'Unpatent' Begins Crowdfunding Challenges To Bad Patents (unpatent.co) 115
"Unpatent is a crowdfunding platform that eliminates bad patents," reads their web site. "We do that by crowdsourcing the prior art -- that is all the evidence that makes clear that a patent was not novel -- and filing reexamination requests to the patent office." An anonymous Slashdot reader reports:
"Everyone in the world can back the crowdfunding campaign against the patent," explains their site, which includes a special section with "Featured stupid patents". The first $16,000 raised covers the lawyers and fees at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and "The rest is distributed to those who find valid prior art...any evidence that a patent is not novel. We review all the prior art pieces and reward those that may invalidate a claim... Then, we file an ex partes reexamination to the USPTO."
Their team includes Lee Cheng, the legal officer at Newegg, "worldwide renowned as the patent trolls' nightmare," as well as Lus Cuende, who created his own Linux distro when he was 15 and is now CTO of Stampery, a company using the Bitcoin blockchain to notarize data.
They're currently targeting the infamous US8738435 covering "personalized content relating to offered products and services," which in February the EFF featured as their "stupid patent of the month." Its page on Unpatent.co argues that "Taking something so obvious such as personalizing content and offers...and writing the word online everywhere shouldn't grant you a monopoly over it." Unpatent's slogan? "We invalidate patents that shouldn't exist."
Their team includes Lee Cheng, the legal officer at Newegg, "worldwide renowned as the patent trolls' nightmare," as well as Lus Cuende, who created his own Linux distro when he was 15 and is now CTO of Stampery, a company using the Bitcoin blockchain to notarize data.
They're currently targeting the infamous US8738435 covering "personalized content relating to offered products and services," which in February the EFF featured as their "stupid patent of the month." Its page on Unpatent.co argues that "Taking something so obvious such as personalizing content and offers...and writing the word online everywhere shouldn't grant you a monopoly over it." Unpatent's slogan? "We invalidate patents that shouldn't exist."
prior art (Score:1)
Shit (Score:1)
There goes my patent on [a-z0-9]*
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Oh, it explains the [abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz012345789]* I've seen. They are trying to circumvent your patent.
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Can't be. The 6 is missing.
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There goes my patent on [a-z0-9]*
How about:
Convert all upper case to lower case
cat my_file | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'
or
cat my_file | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
Reverse the options and you can convert lowercase to uppercase. Read the manual entry "tr" for further fun and games.
We have just invalidated your patent. Now pay court costs and consider yourself spanked, not because you tried such a silly patent but because you did not write in convoluted "legalese" which would enable our lawyers to do some very needed renovations to their
Re:Doesn't this encourage bad behavior? (Score:4, Informative)
Filing patents has both non-zero cost, and non-zero latency.
You need to make a patent that is good enough to make it past the USPTO (which is harder than people think), spend money on the filing, and hope this program is still around in 2 years when your patent is actually approved. In the grand scheme of things if you can actually write a good patent you can almost certainly make better money by just using that skill to write patents.
Re:Doesn't this encourage bad behavior? (Score:4, Informative)
... and hope this program is still around in 2 years when your patent is actually approved.
Two years if you're lucky.
Re:Doesn't this encourage bad behavior? (Score:4, Informative)
good enough to make it past the USPTO (which is harder than people think)
Which in itself is part of the problem, though Slashdotters would rather just whine about the Big Bad Gubmint.
It's traditionally been, and remains to be, difficult to get a patent. As a result, patent law is structured such that once a patent is approved, it's almost certainly some kind of groundbreaking new technology. Then if someone else end up with the same technology, they must certainly have copied the patent, and it's effectively the burden of the defendant to show that their design process excluded the duplicated patent, effectively requiring proving a negative and undermining the public good for which the patent system was created. In essence, the patent system is assumed to be infallible, so its failures have a significant impact.
I've put some consideration into a system in which the first step in any patent lawsuit is a mandatory reevaluation of the patent claims, paid for by the USPTO (and amortized into filing fees), and waivable if the reevaluation was done recently enough to remain relevant to current societal standards. Part of that evaluation would weigh whether the patent is really a specific application, or a new technology that will have wide use. In essence, once a patent is granted, it's only partially valuable until it's been tested in court, and its value as a commodity (especially for trade between NPEs) depends significantly on the likelihood of the patent to stand up to a fresh examination. On the other hand, a novel patent with specific demonstrable products would be more likely to survive a trial, so it would be more valuable to investors interested in creating products.
Doesn't solve the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't solve the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Morally speaking if you invalidate a patent that a corrupt patent office approved without obvious due diligence, should you not be able to recover that cost from the corrupted patent office and then legally speaking be able to charge the approving officer of that patent with a constitutional crime ie approving a patent that did not adhere to constitutional requirements.
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Who knows, IANAL (I like ANAL).
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"Constitutional requirements" - there are no Constitutional requirements for patents. That is in the law.
I like the points you're making above, but this statement is incorrect. There *are* constitutional requirements on patents (and copyrights, which come from the same clause). Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, empowers the United States Congress:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Nearly every word in that clause circumscribes -- and
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Correction: Congress may do that. The Constitution says they have the power; it does not say they are obligated to avail themselves of it.
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-1 Baseless Namecalling. There are many problems with the patent system, and IP laws in general. Corruption at the USPTO isn't one of them. If you have evidence of actual corruption -- you know, bribery, graft, extortion, embezzlement, favoritism based on political patronage -- please provide. Or are we all just going to become little Donald Trumps and say mean words instead of making reasoned arguments?
Would it be name calling to say the OP sounded like some alt+right screedism? Corruption versus a bad paradigm years ago by USPTO office people who didn't understand computing, and therefore didn't understand the unintended consequences.
So yeah, my money is on pepe' doin their thing.
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Each and every falsely approved patent is a sure sign of corruption, each and every single one, that was not novel or unique or new. That it the job of any patent office and they are failing at it and that is corruption of office.
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Each and every falsely approved patent is a sure sign of corruption, each and every single one, that was not novel or unique or new. That it the job of any patent office and they are failing at it and that is corruption of office.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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Morally speaking if you invalidate a patent that a corrupt patent office approved without obvious due diligence, should you not be able to recover that cost from the corrupted patent office and then legally speaking be able to charge the approving officer of that patent with a constitutional crime ie approving a patent that did not adhere to constitutional requirements.
Pepe'?
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Wot? Hold a stupid, lazy, possibly corrupt gummint official responsible for his actions? Now you're just talking crazy!
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Stop with the bullshit lazy government worker crap, it was always a lie a joke, sure there are bad ones but in the minority. The real problem ones are political appointees joining in on the corruption of the corporate selected politicians. So corrupt corporations, get corrupt politicians elected and those corrupt politicians put corrupt people (approved by those corporations) in charge of government departments, to run them into the ground, to hand out no bid contracts, to privatise elements at a major loss
Re:Doesn't solve the problem (Score:4, Informative)
You are making the lawyers lot of money though I guess
How? Read their site -- the donated money in excess of the PTO filing fees gets paid to the prior art searchers.
which is probably why the Newegg lawyer thought of this brilliant idea
Or maybe it's because every bad patent that's killed through this process is one less bad patent that Newegg may have to pay real money to fight later on.
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You are making the lawyers lot of money though I guess
How? Read their site -- the donated money in excess of the PTO filing fees gets paid to the prior art searchers.
Which is in and of itself a chore, given that I've seen a few patents that I'm not that sure were not in point of fact created by a very good parody generator that has been well-fed on patent applications. I can fully believe that a good prior art searcher deserves fully to be paid.
I'd also like to feel a bit more confident that you couldn't manage to get the patent office to grant a patent on a filing that is nonsensical, but I don't expect that to happen.
Agreed but still better than nothing. (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed, this is what Slashdotters have been saying for over a decade now, but still there is no political apetite from either side of politics in just about all western countries from actually addressing this at the cause.
Meanwhile patent wars are being fought all over the world hurting consumers world wide because at the end of the day they are the ones that are paying for this nonsense. At least there is someone out there trying to fix something. Yes it's like pissing into the ocean but if a few stupid patents get squashed that's still better than none.
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Gears and levers exist (Score:3)
Mechanical devices should be an easy target. Let's start there.
Gears and levers already exist and are already capable of doing the operations they can be assembled to do. Fixed!
Next up, let's invalidate all of the "X, but with Y" patents. Travel was already possible without airplanes, therefore airplanes were not novel. Fixed!
That's two huge classes of patents made invalid by very simple, very irrefutable logic. Tackle those first, and you'll take the funding away from the trolls and they won't be able to f
Several dollars would hardly matter (Score:2)
> Not worth the cost to build and store it in the USPTO? Then its not worthy of government force backed patent protection.
A *PGA costs several dollars. The patent process costs several thousand dollars. Burning a PGA wouldn't change the cost of the patent at all.
Add a self-addressed, stamped envelope too! (Score:2)
> It's not a big deal, so you should give in to me.
It's not so much "giving in to you" as rolling my eyes at you.
I know, make them send a self-addressed, stamped envelope too, that'll fix the greedy bastards. â--"Ìâ--" You have some strong opinions, undiluted by any understanding of facts. That, by itself, is nothing bad. I once knew no facts at all! I didn't even know mybown name. When people gave me the facts, I -learned-. One can choose to learn, or one can choose to stubbornl
Works because of one very important fact- few trol (Score:5, Interesting)
There is one fact which is rarely pointed out when discussing patent trolls, but I think it's important.
Over 80% of all patent suits are filed by just four trolls.
Obviously some patent litigation has to do with legitimate disputes, so those four trolls do probably 95% of the trolling. If you put those four out business, that takes care of 95% of the problem. It also shows other potential trolls that trolls end up broke.
The people behind this initiative don't just yip yap about patents on Slashdot for a few minutes, they are professionals who have actually fought these trolls. They understand the problem better than you or I do. If they think this approach will help put the four major trolls out of business, they're probably right.
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Over 80% of all patent suits are filed by just four trolls.
Interesting. Can you please list them?
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[ Sorry in advance for the stupid l33t spelling, but the lameness filter won't let me write the word tr0ll.]
I wonder about "patent tr0lls". The inventor patents Invention X, then wants to monetize their invention. They can build a business (slow and risky) or they can sell their patent to someone else, such as a manufacturer, in exchange for money. Whether or not they get a lot of money or a little money is not important; what is important is that they agreed to the sale. The patent now belongs to Compa
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Actually, I think the main reason they're considered evil is because their behavior is fundamentally a legal form of extortion--it would be like if I started claiming you trespassed on my property...because your shadow happened to possibly cross just slightly into it, maybe. These are not companies that in their behavior can be distinguished from Investment Company Q which will actively do things like try to find a company to license the patent out to, or offer Companies A, B and C a chance to license X be
Subjective factors (makes law hard) (Score:2)
I agree there are perfectly reasonable and legitimate reasons to sell a patent, and for the buyer to license it.
The few companies who file the vast majority of patent suits (the trolls) are characterized by attempting to retroactively license questionable patents and engaging in various forms of generally predatory conduct in so doing. This combination of factors has a siginificant subjective element, you know when someone is being a slimeball even though you can't establish a rigorous definition of "slime
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It appears to be tied to a word count. I think that if I had cut back to one instance of the T-word, it would have been fine.
But it appears to be following the same pattern as any authoritarian's response to criticism: whether it be Chinese citizens talking about Falun Gong, or slashdotters complaining about trolls, those in charge trot out the Great Firewall and censor them.
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In addition to SlaveToTheGrind's comments:
The disease in the USPTO is a lack of funding to bring in enough competent personnel to do enough research to be able to reject invalid patents. The USPTO makes _more_ money if filers keep coming back with more narrowly-worded patent applications to bypass the latest rejection (and the fees to examine the latest submission). They make _less_ money if the filers get a patent accepted that never should have been accepted.
Newegg and its partner organizations _are_ trea
Re:Doesn't solve the problem (Score:4, Informative)
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Hi there, Luis from Unpatent here. I agree the patent system is broken. However, the same way as we cannot cure VIH right away, we gotta treat the symptoms at least. It's the same for our crowdfunding platform. We're actually in the process of automating the lawyers' task in the process, so no, our aim is not to make lawyers rich(er).
You lost me for a second there on VIH. I assume you're a native Spanish speaker? It's HIV in English. I'm guessing I was not the only one that was slightly thrown by this. Otherwise, your English is excellent.
I fully support this (Score:2)
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Not self sustainable.
To challenge the copyright cartels, the kind of rights holding group you envision needs to charge a simple one-off use fee if you intend to use the owned property to create a derivative work, to obtain a suitable license. That fee money is used to purchase additional properties that should be in the public domain.
As long as the fee is minimal (say, 10$, to make as many derivative works as you want), and retains some level of viral permanence (derivative works are given reciprocity for
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Its a bit like how an insurance company works. For every person wanting to make a derivative work, there is a subtle risk that somewhere in the chain there will be litigation. This small fee helps cover that, and provides the slush to protect the properties it manages licensing for.
bad patents (Score:1, Insightful)
All patents are bad patents. The ownership of ideas is immoral and should be abolished.
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The concept of ownership historically only applied to scarce goods. It was a solution to a scarcity problem. Knowledge is not scarce, although teaching it may be. The idea of "Intellectual Property" for knowledge is a relative recent one in human history (trying to keep it secret is not, but that is another matter) . Not all new ideas are good, or implemented properly at first try. IP is one of them.
In a sense you can compare it to slavery. At first it looked like a good idea and solved some problems for so
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Correct, I do not own a government-granted monopoly on any ideas. I also do not own any slaves. And your point is?
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1. That a certain immoral public policy might sometimes be expedient in a certain economic configuration does not make it any less immoral. Let me emphasize: The question of whether the government ought or ought not grant monopolies on ideas - monopolies that are so similar to ownership that their own advocates describe them as "intellectual property" - is first and foremost a moral question. The ownership of ideas is offensive to human dignity. It must be abolished now.
2. Dude, you are dreaming if you
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Re: bad patents (Score:2)
Congratulations, you're on the wrong side of history.
Since you apparently didn't read before, allow me to repeat:
Dude, you are dreaming if you think those folksy anecdotes even sort of approximate how the real capitalist economy works.
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But then you run into a primary problem of capitalism: Why would anyone invent anything anymore instead of saving the money, waiting for someone else to do it, then invest the money in technology to mass produce and sell whatever someone else invested time and energy into to invent it?
Re:bad patents (Score:4, Insightful)
What you describe is but a lesser example of the many problems with capitalism. However it seems implausible that, without immoral ownership of ideas, innovation will just grind to a halt. People were inventing things long before these badlaws were enacted, and will continue to do so in their absence.
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Yes. People were. People were indeed often inventing for invention's sake. And many inventors died impoverished and penniless despite coming up with something that was a revolution to the world. There was this saying about Goodyear that "if you find a man, clothed in rubber from head to toe (which was an incredibly expensive stuff back then), but without a penny to his name, you found Goodyear".
But the times when big breakthroughs were the work of single men are past. We still have ingenious people, no doub
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Which doesn't really answer the question of how, precisely, do you propose we reward people for putting forward the time and effort to make these breakthroughs and then share them? The only thing wrong here is that you're specifically attributing this problem to capitalism, when this is a problem for any system--what incentive do I have to come up with a brilliant idea that solves one of your problems...and then share it?
The fundamental question here is: Do those who invent have less of a right to remunera
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I never questioned a time limited monopoly on intellectual property, what exactly is your problem? That's basically what I said, that you have to give corporations (rather than people, who MIGHT do it out of curiosity or their own, from a purely economical point of view irrational, reasons) a financial incentive to invent or they will not do it.
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The ownership of ideas (Score:1)
Novel and useful implementations of ideas can be patented.
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All your online activity is tracked. If you don't think so, you are misinformed.
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"Notarize"
"have (the signature on a document) attested to by a notary."
To notarize something, usually by a solicitor, is to say that that something existed, was seen, what the content of it was, and prove that it existed. You notarize things like contracts and wills and things like that, but there's no reason you can't notarize data itself.
Using the Bitcoin blockchain you would be able to provide proof of the time/date of that notarization, what was notarized and by whom, with virtually-certainty that in t
Statistics/strategy (Score:1)
There are already statistics that show some applicant/lawyer teams especially able to are able to push questionable patents thru the system.
Similar story for which districts to sue folks.
I wonder if there are any statistics as to which patent examiners approve which patents.
Perhaps the system forces some examiners to work in fields they shouldn't.
Such statistics might make it easier to raise a systemic challenge instead of slogging it out patent by patent or claim by claim.
On the other hand, the patent off
Nike Free Run 2016 Pas Cher (Score:1)
The Patent System is Unconstitutional (Score:1)
The Constitution says:
"The Congress shall have Power ...
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
The patent system as it is constituted does the exact reverse. It does not "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" but instead *impedes* the "Progress of Science and useful Arts". If someone brought a case to the Supreme Court, perhaps they would have a chance to declare
XOR cursor blink kills Amiga, (Score:2)
Why not non-profit org? (Score:2)
If I could get a tax break for donating to challenge patents I'd be really all for it. Could they get 501(c)(3) status?
fighting expired patents? (Score:1)
I noticed that a couple of the patents featured on the site are listed as expired? Can someone explain why there's a point to invalidating expired patents? Doesn't the expiration effectively place that invention into the public domain?
Not what patents are for (Score:1)
Patents are -not- to protect your ownership of an idea, or to help you make lots of money.
Patents are to encourage people to -disclose- ideas so that they may be recorded and not lost, as happened many times in history (and before).
And it is part of the reason the U.S. (and now others) has advanced so far, so fast.
The normal way is to keep things a trade secret, which is great for the inventor but -not- so great for the nation or for humanity.
But a way to record prior art, that was never patented, would mak
Next maybe they'll hire a competent web developer (Score:1)
When they learn to create a web site that works without Javascript loaded from a dozen external domains, I'll be glad to take a look.
Lordy, but I'm tired of web developers who don't create POSH sites that degrade gracefully when scripting is disabled. For a handful of RIAs that's understandable - they can't do anything useful without scripting - but for everyone else it's inexcusable laziness.