Any chance they were saving that for the trial?

Strategically, isn't it better for Uber to let Waymo yap on and on about it and then crush them during the trial than to ask the patent office for a review and let Waymo drop the issue before the trial even starts?

I mean... if I knew something embarrassing that opposing council didn't know, and I had no obligation to inform them, I would definitely see that knowledge as a weapon and a strategic tool. Letting Waymo drop it without embarrassment is a bit of a win for Waymo, IMO.

[rhino369]

>Any chance they were saving that for the trial?

Yes.

>Strategically, isn't it better for Uber to let Waymo yap on and on about it and then crush them during the trial than to ask the patent office for a review and let Waymo drop the issue before the trial even starts?

Uber would have to inform Waymo of their invalidity theory way before trial. You can't spring new prior art right before trial.

[zodiac]

The article begins by making a plausible story for his motivation. He had been sued for patent infringement in his own company - "overreaching patents" caused a lot of damage to him personally before and he saw Alphabet use one to attack Uber. And Uber is indeed smaller than Alphabet.

[the_watcher]

The headline implies that. The content of the article actually only implies that it throws off Waymo's patent claims... and they did drop their patent claims related to 936.

Keep in mind, headlines are rarely written by the author of the piece. The headline writer has a very different goal than the reporter.

[Nomentatus]

Inequality is driven in good part by stolen intellectual property and laws that make that increasingly legal or at least unregulated. Fraud in this case might be reversed, but I'll bet it's not prosecuted as such.