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The House Hearing on Abusive Patent Litigation: Webster's Report ~pj Update | 170 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Patents, Abstrations, Gödel, Escher & Bach
Authored by: IMANAL_TOO on Sunday, March 17 2013 @ 04:48 AM EDT
The whole is larger than the pieces.
"Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (commonly GEB) is a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter, described by his publishing company as "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll".

On its surface, GEB examines logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, discussing common themes in their work and lives. At a deeper level, the book is an exposition of concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence.

Through illustration and analysis, the book discusses how self-reference and formal rules allow systems to acquire meaning despite being made of "meaningless" elements. It also discusses what it means to communicate, how knowledge can be represented and stored, the methods and limitations of symbolic representation, and even the fundamental notion of "meaning" itself."

This book should have been read by all members of the USPTO as I think it relates very well to software patents and why they shouldn't be patentable.



---
______
IMANAL


.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Thank you, Webster
Authored by: Ian Al on Sunday, March 17 2013 @ 05:34 AM EDT
'The patents on lip service lapsed long ago.'

You need to walk a mall in their, shiny, expensive shoes.

Another case of interesting reporting. As you say, we know how the story goes,
but you made it absorbing, right to the end.

---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid!

[ Reply to This | # ]

Corrections Thread
Authored by: bugstomper on Sunday, March 17 2013 @ 05:47 AM EDT
Please summarize in the Title box error->correction or s/error/correction/ to
make it easy to scan see what needs to be corrected and to avoid duplication of
effort.

[ Reply to This | # ]

News Picks Threads
Authored by: bugstomper on Sunday, March 17 2013 @ 05:50 AM EDT
Please type the title of the News Picks article in the Title box of your
comment, and include the link to the article in HTML Formatted mode for the
convenience of the readers after the article has scrolled off the News Picks
sidebar.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Off Topic threads
Authored by: bugstomper on Sunday, March 17 2013 @ 06:00 AM EDT
Please stay off topic in these threads. Use HTML Formatted mode to make your
links nice and clickable.

[ Reply to This | # ]

WVX file
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, March 17 2013 @ 06:42 AM EDT
The .wvx file contains a link that you can manually extract and give to any
player that supports the mms:// protocol. I tried mplayer and Parole and both
worked.

[ Reply to This | # ]

The House Hearing on Abusive Patent Litigation: Webster's Report ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, March 17 2013 @ 08:17 AM EDT
In response to Congressman Richmond, a Democrat from this reporter's home town district of New Orleans and the great state that is the only foreign country of the union, Louisiana
Heh. Sorry, webster, but actually, the state that is truly not treated as part of the union is Hawaii. (And Alaska, but they're at least on the continent.) Every time I have to deal with someone from the mainland, the inevitable comment is "See, in the states..." And when I point out that Hawaii has been a state for over 50 years, the response is, "Well, yeah, but [insert idiot reason here]" The most common justification is that since Hawaii isn't part of the continent we don't count.

Gets a mite tiresome.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Comes transcribing
Authored by: feldegast on Sunday, March 17 2013 @ 09:05 AM EDT
Thank you for your support (still lots to do people!)

---
IANAL
My posts are ©2004-2013 and released under the Creative Commons License
Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
P.J. has permission for commercial use.

[ Reply to This | # ]

  • 4433 - Authored by: feldegast on Sunday, March 17 2013 @ 09:06 AM EDT
  • 7383 - Authored by: macliam on Sunday, March 17 2013 @ 04:17 PM EDT
  • 7384 - Authored by: macliam on Sunday, March 17 2013 @ 04:19 PM EDT
The House Hearing on Abusive Patent Litigation: Webster's Report ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, March 17 2013 @ 11:39 AM EDT
Interesting about the local connections of the principals mentioned in Webster's narrative:
Rep Howard Coble, of course, is a 30-year veteran of Congress, from Greensboro NC
Rep George Holding is a 2-month veteran of Congress, whose strangely-shaped district covers part of Wake County, NC
SAS has its corporate headquarters in Cary, Wake County, NC
Cisco has its RTP, NC, operations in the Wake County, NC, portion of RTP
-
Joef, Cary resident, on borrowed computer.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Compare and contrast
Authored by: macliam on Sunday, March 17 2013 @ 04:07 PM EDT

There is an article on the PatentlyO blog" linking to a blog posting by Prof. Adam Mossoff (George Mason University School of Law) on the website Truth on the Market, entitled The SHIELD Act: When Bad Economic Studies make Bad Laws. It is full of criticism of "conventional wisdom" and alleged methological flaws in academic studies of the economic impact of patent trolls, with pointers to other studies that allegedly set the record straight. The article points out that there aren't accepted definitions of terms like patent troll or patent assertion entity, and asks: "How can we be expected to have a reasonable discussion about patent policy when our basic terms of public discourse shift in meaning from blog to blog?"

I watched the media file of the congressional hearing this afternoon. The very real problems faced by retail businesses and by customers and end-users of technological businesses from patent troll litigation were very graphically described by four of the witnesses, and committee members from both parties had their own stories to tell. The stories told brought home the basic unfairness of a system where defending against patent trolls costs big money, yet patent trolls walk off scot-free when they "lose" cases they have brought in the Eastern District of Texas and elsewhere.

[ Reply to This | # ]

The House Hearing on Abusive Patent Litigation: Webster's Report ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, March 17 2013 @ 04:30 PM EDT
Patents are intended to be for the benefit of the inventor. The re-sale of
patents should not be legal as it does not benefit the inventor. Maybe the
inventor may license or sell but beyond that nill. Anyone who buys or licences
from the inventor should only get the right of use not that of litigation.

This would not prevent all of the abuse but it would kill off a large part of
it.

Tufty

[ Reply to This | # ]

The House Hearing on Abusive Patent Litigation: Webster's Report ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, March 17 2013 @ 07:35 PM EDT
A significant difference between the patent system and other disciplines
involving adherence to the law is that the patent system:

a) continuously adjusts the legal realm wherein inventors or else producers can
or may realise new 'inventions' in the form of products or else services, and
b) in comparison to other legal code, the patent system represents a tremendous
amount of rules to which an inventor or producer must adhere to for new
inventions

I seem to remember that some time ago (20 years or so), the patent office
decided to be more lenient in the granting of patents because the office's
ability to decide on eligibility for a patent had become increasingly difficult.
The idea was to defer much of the decision of patent eligibility and
corresponding determination of infringement to subsequent legal proceedings
between plaintiffs holding patents and corresponding alleged infringers of
patents.

This deference of deciding on eligibility or else infringement of a patent has
clearly translated into much higher (discovery) costs for defendants than what
the patent office previously had to incur. For a defendant, the discovery costs
are clearly not interchangeable with what would otherwise have been provided by
the patent office in the form of a (better) determination of patent eligibility.


While we may consider understanding and adhering to legal code to be a
relatively difficult or else specialised process, such that for this we
frequently rely on legal advice, such effort required to conform to legal code
is undeniably dwarfed in comparison to understanding and adhering to a (patent)
system that is a) changing at a much faster pace than any legal code and b),
involving a much greater data set at any given moment when compared to other
legal code. Even with specialisation, that is patent lawyers, I conjecture,
ceteris paribus, that the legal advice provided by patent lawyers is of much
less significance than legal advice provided by lawyers for other disciplines of
the law. This is not necessarily because patent lawyers are less capable than
other types of lawyers, rather because patent lawyers are confronted with issues
a) and b), which invariably leads to less accurate and more ambiguous
understanding of eligibility of or else infringement on existing patents.

Summarizing this, much of the effort which originally had been the
responsibility of a governmental agency, is now translated into legal
proceedings which have significantly different effects for those involved in
patent disputes.

If the patent office itself is acknowledging the difficulties involved with
determining patent eligibility, it shouldn't be so that the patent office or
else Congress refrains from dealing with the problem by deferring the efforts
and corresponding responsibilities required to maintain the ever growing patent
system to the legal system in the form of legal proceedings. Conversely, the
legal system, in its current form, is incapable of representing a
*corresponding* substitution of the role which previously was more so provided
by the patent office in the determination of patent eligibility and related
infringement.

While the patent office may once have genuinely considered (more) deference of
determination of patent eligibility to legal proceedings to be appropriate, this
conceptualization has clearly not translated into a practical substitution for
the responsibilities of the patent office. This deference has been practical for
the patent office, but has become increasingly impractical for businesses and
inventors involved in patent disputes.

We're not determining eligibility of or infringement on patents -a role which
the patent office should be more prominent in providing- by conceding to patent
claims in the face of tremendous discovery costs.

[ Reply to This | # ]

The House Hearing on Abusive Patent Litigation: Webster's Report ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, March 17 2013 @ 10:05 PM EDT
The NPE gentleman (I am being polite tonight, it is Sunday and all :-) made
claims that we can't throw rule 11 sanctions because that would hurt the little
guy.

Well, guess what, the current system hurts the little guy, the big guy and all
their customers.

If someone can throw something out there just to see what sticks, and someone
had no idea that they were using something that some vendor didn't get a proper
license for (or the vendor of a vendor of a vendor), well guess what, we are all
screwed.

Even if we don't have to pay directly, we have to pay higher costs for the items
we do buy! Both the folks who sell us stuff, and the people who sell them stuff
have to have extra people around, and insurance to cover some of this baloney!

Make the NPEs have a problem if their claims aren't realized. If they have a
legitimate claim, then they should have no problem with a system that punishes
them for doing something wrong. They only have a problem with a change to the
system if it doesn't favor the frivolous see what sticks kind of lawsuits.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Alternate video..
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 18 2013 @ 04:53 AM EDT
It didn't want to play nice for me either, so I grabbed it and transcoded it.

http://kittiesgomew.com/patent_hearing-theora.mkv

Be warned, it's over three hours long and over 300MB in size, plus the original was pretty low quality so the transcode didn't turn out very well, but.

[ Reply to This | # ]

The Update regarding the Reports
Authored by: webster on Monday, March 18 2013 @ 10:44 AM EDT
.

At the hearing when the battle of the reports came up, the BU
Report about NPE billion dollar attacks and the Schwartz
Report disputing the troll damage by Gurst the troll lawyer,
One couldn't help but think of the Climate Change Denial
studies.
.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Patent Troll {- and the multiple definitions thereof
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 18 2013 @ 12:56 PM EDT

First: I like the concept of the Shield Act. Part of the problem it's supposed to resolve is counter-suing the Patent Plaintiff. The NPE's were quite heavily designed as to have as few resources as possible so that if they loose, they don't really pay anything.

As a result, I like that aspect of it. If implemented correctly - it means the practicing entities will stop using NPE's to act on their behalf.

Second: Patent Troll is a definition that should include practicing entities!

There is a diversion causing a lot of energy to be spent. It is directed at a very specific type of patent troll. This causes those unfamiliar with the real problems of the patent system to focus on trying to figure out how to create a bandaid that will stop the bleeding - yet doing nothing about the knives that are causing the cuts in the first place. It's possible the bandaid will work partially thereby causing the practicing entities to initiate their own lawsuits as they should have done in the first place. But it sure would be nice to get some real solutions in place.

The definition of Patent Troll as applied:

    Non practicing entities!
There are two core problems with that:
    1) Without invalid patents in the first place - the Trolls would be limited in how many patents they could apply their tactics to!
    2) There are practicing entities applying the same tactics the non-practicing entities are!
As a result, the definition of Patent Troll is lacking because it does not fully describe the troll. Let's consider a definition of Troll as applied from the stories of our child-hood.
    An entity who camps out at a bridge the entity had no part of creating nor claim of ownership over, on land the entity has no claim of ownership of, who then claims a toll from anyone who wishes to use the bridge.
So let's refine the definition of patent troll:
    An entity who mis-uses the patent system in order to lay claim to an invention they otherwise have no claim over!
Examples:
    Example 1: The entity knows they can not patent E=MC2 and if they word it clearly like that, it would be rejected. So they choose to reword it in such a way as to increase the odds of getting the grant.
      to determine the amount of energy by
        1) realizing the mass of the subject
        2) of which claim 1 is then computed against the result of the factor
        3) which factor is the resultant speed of electromagnetic radiation computed against itself
        4) the result of claims 2 and 3 resolve in producing the amount of energy
    Example 2: The entity knows the defendant does not infringe their patent, but lays claim to infringement anyway in order to acquire a much smaller licensing fee then it would cost the defendant to properly defend.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Easy Fix?
Authored by: dm42 on Tuesday, March 19 2013 @ 09:58 AM EDT
Ok... I'm a simplistic sort of guy... I think the best way to deal with this is
as follows:

In any patent lawsuit - if the defendant prevails one or both of the following
immediately happens:
1) The defendant is awarded 75% of the initial damage estimates made by the
plantiff in their initial filing (no appeal may be filed until this amount is
paid in full or placed into escrow pending appeal).
2) The asserted patent along with ALL future royalty payments under any
agreements previously made are immediately assigned to the defendant and
divested from the plantiff (or assigned to escrow pending appeal).

Short and simple and should be "toothy" enough for NPE's to think
twice.

[ Reply to This | # ]

The House Hearing on Abusive Patent Litigation: Webster's Report ~pj Update
Authored by: The Cornishman on Tuesday, March 19 2013 @ 11:03 AM EDT

Attributed to Mr Gerst:

...the strongest patent system in the world and the world's most innovative country.

This sounds suspiciously like a logical fallacy. Q. How is the US patent system strong? A. The USPTO issues 10x patents every year! Q. How is innovation measured in this country? A. The USPTO issues 10x patents every year!

The same objective fact, but it supports neither conclusion unless you accept (wrongly) that {strong patent system} <=> {much innovation} by that measure alone, without addressing the quality of the issued patents.

Mr Johnson:

Help the NPE targets coordinate their activity. NPEs fear coordination.

Who wants to set up a wiki, maybe at www.trolltargets.org. Anyone? It must be pretty terrifying if you're a smalltown coffee-shop owner with a couple of Wi-Fi hotspots that you're asked to stump up $2,000 each for. To establish that you're not actually alone would be a comfort, at least.

And another thing. $2,000? For operating a $100 Wi-Fi device? In the vernacular, 'Yer 'avin a laff'.

As Mr Johnson says, damages ought to be limited to the value of the product.
In most places in the world the loser pays. The judges here don't want to get into that.

Can anybody explain why they don't?

Disclaimer: I have not viewed the video of the testimonies, nor read the written evidence.

---
(c) assigned to PJ

[ Reply to This | # ]

The House Hearing on Abusive Patent Litigation: Webster's Report ~pj Update
Authored by: albert on Tuesday, March 19 2013 @ 02:49 PM EDT
Patent trolls are a major problem, but not the only problem.

I'm concerned with the following points:

1. Congress will make another 'band-aid' bill, that will appear good, but end up
making things worse.

2. The Patent Office will continue to issue swarms of bogo-patents.

3. Patent lawsuits will continue to clog the system.

4. The business of computer technology in the U.S. will slowly grind to a halt.


What kind of country lets consumers be sued for something they did on a computer
with a commercial product? (not 'hacking')

It's too bad that the U.S., which made such big contributions to computer
technology, will lose its leadership in the field.

Fix the system, don't patch it.

1. Software patents need to be abolished. There's no other way to do it right.
Software patents include codecs, encryption algorithms, methods or processes
consisting solely of software.

2. Business method patents need to be abolished.

3. Anything to do with genetics should not be patentable.

Yes, these are draconian steps. But by simplifying the system, you eliminate
the inevitable attempts at working around the existing patent laws. The parsing
and arguing about definitions of the broadly worded patent laws we now have, and
broadly worded patents, is ridiculous.

I speak only of the U.S. here. This country is so enmeshed with the pursuit of
money, that it fails to see the problems associated with that goal. When all
legislation is geared toward businesses, what else can we expect?

Businesses want:

1. Monopolies. Long lasting, preferably forever.
2. Low taxes. ('no taxes' is better).
3. No environmental regulations.
4. No regulations on business methods or finance.
5. Subsidies.
6. Less legal accountability (none is better).

We don't have to imagine this kind of world, we can already see it coming.

I won't go into the details of how our system works. It is a symbiotic
relationship among hundreds of entities, including governmental agencies.
That's why it's difficult to correct only one part at a time. Fortunately, the
patent system is one that would be relatively easy to fix. The high cost of
health care, for example, would be much more difficult to correct.



PTTC

[ Reply to This | # ]

In a land full of guns, why has nobody been shot?
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 19 2013 @ 04:15 PM EDT
It is amazing that nobody who has been unjustly robbed of their goods by patent
trolls supported by congress has yet taken action against them. While there is
no legal recourse against patent trolls, there is plenty of illegal recourse.
Since the original theft was unjust, whether supported by law or not,
retribution is justifiable, whether supported by law or not. So why has it not
happened? Why has billy goat gruff not thrown a troll to his death under the
bridge? What a wonderful country America is!

[ Reply to This | # ]

Benjamin Franklin on Patents
Authored by: TomWiles on Wednesday, March 20 2013 @ 03:29 PM EDT
Benjamin Franklin designed and patented a design for a pipe (smoking).

He never produced the pipe but some years later a pipe manufacturer produced the
Franklin pipe for which Benjamin never received any form of compensation.

When asked about this by a journalist Benjamin Franklin replied.

I chose note to exploit the patent therefore I have no moral claim against those
that choose to honor me by manufacturing the pipe.

Tom

[ Reply to This | # ]

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