<story><title>We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won</title><url>https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-project-jengo-saga-how-cloudflare-stood-up-to-a-patent-troll-and-won/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nine_k</author><text>Please remember that patents were invented as a way to fight trade secrets.&lt;p&gt;A patented invention should be described in sufficient detail, and the description is made public. This is how important inventions do not get hidden form sight forever, even if they don&amp;#x27;t bring any profit.&lt;p&gt;This also allows people (including governmental agencies) have an idea of what is being sold as a new invention. Would  you take a new medicine whose chemical formula is a tightly guarded secret?&lt;p&gt;I think that what makes a patent worth it is the first-mover advantage. What makes a patent problematic is a long expiration time which does not depend on its being used productively.&lt;p&gt;The best idea I saw is an exponential patent fee. Say, first year it&amp;#x27;s $100, second, $400, third, $1600 (all amounts acceptable even for a lone-wolf inventor), ... tenth, $26M, ... fifteenth, $27B.&lt;p&gt;This way any useful invention can enjoy a patent coverage for some time, and afford it for some more time if it&amp;#x27;s bringing in significant profits, but sitting on a patent for a long time would be impossible even for the richest companies. Keeping a portfolio of unused patents would become pointless, too, and patent trolling, likely unprofitable.</text></item><item><author>spectramax</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve worked in China extensively and I feel strong about the following:&lt;p&gt;A) Cloudfare can defend, but a mom-and-pop small business cannot. A startup cannot.&lt;p&gt;B) China can hedge against western bureaucracy and gain unprecedented speed in innovation and new ventures - precisely because of hard pressing and blocking issues such as patent law.&lt;p&gt;C) Even if there were no patent trolls, China can still manage to steal, copy, espionage or fearlessly innovate - why? Because of three things - culture, law and international relations.&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, Patents need to end. Yep, completely get rid of patents. Not shorten it, not amend it, just simply stop taking new applications. Existing patents can be still be active until they expire (or better yet, shorten the expiration date). Ideas are cheap, execution is where companies need to compete.&lt;p&gt;This is not a level playing field for the rest of the nations. China gives no fucks about law and the west is gonna watch China lead the way in exponential progress while we are still playing in the dirt with our little patent litigations.&lt;p&gt;I wonder if people here have felt this before: Get an idea, start building a prototype, demo it to a friend, friend suggests checking google.com&amp;#x2F;patents, excitement collapses :(</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yason</author><text>Patents have suffered a fate similar to something like metrics that have succumbed to Goodhart&amp;#x27;s law.&lt;p&gt;Patents could&amp;#x27;ve worked somewhat originally, at least in principle, but soon people started gaming the system, rendering the patent system worthless. Except for maybe certain domains patents do not currently host important inventions in the meaningful sense. Especially in software, execution matters much more than the actual idea.&lt;p&gt;And the execution part usually is akin to a trade secret: for example, it&amp;#x27;s not so much what Google and Amazon do, it&amp;#x27;s about the mountain of work they did in building all that &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; also making it scale. That&amp;#x27;s the non-trivial part that you couldn&amp;#x27;t replicate even if you read and bought all their patents.&lt;p&gt;A low-hanging fruit of fixing the patent system would be to reduce it to a mere notary service of timestamping ideas. Establishing the patent de facto would require the patent to be defended in courts: this alone would cut down the amount of bogus patents.&lt;p&gt;Defending a complex, vague system would cost a lot of money, balancing the usefulness of gaining a court-verified monopoly on the idea. On the other hand, a simple but truly novel idea would be rather easy to defend, even for a private person. There&amp;#x27;s no downgrade to the current state of matters: it&amp;#x27;s not as if the current patent system would allow individual inventors a low-cost way to sue and win big companies trying to abuse their patents already.&lt;p&gt;There are other ways but in any case gains need to be balanced with cost, that&amp;#x27;s the only way to make people and companies prioritise and valuate the true worth of their ideas. No party is going to spend a lot of money trying to defend a vague patent that was written only to win the first-to-file race and game its coverage within the patent system. They already know it&amp;#x27;s bollocks.</text></comment>
<story><title>We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won</title><url>https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-project-jengo-saga-how-cloudflare-stood-up-to-a-patent-troll-and-won/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nine_k</author><text>Please remember that patents were invented as a way to fight trade secrets.&lt;p&gt;A patented invention should be described in sufficient detail, and the description is made public. This is how important inventions do not get hidden form sight forever, even if they don&amp;#x27;t bring any profit.&lt;p&gt;This also allows people (including governmental agencies) have an idea of what is being sold as a new invention. Would  you take a new medicine whose chemical formula is a tightly guarded secret?&lt;p&gt;I think that what makes a patent worth it is the first-mover advantage. What makes a patent problematic is a long expiration time which does not depend on its being used productively.&lt;p&gt;The best idea I saw is an exponential patent fee. Say, first year it&amp;#x27;s $100, second, $400, third, $1600 (all amounts acceptable even for a lone-wolf inventor), ... tenth, $26M, ... fifteenth, $27B.&lt;p&gt;This way any useful invention can enjoy a patent coverage for some time, and afford it for some more time if it&amp;#x27;s bringing in significant profits, but sitting on a patent for a long time would be impossible even for the richest companies. Keeping a portfolio of unused patents would become pointless, too, and patent trolling, likely unprofitable.</text></item><item><author>spectramax</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve worked in China extensively and I feel strong about the following:&lt;p&gt;A) Cloudfare can defend, but a mom-and-pop small business cannot. A startup cannot.&lt;p&gt;B) China can hedge against western bureaucracy and gain unprecedented speed in innovation and new ventures - precisely because of hard pressing and blocking issues such as patent law.&lt;p&gt;C) Even if there were no patent trolls, China can still manage to steal, copy, espionage or fearlessly innovate - why? Because of three things - culture, law and international relations.&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, Patents need to end. Yep, completely get rid of patents. Not shorten it, not amend it, just simply stop taking new applications. Existing patents can be still be active until they expire (or better yet, shorten the expiration date). Ideas are cheap, execution is where companies need to compete.&lt;p&gt;This is not a level playing field for the rest of the nations. China gives no fucks about law and the west is gonna watch China lead the way in exponential progress while we are still playing in the dirt with our little patent litigations.&lt;p&gt;I wonder if people here have felt this before: Get an idea, start building a prototype, demo it to a friend, friend suggests checking google.com&amp;#x2F;patents, excitement collapses :(</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gdhbcc</author><text>Except that idea is simply historically untrue. Patent were started primarily as a way to modernize the guild monopolies that were common place at the time, but were unsuited given the greater levels of globalization and international trade.&lt;p&gt;The idea that they were meant to serve as a way to reduce trade secrets falls flat in the face of the fact that most places with strong patent and copyright law, also have strong laws protecting trade secrets</text></comment>