Comment by IG_Semmelweiss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IG_Semmelweiss | Hacker News Reader

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Domain names pay per year because there's an ongoing service attached. There's no such thing for patent (besides fee to file)

Why punish patent holders because of patent trolls or garbage patents ?

Make it unprofitable to be a troll, and they will go away. Trolls need to be tagged , like pirates. There should be rules to make hunting for trolls profitable. For that, you need a "bounty". Here's my take:

In any patent dispute[1], the loser will pay as punitive damages (this is the "bounty") to the winner, the lower of (i) the winner's legal costs, OR the loser's legal costs x 2, plus (ii) loser must disclose the ultimate name of the beneficial owners (or material, if public) of the loser. EINs not allowed. The "trolls" are thus, branded.

The next lawsuit ensues. During research, it is found that one of the parties is a known troll that has lost 1 prior case. Now the damages, should troll lose, are 2X of any settlement OR punitive amount.

Should troll lose again, an extra 2x (total, 4x) gets applied on the punitive damage[1] to the troll and so on. If troll wins, his x is halved.

This does 3 things:

1- Incentivize public to seek out weak patents, or trolls, for a payout.

2- Makes Trolling much harder at scale.

3- Ensures huge companies face risks if they throw their weight around. Bigco can afford $$ penalties vs small fish, but cannot afford to be tagged a 2-4x troll. It makes them an attractive target for bigger fish looking for the 2X or 4X reward challenge of Bigco patent portfolio.

> Domain names pay per year because there's an ongoing service attached. There's no such thing for patent

Erm, what service? A record in a database? How's that different from a patent office? I guess there's fancy registrar website...to do what...help me pay my recurring bill?

I don't think you are arguing in good faith.

OK fine want an ongoing patient fee ? Make it $9.99 per year just like a registrar, who gives you convenient ways to renew and pay fees from a working, modern site, and allow migration , with a few clicks.

Is that going to prevent trolls ? Unequivocally, no.

Parent was arguing for some ridiculous, unnecessary , tax. Then cited registrars as an example.

My point, 1 gives a service, one does not. If you want to charge for a service, then make it transparent and make the fee reflect the service, not argue "hey we already charge for registrars" to make his/her point about a new, unecessary tax.

I do not think you know the domain business, which I happen to work in (I own a small registrar and know people at registries). The reason domain costs money is to make it more expensive to hoard, not to pay for any service. There is a service but it just costs a tiny fraction of the registry fee the rest they often use for funding various non-profit initiatives to improve the internet not related at all the providing any service. The fee is set where it is to discourage hoarding.

Edit: It is also there to make it slightly more expensive to create scam sites, but mostly for the anti-hoarding.

Makes complete sense. Domain hoarding is not cool and makes sense to mitigate using fees as you describe.

Now, Patents already require fees and also substantial paperwork. In effect that is the "hoarding" control.

I stand corrected that the point of ICANN and registrars to charge something is to introduce a barrier to entry. Yet, I'd argue you are still providing a service if the fees go towards nonprofit activity to improve interoperability.

Yet, introducing a huge fee to patents wouldn't really be conductive to anything on the patent side, which is at the core my issue: I'm not making a judgement about the margin on fees, i'm questioning whether there's a semblance of service. From my vantage point, registrars have made massive improvements in accessibility and ease of use, and as you said, they have lowered the barriers to entry. | I can't say the same at all for patents.

> Domain names pay per year because there's an ongoing service attached. There's no such thing for patent (besides fee to file)

I work for a registrar and know people working at registries so I know that is not the case. The reason they charge more than like 1-2 dollars per year is to make it expensive to hoard domains.

Sadly though, not expensive enough to actually prevent anyone other than the very low end of consumers from hoarding domains.

I worked for a registrar for a decade+ and worked with a lot of hoarders. Very early on in my career I actually dobbed one in to our local registry authority (because I was naive, and he was CLEARLY breaching the requirements for our ccTLD and so I thought 'Well this is wrong and I should report it') and is how I discovered nobody actually cares about hoarding and just wants to maximise revenue. (Well duh I suppose.)

> loser must disclose the ultimate name of the beneficial owners (or material, if public) of the loser. EINs not allowed. The "trolls" are thus, branded.

So TrollCo will just pay a different homeless person $100 to be the owner on paper for each of their patents?

Sure. Let them deal with getting the homeless persons to sign up. Open a bank account, pay taxes, get credit cards, run payroll, process permits, etc.

I don't think you fully appreciate how tough is to run a business with someone's name on top of every document. Not to say its not possible for a determined actor, but its going to eliminate a lot of options from the get go.

Then, let a judge find out!

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