Hacker News Reader

Comment by siliconc0w | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a fan of the argument that if Blackbird weren't a NPE it'd be okay because Cloudflare could then aim it's 150 strong patent portfolio cannon back at them. It's basically saying incumbents like Cloudflare don't really want to fix the system, they want to keep the untenable 'cold war' status quo which protects them but burdens new entrants.

View on HN

Frankly, if it weren't for the stupidity of the patent system, I don't know that Cloudflare would even have the patents. Has Cloudflare ever initiated patent litigation against anyone?

The fact is that most patents for things that are "invented" but entirely virtually don't really deserve patent protection. Rarely is there significant research, expense or tooling to implement. Patents on software, processes and most extension patents are ridiculous in premise. That's what trade secrets are for.

Has Cloudflare ever initiated patent litigation against anyone?

No, we have not.

Have you ever threatened to, or alluded to your ability to do so, to obtain commercial negotiating leverage in a context other than defending the company from the threat of a patent suit?

Not to my knowledge.

Who cares? Cloudflare are a practicing entity, presumably with legitimate patents. They aren't necessarily at war with software patents as a concept, just the obvious abuse.

There is no such thing as a legitimate patent.

As much as I am against software patents in general, that isn't entirely true... I would say that most patents aren't, or shouldn't be legitimate, not that none of them are.

No, we have not.

Even if the companies only hoard these to defend themselves when they go under their patents get picked up by NPEs. It's like nuclear weapons, MAD kinda works but then a state fails and now you have terrorists with nukes. The answer is disarmament. If you want to enlist the help of the community you should have to pull a Tesla and open your patents or at the very least advocate for the abolishment of software and process patents. By crying foul and appealing to the community Cloudflare, like Blackbird, wants to have it both ways. They continue to advocate for and benefit from the ridiculous status quo but don't want to be subject to it when it inevitably goes awry.

Just so we're clear though, the disarmament that we should aim for is to change physics so that nuclear weapons don't work at all, right? Because that's an option, we could change how the patent system works.

Wat?

They're critiquing the analogy to nuclear weapons. Patent-weapons can be voided by altering the underlying legal framework, but nuclear-weapons can't be voided by changing the underlying rules of physics.

...Or at least, not yet.

Land mines are a much better metaphor for patents than nuclear weapons are. Say what you will about the evils of nuclear warfare, but we haven't seen any world wars lately, and nuclear weapons are to thank for that state of affairs.

Patents (and land mines) are a lot less useful to society.

I don't think it's fair to say that nuclear weapons are why we don't have world wars anymore. I believe it has a lot more to do with globalization and the fact that most countries now recognize that it's a lot more profitable to trade with other countries than to go to war with them.

I used to think that was the case, too, and then someone pointed out how incredibly well-connected and economically interdependent the world was in the years leading up to WWI.

Global trade back then was like our modern dot-com boom, but with real money and merchandise. People were sure it would change everything. Turned out not so much. As long as the lives of the old men who ran the world weren't personally at risk, they had no reason not to go to war with each other. Nukes, not trade, were what finally changed that calculation.

Another possible non-nuclear explanation is democratic peace theory.

You may want to change your mind again, given that there is a trivial fallacy in "We haven't had a world war yet, so clearly nuclear weapons prevent one from happening."

It is, in fact, the poster child for survivorship bias!

We have also come extremely close to having nuclear war, on multiple occasions.

The 'long' 19th century that ended in WWI was rather globalized, and we only surpassed them a few decades ago. But we did surpass them.

We have less armed conflicts and their victims now than during the MAD years of the cold war---perhaps that's a better piece of evidence that something other than nuclear weapons is helping us keep the peace?

> Say what you will about the evils of nuclear warfare, but we haven't seen any world wars lately, and nuclear weapons are to thank for that state of affairs.

It seems disingenuous to assume that the way it happened is the only way it could have happened. MAD exchanged the near-certainty of world war for a coin-flip between mostly-peace and total annihilation. We can certainly be happy that we lucked out on the coin-flip, but I don't think it follows that MAD was a policy of pure wisdom and sanity.

No question about that -- MAD was a reckless gamble that nothing would accidentally trigger the endgame. Hardly a sensible strategy. Still, it's hard to argue with the results so far.

The real concern is the ascendance of leaders who don't care if they die, or whose religion assures them that they'll come out on the winning side of Armageddon. But the analogies with patent law run out of steam well before reaching that point.

On the other hand, you do not negotiate with terrorists. Never, for reasons that are well-known: you make yourself a possible future target, and you fund their effort.

But I agree that it probably sounds cheaper to settle. The same is true with terrorists when it involves hostages, or kidnapping, though. These patent trolls are just corporate terrorists.

Everyone is a "troll" when they are suing you. When you are suing other people they are thieves stealing your innovation.

These lawyers are doing great work by creating a market that allows innovators to profit from their work even if they don't have the capital to commercialize their innovations themselves.

The incumbents can cry about this but even if they have never sued anyone for infringement their valuations are still based on their portfolios and they still use the threat to suppress competition and when they are over a barrel for cash they will monetize those patents either themselves or by selling to another "troll."

Individual software engineers who invent new technologies deserve to get compensated the same as anyone else for their inventions.

That's all well and good, but it's impossible to argue that point when people are awarded patents where previous work exists that the patent office failed to investigate enough.

But these aren't "individual software engineers who invent new technologies", now are they, shill? As stated in the article -- which I'm sure, based on what you've said here, you haven't read -- the "individual software engineer who invented new technology" made his one United States dollar in selling it to these vampires. Get a job.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com