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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
After a three-year battle in which he spent up to $1000 an hour on lawyers, Swildens ended up selling Speedera at a discount to Akamai for $130 million.
The experience left Swildens with a working knowledge of intellectual property battles in the tech world, and a lingering soft spot for others facing hefty patent claims. So when he heard in February that the world's second-most valuable company, Alphabet, was launching a legal broadside at Uber's self-driving car technology, he put himself in then-CEO Travis Kalanick's shoes: "I saw a larger competitor attacking a smaller competitor...and became curious about the patents involved."
In its most dramatic allegations, Waymo is accusing engineer Anthony Levandowski of taking over 14,000 technical confidential files to Uber. But the company also claimed that Uber's laser-ranging lidar devices infringed four of Waymo's patents.
"Waymo developed its patented inventions...at great expense, and through years of painstaking research, experimentation, and trial and error," the complaint read. "If [Uber is] not enjoined from their infringement and misappropriation, they will cause severe and irreparable harm to Waymo."
But Swildens had a suspicion. He dug into the history of Waymo's lidars, and came to the conclusion that Waymo's key patent should never have been granted at all. He asked the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to look into its validity, and in early September, the USPTO granted that request. Days later, Waymo abruptly dismissed its patent claim without explanation. The USPTO examiners may still invalidate that patent, and if that happens, Waymo could find itself embroiled in another multi-billion-dollar self-driving car lawsuit—this time as a defendant.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pipedwho on Sunday December 10 2017, @09:46AM (4 children)
I had to moderate this Insightful even though you're already at +5 with only two other posts.
This is so true, and a huge problem for people actually inventing and creating things. The bar on patent acceptance is FAR TOO LOW. A 'scintilla of inventiveness' as the the current point where a patent seems to get approved is patently ridiculous. They don't need to tear down the system, they just need to stop approving patents that aren't plainly obvious.
Patents should really be limited to something that might be lost to humanity should the technique never be used in the real world should it never be disclosed. Or at least something that would otherwise not be 'parallel invented' during the life of the possibly granted patent. The shorter the duration of the patent, the more leeway the patentee could be given. In most cases patents pop up for things that numerous competitors are working on with innovations that are pretty much straight forward solutions to any engineer that even considers the problem. That sort of patent could be granted with a 1 year duration. Something more complex and non-obvious could get a little more. Something totally left field, like a successful method for portable fusion power could get the full 20 years. But, if that same fusion power system was simply inspired by the sudden appearance of a couple of precursors in the current state of the art, then the patent rush that ensued should guarantee a much shorter duration. Emergent technologies and techniques should not be patentable as they are simply the inevitable combination of ideas that are naturally evolving towards a final solution.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Sunday December 10 2017, @09:41PM (2 children)
As far as I understand, the patent office makes money by granting office. It doesn't make money by rejecting patents. And I've never heard about a penalty against it for granting patents that should not have been granted.
I think the result isn't surprising at all.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday December 10 2017, @09:43PM
Err … I of course mean they make money by granting patents!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 10 2017, @10:04PM
Is there a fee to get your patent approved, or is it just a fee to get your patent reviewed? One case=massive corruption, other=normal corruption (may or may not be massive)
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Sunday December 10 2017, @11:49PM
I believe a large part of the reason for this is that the patent office is not sufficiently adversarial.
Put yourself in the shoes of an examiner for a moment. You are tasked with reviewing a patent that has a questionable level of inventiveness, submitted by superbigco.
If you decide to reject the patent, you have to have all your ducks in a row. You need to carefully lay out and research a strong case for rejection. Your decision is up against a multimillion dollar team of patent lawyers who will attack your every reasoning.
Or, say you decide to accept the patent. All you have to do is accept the reasoning you have been given and rubber stamp it.
Assuming you are paid not by the result, but even by the number of processed applications, you have an obvious incentive to accept rather than reject. Even if you are paid a salary that is independent of your processing rate, the patent office always has a backlog and lack of funding so there will still be plenty of pressure to move them through faster. Add to that, that your boss probably plays golf with the execs from superbigco, and it is easy to see that rejecting patents is a sucker's move.