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Comment by YayamiOmate | Hacker News Reader

"a prolific patent litigant" that should be urban dict definition for a patent troll. And with addition of "losing majority of actual trials" a regular dictionary.

I think it's becoming if not already became apparent that IP law is deeply flawed. The sole existence of legitimate business model of patent trolls is an indication as well as solutions hurting public designed to avoid corporate litigations such as you tube content infrifiment marking. Its biased against individuals.

But, oh well,bills and laws are not sponsored by public, so it's hard to expect they work in their favour.

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And don't forget trademark and copyright bullies. There's a whole bunch of brands that try to restrict distribution of their authentic products using trademark law - see e.g. https://www.polygon.com/2018/8/11/17661254/bethesda-sell-use..., or my previous comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22079904.

As I've mentioned several times on HN, I'm currently suing TP-Link for asserting false IP claims against me. We actually just amended to add new antitrust claims, which might work, being that TP-link is the largest manufacturer in the WiFi router market by far.

> As I've mentioned several times on HN

Please provide links when referring to old discussions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23285174

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23278177

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22697693

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

This has them all

Nice, thanks.

It's particularly unfortunate that trademark law in essence forces trademark holders to be bullies. Hard to come up with a law structured to cause more litigation.

Nothing in the law forces them to restrict resale of their products. If anything, it might be an antitrust violation. Some abusive patent suits might be antitrust violations as well. See e.g https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/apple-intel-file-antitrust-c...

I think it's becoming if not already became apparent that IP law is deeply flawed.

Unfortunately, it's a problem for a long time. This isn't something that happened in the last few decades.

Hollywood was in California to avoid Edison's patents.

The Wright brothers spent their time and energy suing people and engaging in feud instead of spending their time improving their inventions.

3D printing didn't really emerge as a hobby market until the 2000s after the expiration of patents.

Makerbot Inc apparently patented inventions that belonged to the 3D printing community at large, and then get bought up by Stratasys.

So you get intellectual common theft, inventors suing people instead of further innovating, patent trolling, etc.

> Unfortunately, it's a problem for a long time. This isn't something that happened in the last few decades.

Yes, all of those things have been problems for a long time. However, the application of patent law to software and business methods is relatively recent (in legal terms). In the US, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has been largely responsible for growing the scope of software patents since its creation in 1982 (e.g., holding that use of an analog to digital converter or a memory storage device were all that is needed to meet the Supreme Court's 1981 Diamond v. Diehr test that a software patent has to actually do something, rather than just being a conventional implementation of inherently unpatentable math). This culminated in the 1998 State Street decision (again, of the CAFC, not the Supreme Court) that opened the floodgates for business method patents.

Despite Supreme Court decisions like In re Bilski (2009) and CLS Bank International v Alice Corp (2014) that attempted to limit the scope of these patents, and that were hoped (of Alice in particular) to be able to be used to invalidate large swaths of such patents, the CAFC continues to erode the force of these decisions (see, e.g., the 2020 Uniloc decision) and carve out new ways to patent mathematical algorithms implemented on general purpose computers. The allowance of these patents by the USPTO has also been on the rise in recent years.

The patent application process should at least allow the public to come up with counterclaims. Far from perfect, but imho it would solve a lot. For example: Amazon files a patent application for one-click buying; the public however responds with a small script showing how to implement it, nullifying the patent.

I'd also like to see an official public database where people can post inventions, source code, etc., or an official way to timestamp/sign them. Such services exist right now of course, but afaik they're not official.

This is the absolute minimum that the government can do to make patent law future-proof. A law will only work if people think it's fair.

Part of the problem is that there are no criminal penalties for making false copyright claims as far as i know. A troll could be sued in civil court, but it's a long expensive process with non-negligible risk, and in practice individuals rarely attempt it because of the same asymmetries that enable patent trolls in the first place. What we need is an actual law that levies meaningful penalties for abuse. Maybe $100+ fine per invalid DMCA request, or 2x the demanded damages in lawsuits. That would at least help put a stop to shotgun blast automated takedowns, and inflated multimillion dollar claims designed to fleece teenagers and college students.

I wonder if it would be possible to make a youtube competitor supported entirely by issuing fines for invalid copyright claims.

The exact problem is that it puts the burden of proof on the accused, who has to fight the claim under penalty of perjury (while there is no reciprocal requirement for the accuser).

The simple fix is to make false DMCA claims tantamount to perjury.

Aren't they already literal perjury? (Or is that just the second, post-doxx phase?)

DMCA claims already must be submitted under penalty of perjury. It's just rare to see prosecutions.

DMCA notices are submitted under penalty of perjury, which means someone submitting false ones could be prosecuted criminally. We need an ambitious DA somewhere to enforce this, though.

I've been tracking lawsuits for false DMCA or trademark/patent claims, there's been a rising number, but any litigation takes time and money. I would support a law with punitive damages for such offenses, as well as a law making clear that such conduct is not legally protected (IP abusers have argued they have 1st amendment rights to say whatever they want, or similar argument.)

Note that it's sometimes possible to sue for antitrust violations, which carries a triple damages provision. I'm also currently attempting to get a RICO claim to work with an underlying wire fraud predicate, which would also lead to triple damages.

In some U.S. states it's still possible for a private citizen to prosecute a crime. I wonder if that could be applied to cases like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution?wprov=sfla...

I considered that. It should be fairly simple to find evidence in any particular state, just dig through Google's transparency reports. Would be fascinating to watch.

Another failure: IP as it is today allows for all the tax havens

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