[Andrew_Russell]

I am an IP litigator, and I have dealt with patent trolls repeatedly. I have taken these kinds of cases pro bono in the past for small companies (including through the EFF attorney referral list, https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-assistance), and I know that others have as well.

There are definitely low-cost and pro bono (free) options out there for very small businesses. The EFF attorney referral list is a good place to start.

I'm also happy to talk it through with you if you'd like more specific information - my contact information is here: https://shawkeller.com/attorneys/andrew-e-russell/

[jblake]

Wow, thanks Andrew! I sent you an email with the lawsuit. I look forward to hearing from you. What an amazing community!!

[jblake]

I just spoke with Andrew and he was incredibly helpful and is going to help me out. Whew. Thank you Andrew and HN!!

[JGM_io]

Some way the two of you can do a blog or soenthing outlining the main points when dealing with such a threat?

[supernova87a]

Agreed -- it would be a service to the community that helped connect them if they could share some approaches / advice for others in a future similar situation!

[jblake]

I could discuss it with Andrew, but every case will be unique and necessitate its own approach. If I could make one suggestion for anyone dealing with a software patent issue, from my crash-course, is to look into Alice (2014)[1] under Section 101, and review any similar cases, especially by the same entity. You can download case documents pretty cheaply and learn a lot. I paid like 15c a page, and seeing the docket is free. Take the curiosity you have for computers and apply it to the legal system. It's inputs and outputs. But don't go too deep and put your business on the bench. Move the needle a little each day but know you have some time and don't rush into any decisions. Ultimately it's not the end of the world and life will go on.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Intern...

[ajb]

Also look at RECAP https://free.law/recap/

[JGM_io]

Super, thx

[mraza007]

HN never fails to amazes me this is one of the best community where people from all backgrounds can take part in discussion

And I wish all the best

[ahmedalsudani]

Looking forward to the day a patent troll comments on a discussion

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Largest "patent troll" in history was brainchild of and founded by former Microsoft CTO. The person who coined the term "patent troll" helped him start the company. He came from Intel. The saddest part of the idea of "trolling" as a "business" is that it has spread into other areas, outside IT. "Patent trolling" is easy to spot when the patents are software patents as so many software patent are low quality. However, the patent quality problem is not nearly as acute in other industries.

There are in fact legitimate small inventors who must approach large companies, and that situation predates the hardware and software industries, but it was software and hardware people that created this idea of the "patent troll". If there was a "bad" situation that existed before Intellectual Ventures was founded, no solution was offered by those who were negatively affected. Rather, the approach taken was "If you can't beat `em, join `em." One could argue, as a result, the situation went from bad to worse.

[unishark]

> The saddest part of the idea of "trolling" as a "business" is that it has spread into other areas, outside IT.

I'd say the business idea was created by the govt. Finding new ways to profit via exploiting the laws will always happen sooner or later if they exist.

Hardware and software are perhaps unusual because the patent office has such a divergent idea of what is and novel and obvious to experts versus reality, presumably because computer technology moves so fast.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Further reading:

https://www.eff.org/document/memo-uc-regents-re-patent-licen...

What would people call this. What is this LLC actually going to produce, besides licensing revenue or litigation.

[rot13xor]

If the patents are legitimate it seems like a business model similar to debt collectors or "cash now for annuity" companies. A small company might have a winnable case of damages but doesn't have the resources or risk appetite to take the case to trial. It's a rational decision to sell off the claim to another company for X% of the expected value and let them take risk of enforcing the claim.

[gpm]

Taking a look around this thread should make it clear that even if patents are legitimate, many patent trolls are not. They are frequently going after entities that are not actually infringing, or threatening people with obviously invalid patents, because the legal system makes it cheaper to pay the troll than go to court, even if you will win.

(But you probably have a point that if patents are legitimate than an otherwise ethical patent troll would also be legitimate)

[hvis]

> But you probably have a point that if patents are legitimate than an otherwise ethical patent troll would also be legitimate

I'm not sure it's possible to be an "ethical" patent troll. It is a structure explicitly chosen to minimize any collateral in case their patents are thrown out in court, claims are invalidated, and they have to pay to for the counterpart's expenses (and which point the company is simply dissolved, with little to no damage to the owners).

If somebody is so sure their patents are valid, let them form a "real" company which utilizes said patents to bring in revenue, and let that company go to court with competitors and bear the risk of having to pay for frivolous lawsuits.

Not that I think that that software should ever be patentable, of course.

[ethbr0]

People take enough cheap shots at adtech folks, when they offer their perspective.

I assume the patent troll approach would be that they're returning value to their investors, while following the law as it stands.

[silexia]

I hope the entire patent system is simply dissolved. Patents are an artificial restriction on free trade that prevents competition and put profits in the pockets of the greedy undeserving.

[worik]

Patents have their uses. Trade secrets are worse.

We should not through out the baby with the bathwater....

[krastanov]

Are trade secrets really worse? My (uninformed, anecdotal, unsubstantiated) intuition is that reverse engineering, or even just the knowledge that something is possible, ensures that trade secrets are no barrier to progress. While patents definitely seem like a barrier.

[hellbannedguy]

I used to think Patents had their uses.

I looked into just the fees to file a patent, and it's for middle class, upper class folks, institutions, and companies.

The poor guy tinkering around in his wood shed is not filing patents.

Maybe not throwing out all patents us a good idea? I don't know, but an American citizen (low income) all fees shouid be eliminated.

I would like to see a limit on patents anyone can file, or a graduated fee structure?

1 patent free. (low income. $300 everyone else) 2 patent $500 3 patent $500,000 4 patent $1,000,000,000

This would at least limit those guys patenting round corners?

[ClumsyPilot]

"Patents are an artificial restriction on free trade"

So is copyright, without them both the concept of IP dissapears.

Patents at least have to be usefull, and documented publically for future use.

Copyright of code by comparison is an abomination, it does something to your smartphone and data, you have no right to inspect it or change it.

[elcomet]

But don't you believe it encourages innovation ? That's the main argument in favor of patents

[nrdvana]

I think it stalls more innovation than it encourages, and generally prevents new entry into a technology space, because the existing players have all the patents that a new player would need to get started. The fewer players you have in a technology space, the less innovation there will be, because “necessity is the mother of invention” and people don’t generally start working on an idea unless they are exposed to the problems of that field. In theory, a non-player could start a research shop and then sell the results of their research in the form of a patent, and this happens sometimes, but just as often the industry decides they don’t want to pay, and leaves the idea dead until the patent expires.

My pet example is the mosquito laser. They invented it at MIT, and showed that it could effectively shoot down mosquitos that pass between posts. The hardware costs were a bit high, but would come down drastically if someone mass-produced custom chips for it. But, the overall idea is patented, and currently held by a “think tank” licensing company, and no product has emerged. I can only assume that it is because their licensing demands are too high. I’d be happy to start my own company to build mosquito lasers, but I’m sure that their licensing costs would kill any profit from it, so I don’t. And so the world is left with no mosquito lasers for more than a decade.

If you want another extreme example, the 3D printer craze was kicked off by the expiration of a patent on the FDM process: https://www.fabbaloo.com/blog/2020/3/2/the-challenge-and-opp... The innovation in the 3D printer space probably lost 10 years due to that patent.

One possible solution to the problem, without throwing out the entire patent system, would be to create a mandatory licensing system with fixed rates. For example, if you know that your design is about 60% patented, and there is a law that says 20% of your profits have to be given to the patent holder, then you might be able to go ahead and make the product and still turn a reasonable profit. The patent holders would get paid something and the products would continue being innovated without these stupid wait-17-years delays. Also it would put less severe stake on the patents, so people could just argue out the details in court about who gets how much money without worrying that it was going to bankrupt a company or kill the product line.

[gpm]

I really don't

Innovation seems to come from

- Academics, who would be doing the same thing regardless of patent revenue

- Entrepreneurs (and people working for small companies), who are hurt much more by the existence of the patent system than the potential revenue from it.

- People working for big companies, who would almost always be building the exact same product if the patent system didn't exist, except they wouldn't have to worry about working around competitors patents.

Certainly the patent system makes some people money, but it mostly seems to be

- Lawyers (for obvious reasons)

- Owners of already very large and no longer very innovative big companies, who had the time to build up a war chest of patents.

I don't particularly believe that giving extra money to either of those groups encourages innovation, and I certainly don't believe it encourages innovation enough to make up the harm it does to people attempting to be entrepreneurs, people having to work around patents, and so on.

---

One potential exception to this is bio related industries, which are different in that patents are often the primary product a company produces, instead of a byproduct produced by engineering work that happens for other reasons. Without patents you would need to find another way to fund that work, if you want it to happen. I wouldn't call most of that work particularly innovative though, it's mostly just very expensive mind numbing work like "trying a million different possible drugs" and "running huge human trials" and so on.

I would generally prefer that the bio work be funded by a different system, because I don't think the patent system produces good outcomes for society. It creates perverted incentives to always be creating new drugs, instead of finding new ways to use old ones. It creates perverted incentives to not build on each others work. It means that drug companies have the ability to charge substantially more than the cost of production for drugs they produce, meaning people who could be treated cheaply in an optimal system go untreated (note: The marginal cost of treating more people is really small since the expensive part is the R&D that already happened). Moreover it forces drug companies to do that if they want to recoup their R&D costs.

Something like direct government subsidies to companies who discover drugs that people end up using (for medical purposes) seems like a better solution. There are a million variations on that, but I'd claim that basically any variation on that is probably better than patents.

[jlokier]

I believe we would have released open source FPGAs and the accompanying toolchain about 18 years ago if it wasn't for patents. I was getting quite into it, but the patent minefield made it financially too worrying to continue, and it also put off potential collaborators at the time. People literally warned me "you will lose your home - I'm not willing to take that risk". I didn't have a home to lose :p but it was still a downer.

And a novel high performance x86 CPU design. x86 is patented thoroughly, although now it ought to be ok to ship one that has the features from about 20 years ago. I would still recommend to be cautious!

And an ARM one. ARM is known to some in the field as a company with an army of lawyers after all.

A lot of innovation happens when patents expire.

Other people's open source FPGA designs are shipping now (and kudos to the designers - they are really well implemented!), in part thanks to many of the basic patents on FPGAs expiring about now.

I would be quite surprised if RISC-V implementations aren't dependent on a number of key patents having expired by now.

FDM 3D printing (where hot plastic is squirted through a moving nozzle) became popular when the patents on it expired. Some people into open source 3D printing think it happened because that's when people innovated. They did innovate at making it low cost, but the expiry of the patents was a factor too.

At the moment I'm building a specialised high-performance database engine, and I have to explicitly avoid some of the obvious on-disk data layouts because they turn out to be patented. It's annoying having to come up with some "clever" alternative, but I'll find a way.

I don't know if patents encourage innovation on balance, but they've definitely prevented me from shipping some fairly advanced things I've worked on in the past.

I don't begrudge the companies or the system, but I will argue that there is plenty of innovation impeded by it, and in my experience I have never worked anywhere that patents helped, only places where they hindered. It could happen but it hasn't yet.

When I discussed this with a patent attorney once, there was a fascinating gulf between people who dream up patentable (or already patented) solutions almost casually on demand when faced with a problem, and people who think this is impossible and such insights are precious gems that rarely occur. I'm sure it differs between fields, and I know there are some very clever patents. But in software and to an extent hardware, the two fields I'm most familiar with, most patents seem to cover natural solutions to a problem which would occur to anyone skilled in the area when faced with that particular problem.

[treeman79]

Was in adtech for awhile. Glad to be out of it. Lots of neat problems to solve. But yeah it was super creepy

[ajb]

That works both ways - the IP folks have their own echo chamber. I remember reading one article on an IP blog which mentioned that of course IP laywers know much more about what would help innovation than engineers.

[speedgoose]

It happens. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26759051

[DrNuke]

Well, they come in different shapes and tunes: without talking hackers or espionage, you also have “investors” kindly asking for details of your software. In fact, in many fields (and mine, materials informatics), you can file a patent for the end product of your software (novel alloys, in my case) while keeping your code entirely private. How could they troll you then? Patents make their own industry as well.

[pbreit]

And see if you can interest Cloudflare: https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/26/cloudflare-rallies-the-tro...

[major505]

I'm curious. Can you counter sue a company like that? Since they do affect productive companies, that must be some law against that...

[coldpie]

I think these days inter partes review is the way these trolls are slain.

[chalst]

Not familiar with this idea, I searched and found this

https://www.gearhartlaw.com/2016-9-8-a-way-to-defeat-a-troll...

IIUC, inter partes review is a relatively recent (9 y.o.?) patent law practice that allows 3rd parties to challenge patents directly to the patent office any time between patent award and expiry. I had thought there was only a short period this could be done after award of the patent.

[nceqs3]

Yeah but it costs 20k

[bdowling]

It's more than that. The fee to request the IPR is $19,000, plus $375 for each claim in excess of 20. If the USPTO decides to institute the IPR, the post-institution fee is $22,500, plus $750 for each claim in excess of 20. [0] Attorney's fees will be far more than these amounts.

[0] https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?n=37y1.0.1.3.12#se...

[nceqs3]

Funny how Obama pushed this as a good thing for small inventors.

[shmerl]

You'd think it should be a law against racketeering (something like RICO). Some tried to use that against patent trolls, but it didn't work.

[Trias11]

Giving away the idea to drug lord might work.

When troll will try to annoy the new owner - the troll will be dealt with in the way he deserves.

[quickthrower2]

We just need a “well duh!” Doctrine on the patent. If you can ask and answer it as an intern interview question (e.g. how to cache a QR code database)

[ClumsyPilot]

The patents already include that, they are meant to be only given on things that are not standard practice or obvious to any competent proffesional. Just software patents fucked it up

[oh_sigh]

As long as the patent is valid there is nothing racketeering about it.

[treeman79]

Had a professor who wat was at big company. Forget which. IBM came in with a list of patents that were being violated. Professor went through the list and managed to document fully how each one didn’t apply to company. One of which was for pythagorean theorem.

They had another meeting to go over it with IBM to show results. Not impressed IBM said fine you don’t violate those. We have a hundred thousand more patents.

Are you buying a license for these, or should we go find more that you “violate”

Company purchased a license.

This was 20 years ago.

[jjeaff]

That is basically just a rephrasing of, "This is an awfully nice store you got here. Would be a shame if something were to happen to it."

[mywittyname]

I've always wondered if sublicensing was a way to get around this. Instead of owning the core technology itself, set up an offshore holding company to own the technology rights, then "license" them out. The main company probably can't be sued since they have a legal contract for the tech and if they go after the holding company, fine, the parent company can then "license" tech from another, similar holding company.

[ldargin]

I read that story quite some time ago. The company was Sun Microsystems.

Edit: A link to that story: https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html

[treeman79]

Oh nice. I was thinking sun. But wasn’t sure.

[ddlsmurf]

Why wouldn't they just go "fine, let's deal with your next batch in court, good luck keeping them" ?

[ta1234567890]

Because it was probably more expensive (and risky) to go to court and spend a ton of money on lawyers than just pay the license and be done with it.

[shmerl]

You can assume in the vast majority of cases patent trolls don't have valid patents. And if even if they are "valid", the patent system is so messed up, that they have to be invalid in reality.

Trolls' method is exactly racketeering because it's extorting money using threat tactics. "You don't want something worse happening to you? Better pay up XYZ amount!". It's not going get much more classic protection racket than that. Except they threaten not with beating you up, but with you spending millions on court cases. I'd say trolls getting jail time for this garbage should be a good medicine for them.

[rhino369]

>You can assume in the vast majority of cases patent trolls don't have valid patents.

Right, but law actually presumes they are valid. Which is why its tough to go after a troll for asserting a valid patent.

[oh_sigh]

Without knowing the content of the patents(merely that they are valid) - would you be able to differentiate between a patent troll and someone with a great patent that wants their hard work licensed instead of taken for free?

[coldpie]

Who is taking anything for free? Do you think people go read through the patent database to get product ideas? If I create a product and bring it to market without any knowledge of your patent, why should I pay you just because you invented it earlier and then sat on it?

[linsomniac]

Can you counter sue? Absolutely!

But, as I tell my kids: Just because you're right doesn't mean you won't go bankrupt proving it in a court of law.

[iajrz]

the court can remain unconvinced longer than you can stay solvent

[crucialfelix]

It's usually cheaper to settle than to go to court. A company I worked for got hit (apparently using TLS violates their patent. Even though it's the browser that initiated the connection). Company simply paid up because it was cheaper.

[desine]

Unfortunately this is one of those instances where looking out for oneself (in a business sense) does more harm to society than eating the costs and fighting the battle.

IANASBO (I am not a Small Business Owner) so I can't say I wouldn't necessarily do any different, sadly. But I like to think I would.

[rolph]

perhaps patenting the entire process of, or a critical component of patent trolling, would be feasible

[zem]

prior art: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20140301

[erik998]

lotnet.com Lawsuits from Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs, sometimes called “patent trolls”) can be a drain on resources for any company. With software a primary PAE target, and software becoming an integral part of all industries — putting nearly all companies at risk of being sued.

That’s why leading companies have come together to form a collaborative, voluntary community to reduce this risk – one that grows in importance as the economic environment becomes increasingly uncertain.

[whynotkeithberg]

Awesome!! I hope you're able to help OP out if they call on you. Good luck to everyone who gets involved in this!

[gaws]

I'm blown away by your willingness to take on these cases pro bono. There are too many greedy lawyers out there who put money over people.

[p1necone]

I wouldn't call it greedy in all cases. Hard to be altruistic when doing so would mean you couldn't pay your rent/bills.

[nuclearnice1]

> There are too many greedy lawyers out there who put money over people.

Name one

[gaws]

Google exists.

[jbb_hn]

Thanks for helping to restore my faith in humanity.

[HiroProtagonist]

This is very cool and generous of you Andrew.

[durkie]

Can confirm! We got a patent troll lawsuit a few years ago as well, and were connected with a great pro-bono lawyer through EFF.

[MAMAMassakali]

You're super cool!!

Also wanted to ask, how can a software guy get into IP law?

[socks]

As a software guy married to a lawyer, be careful what you wish for. The legal industry seems hell bent on inefficiency and fuzzy regulations.

[PaulHoule]

Get a law degree.

[pbhjpbhj]

Or work at a patent office (I only know of the USPTO that does plain software patents, there a thing everywhere but it's complicated) ...

[zaphirplane]

I am interested in knowing why you do this for free (I’m assuming from context)

[kkielhofner]

Wow, this is fantastic information and an amazing offer!

[wangarific]

This is amazing, you are awesome for doing this.

[meowface]

Thank you for your service.

[brodouevencode]

Good Guy ~Greg~ Andrew

[RedditKon]

Good guy counsel