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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

> The letter continued to claim that Lothian would be "single-handedly eviscerating DisplayLink's competitive advantage in this crowded market by educating our competitors and other third parties as to how we implement our proprietary technology"

If one guy can reverse-engineer everything with an LLM and some free time, I'm pretty sure their competitors can as well, and they won't be doing it out in the open like this guy was...

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this is a good point. Isn't one of the pre-conditions for a patent (in the US at least, this case was UK) that it be "non-obvious" ? If LLMs can shit out working solutions that infringe patents, or "trivially" reverse engineer protocols, I wonder if we will see challenges in court that it was "obvious" to ask the LLM, and therefore the patents were trivial and therefore should be invalidated?

That seems to be a separate claim unrelated to their patent claims. Patents themselves are required to have all of the information that would allow someone to implement what is in the patent. Of course, there could be many ways to implement it. And a specific implementation could be further protected by trade secrets. The part that would be a trade secret is inherently not in the patent.

It's a fascinating question isn't it. I personally think the answer is pretty clearly yes for an increasingly wider array of inventions.

What fascinates me is the evidentiary question. How can courts satisfy themselves that (to adopt the EPO problem-solution approach) faced with a given problem, the mere prompting of an LLM was sufficient to arrive at a solution. Will we have consultants with zoos of LLMs providing evidence of their capability at a patent's priority date? Will patent offices need to provide examiners with access to the wayback machine for AI models? How can you, as the applicant, possibly argue with that? What degree of fiddling with the prompt to elicit a solution is fair?

You have to wonder if this part was approved by a qualified lawyer at all. A trade secret would describe proprietary knowledge of how to implement the technology, but would have no protection under patent law.

They also repeatedly claimed "DisplayLink is not a member of OIN" when it actually is, and later when they acquiesced to the cease and desist, one of the actual engineers from the company tried to review the PR to ask for changes. It's not clear anyone there has any clue what's going on!

You're saying I can't use a shell company acquisition as a means to shield certain technologies from my other agreements? Booo

I suspect they know that, but it reads as if they were just lazily tacking that claim on for effect. This isn't a petition to a court, this is just a demand letter. Listing out a bunch of scary damages is how demand letters often work. They don't have to go into details as to the basis of their legal claims.

This demand letter may become evidence in a future case and judges don't look kindly upon lies and deception.

Yes, but this claim is not that... It sounds like they're making an argument about trade secrets, without explicitly detailing the legal justification for it.

You definitely don't need to cite the legal justification for every demand you make in a demand letter.

You don't even need to have a valid justification to make a demand in a demand letter... it is common and normal to make arbitrary demands... they are negotiations.

Trade secrets aren't protected by law. That's why they aren't disclosed. If someone lawfully reverse engineers your trade secret, its secrecy disappears without legal recourse. Decompiling a binary for RE interop purposes is legal in the US.

That is a common misconception, but trade secrets are absolutely protected by law, in most countries around the world.

https://www.wipo.int/en/web/trade-secrets#systems

Now yes, they're fair game for reverse engineering, but that doesn't mean someone can't be mad about it and tell you not to do it.

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