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Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

I know, right!

“You are stealing our ideas! But we won’t tell you which ones unless you pay us”

In any other domain this would be called a protection racket.

Pretty much how SCO sued IBM. When you sue for infringement, you pretty much have to tell the infringer about the infringement and allow them a chance to rectify it. SCO wasn't interested in rectification - they hoped holding out long enough would force IBM to settle. Didn't happen. And they won nothing.

This case is definitely disingenuous. It's not yet a case. But even an open source project without money needs to be careful. Put dev on hold, hope a benefactor comes along, play it safe for a few days, weeks, months ...

Not really, all of law works that way. Everybody is allowed to demand pretty much anything from anybody for any reason, and include anything in any contract they're party of regardless of legality of any of the demands. It's the other party's responsibility to know which of these are legally valid and invalid.

That's not universal, and it's why certain terms are nearly never brought to court because everyone knows they will be laughed out and then they will have to change lots of EULAs for regionally illegal claims

If it was certain, both parties would ignore it. It's only likely to be found invalid, not certain.

In many cases companies do, in practice, exploit other parties lack of law knowledge.

Also encountered many cases where a company simply didn't consider actually vetting what they put on contract against local law

It is standard practice to include certainly illegal clauses in contracts. There is no penalty for including illegal clauses, they don't impact the rest of the contract, and there's always the chance the other party is not going to catch it.

If any part of the contract is found invalid that can invalidate the whole not just the in illegal parts. That is why many contracts have a clause that if any part is found invalid the rest holds - you can point to that clause and tell the court we agreed not to do that - but the judge need not agree. In some cases the judge can decide without the illegal part the whole makes no sense and invalidate the whole. Usually (In Practice always) most contracts make sense except for minor details that don't matter to the point of the contract and so the whole holds except for those details. However if any part of it doesn't hold the whole is open to be rejected.

The practical guidelines I received in my life so far said that usually entire contract is not tossed, at least not in Poland / EU, but if suit depends on clause deemed invalid the suit will be thrown and there might be order that a new contract be drafted (especially important for cases like EULAs where you have a 1:many fanout of people signing a standard form contract)

Law most certainly does NOT work that way. If a business wanted to take you to court over contract violation then they’d have to tell you what you violated.

Likewise, a police officer cannot arrest you without telling you what law you broke.

Technically, Synaptics cannot sue without telling you what patents you violated either. But where patent laws get abused is businesses extorting others over threats of high legal costs.

It depends on the jurisdiction (and there are quite a few in play for HN commentards)

In some jurisdictions, the "threat" describes the maximum possible payout that could be awarded so obviously you deploy a massive sum. I believe that is a US thing.

Law has rules and most of them are written down within most jurisdictions or can be inferred via case law, constitutions, or the distribution of tea leaves (as appropriate).

That's why it called the rule of law - the thing is you need to determine the rules in play. For example you said: "a police officer cannot arrest you without telling you what law you broke."

That is mostly true in the UK, unless you fall afoul of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which involves some pretty wide ranging powers and effects.

It is unlikely to be even vaguely true in Russia or China or any other jurisdiction that doesn't really bother with nonsensical notions such as: demos kratos.

I shouldn't bother using words like "technically".

The article mentions the jurisdiction being the UK. so I don’t think we need to expand the scope to Russia and China.

in UK law, IP infringement falls under the category of civil law. While these can be settled out of court, you absolutely couldn’t take someone to court without disclosing what property has been infringed upon.

The person you responded said nothing about involving the formal legal system. The formal legal system is only involved in about ~1% of legal disputes. ~99% of legal disputes are settled outside of the formal legal system, where yes, anyone can whip open MS Word and type up whatever the fuck they want, and the burden is on the two parties communicating to check each other.

The GP said “law works that way” and what you’re describing isn’t testing law. It’s negotiation over civil disputes.

If Synaptics did want to exercise their legal right under civil law then they’d would have to disclose what properties have been infringed upon.

And they're right, most law is practiced outside of a courtroom. And essentially all civil disputes start outside of them. The vast majority of professional lawyers do not litigate at all.

Id already said civil disputes start outside the court room.

What I’m saying is that not all UK law works on the basis of accusations without evidence, like the GP argued.

Take this specific example, UK civil law does say the initial communication doesn’t have to include the patent numbers. However it does go on to say that if threats are then made then that information should be disclosed

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-patent-act-1977/section-70b-...

If Synaptic require multiple weeks of work at $25,000 a week, to establish what patents are infringed, while also threatening to charge the developer for that time as well as further legal action, then it’s safe to assume that Synaptic didnt have enough confidence from the outset that their original claim was reasonably true.

In short, they are opening themselves up to litigation in return. But since their legal budget is vastly greater than this solo dev’s legal budget would be, they can skirt the fridges of what would be reasonable permitted communications.

BI doubt many UK judges would take favourable view with how Synaptics have handled their correspondence; if this ever were to reach the courts.

That is fair, I think what the above point was that formal technicalities matter only in so much as someone has the means and motivations to go to trial, which is rarely.

Which is why I likened the process to a protection racket. :)

A comment that the GPs you’re defending was objecting to

I agree it's like a protection racket. I disagree that being like a protection racket is uniquely a patent law thing.

I’m glad you disagree with that because I never said it was a uniquely patent law thing. And nor would I.

However you did “all of law works that way” and I’ve proven that isn’t the case.

By all of, I meant all areas of, and by law works, I meant lawyers work. I could've been clearer on that.

And a funny thing happened. In the process of proving not all law is like that, you also proved that patent law is uniquely NON-extortionist (in the UK). Like you mentioned elsewhere, Patents Act Section 70B forbids certain kinds of patent-related threats. I'm assuming there's no general law applying to all such legal threats, or else there would be no need for this one. That would imply the law permits certain kinds of lawyers to be more extortionist than others, and patent lawyer are on the lower end of the spectrum. Is that so?

Nobody is taking anybody to court. They're merely threatening to take to court. It's not illegal to threaten to go to court over bullshit claims, and words are cheap. That's why it keeps happening.

When I said all law, I meant there's nothing about tech patent law that makes it uniquely predisposed to this kind of extortionist behavior. All areas of economic activity have this exact same problem. Employment, debt collection, warranties, housing rentals, and many other things regularly involve pages upon pages of pointed threats written in legalese that don't have any actual laws behind them, but to people without legal experience are indistinguishsble from actual valid claims. There are entire businesses built around the fact most people can't ditinguish it. It's so deeply integrated in our lives that it's basically expected to happen every time a written contract is involved.

> It's not illegal to threaten to go to court over bullshit claims, and words are cheap.

In America it might not be. But the UK does have some protections against this kind of bullying. And this would fall under UK jurisdiction so UK laws apply

> All areas of economic activity have this exact same problem. Employment, debt collection, warranties, housing rentals, and many other things regularly involve pages upon pages of pointed threats written in legalese that don't have any actual laws behind them,

Again, in UK law this isn’t the case. For example the UK has significantly stronger employment laws than the US.

In short, not everywhere is governed by lax US laws, thankfully.

Of course, an American company can still threaten a Scottish citizen over bullshit patent claims if they wanted thought the individual didn’t have the finances to take the company to court. But that wouldn’t be lawful communication under Section 70B: Permitted communications of the Patents Act 1977. And thus not an example of your point about how all laws behave like that.

Which then comes right back to my original comparison of a protection racket. The one you originally objected to

Just to clarify, I mean specifically the act of putting words on paper that's then given to an employee to sign, not actually doing the things that these words say. In Poland for example, there are very strong employee protections and plenty of ways to go to jail or get fined as an employer, but crucially, putting illegal clauses in contracts are not one of them. Enforcing them, yes, but putting them in, no. Legally, illegal clauses are treated as if they're stricken out from the contract, and there's no law that makes it illegal to intentionally add clauses for the sole purpose of being stricken out later.

Do you happen to know the specific UK law that bans putting words on contracts that form illegal clauses (as opposed to banning the clauses themselves)? I love learning random trivia about other legal systems.

That’s a weird argument because you acknowledge that there’s no legal standing to those details yet you argue it’s part of law.

It’s like saying “hopping on one leg is part of law because there isn’t any laws that specifically disallow it”. You just end up down a rabbit hole of saying “everything is law” when you and I both know that’s not true.

I’ve cited UK law that makes a strong case for arguing Synaptics communication is unlawful. And you’re now asking for examples legislation for some other unrelated thing.

These two things combined suggest to me that you don’t actually care what I post, you just want bore me into a meaningless victory. So I’ll duck out now and let you have it. Enjoy :)

Thanks a bunch! This is exactly what I was looking for, Patents Act 1977 Section 70B. I missed it the first time when you mentioned it offhandedly in between calling me an idiot in 5 different ways.

I never called you an idiot and would never call anyone I disagreed with, an idiot. Smart people are allowed to disagree.

And I never bored anyone down on purpose and never cared about any sort of "victory". Yet here we are, with you thinking I'm ignoring what you say and me thinking you're calling me an idiot. There's disagreement, and there's... whatever this is.

You literally admitted you ignored something I posted.

I never thought you were an idiot. What actually happened was I assumed you were a troll.

When I make the same point 3 times and it goes unnoticed but you make time to post multiple strawman arguments, it’s easy to see why one might suspect the other of trolling.

And the reason I cut the conversation short at the end was just because I didn’t want to waste time with someone who I thought was only trying to waste my time.

If that wasn’t the case then I apologise.

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