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Comment by kjellsbells | Hacker News Reader

That is supported by the article, but I would find it hard to imagine that an inventor who is trying to assert their rights against a much more well-resourced competitor would want things to go to trial. The article is pretty clear that filing first is what matters, not posting first, and first to file provides much, much, stronger evidence of your claim than a social media post.

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You don't need to go to trial to invalidate a patent. It happens frequently at the motion to dismiss or summary judgment phases.

you still need the resources to go through the courts though. This closes out the option for almost all.

Well there’s literally nothing you can do about that when every party has a right to a trial. How are conflicts supposed to be resolved if one party doesn’t want to go to court?

Some other, less expensive, less corrupt tribunal mechanism? I don't think GP is saying courts are bad because they're courts, they're saying US courts happen to be bad and expensive (which is not necessary).

How would that work legally? I’m pretty sure you can’t prevent someone from having to drag them to court with a tribunal, because the party you want to compel to do something has the right to a trial. If apple patents something you think you invented and published first, and you go to the tribunal, but apple says „no, I want a court order“, what is supposed to happen? I don’t think you can just remove the right to a trial (but I’m not a lawyer, so maybe that’s possible?).

Oh, like the PTAB? That worked out great for the Big Tech co's, less so for everyone else.

Also, are you genuinely saying that US district courts are corrupt? On what basis?

If you have good prior art, why would a patent holder litigate against you? They'd be almost guaranteed to lose their patent.

Ask Sable wrt their spat with CloudFlare.

Perhaps you can make your point here so I don't have to go searching for something you have not even explained the relevancy of.

Literally what do you expect them to post? Sable is a patent troll who very famously sued Cloudflare, and recently lost. What else could they possibly mean?

https://blog.cloudflare.com/patent-troll-sable-pays-up/

>Literally what do you expect them to post?

What their point is. I don't know who sable is, I'm not a mind reader and searching would just require me to make an assumption as to what their point would have been.

> Sable is a patent troll who very famously sued Cloudflare, and recently lost. What else could they possibly mean?

I don't think that's what the word famous means!

All things aside, I don't think pointing to one instance of this occurring is a great argument. Mind you that the invalidity issue went to a jury which means it escaped at least 3 rounds of determination by a judge, including a JMOL. Meaning that the judge felt there was enough evidence for a jury to be able to find the patents were valid. So, again, I don't think it's the slam-dunk some people seem to think.

No, posting things (for example on YouTube) counts very well as prior art and helps you invalidate (or limit the scope of) patents that appear later.

For a well-known case, consider Hangprinter, by Torbjorn Ludvigsen: a 3D printer without a frame. He had built it and documented the whole thing in YouTube videos. Then someone heard of the idea and went ahead and got a patent on it.

Torbjorn turned on the Internet for help, started a GoFundMe campaign to collect resources, and with the help of an experienced attorney, managed to have the patent limited so much that does not affect almost any other printer. The "experienced attorney" part was the most crucial, in my opinion, and he could not have chosen anyone better than the one he used.

You can read all the details in the entry named "Patent Got Narrowed 5-8-2023" on Torbjorn's blog https://torbjornludvigsen.com/blog/

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