Before I discovered HN (of which I'm on daily), I was a frequent reader of Groklaw[0]- a site primarily devoted to covering the fragile intersection of the technology sector and legal system; where the two are often at odds with one another. We're more than a decade beyond it's voluntary closure after the Snowden revelations and it's left a large void on substantive coverage of these issues. The site was the blog of an anonymous tech reporter named Pamela Jones that did detailed deep-dives into the parties & issues involved in high-profile lawsuits between tech companies, like Apple vs. Samsung on the issue of design patents for rounded corners, over what have often been patents containing broad language that resulted in hindrances to innovation ranging from being unwilling to license to extortion of revenue streams for entire product lines. Part of why I find the technology industry to be continually interesting is its desire to innovate instead of litigate- there needs to be a check on bad faith actors whose goal is capture of a niche through regulatory means instead of fair competition; else we get these cases relegated to the infamous eastern district of Texas which has historically played favor towards non-practicing patent trolls. I'll be submitting my comment and suggest others do the same.
> On August 20, 2013, a final article appeared on Groklaw, explaining that due to pervasive government monitoring of the Internet, there could no longer be an expectation of the sort of privacy online that was necessary to collaborate on sensitive topics. Citing the closure of Lavabit earlier that month, Jones wrote "I can't do Groklaw without your input.... and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate." and "What I do know is it's not possible to be fully human if you are being surveilled 24/7... I hope that makes it clear why I can't continue. There is now no shield from forced exposure."
Just on the pervasive passive monitoring aspect, I think an under-discussed aspect of the time frame covered in the material of Snowden's leaks is that sites/services by and large wasn't using encrypted protocols (HTTPS).
So much could be intercepted back then because of this. It wasn't until 2010 that various large services—including Yahoo Mail and Facebook—got a kick in their ass by a whitehat browser plugin that allowed anyone on the same network to trivially hijack session cookies of others, stimulating an adoption of HTTPS[1] during 2011-2012.
By the time the Snowden leaks occurred in 2013 the trend was heading toward encrypted-by-default and governments were having to adapt.
I thought these “lawful intercept” organisations had their taps inside the data centers after https tsl to the user had already been terminated. And so the infamous ssl removed here slide from prism.
I am surprised this hasn't gotten more attention. I feel like HN used to love nothing more than complaining about patent trolls. Anyway, this article suggestions an action through regulation.gov which, based on the content of the page, seemed worth doing to me.
There is a fairly vocal contingent of patent people on LinkedIn swearing this is good for the solo guy, the small independent inventor. But yes, it does feel like it will be trolls that are in favor -- maybe some pharma wants this.
People who are paying for it to happen ... which is the standard mode of operation for this administration. This is just one of many such disasters they are generating.
honestly i think the whole patent framework is quite literally ready for the dumpster. the spirit of a patent is quite worthy, but the execution over the years has been pretty piss poor and I think the bad is almost out weighing the good; perhaps we only heard about the bad bits. Surely readers of hacker news can chime in good parts of patent? living off fruits of of your knowledge labour and earning that sweet sweet patent licencing fees into the sunset days of leisure?
Most small inventors/innovators don’t benefit. In recent times it’s mostly been good for large companies who can afford to hoard patent portfolios, for defense against other large companies and to crush potential upstarts. Everyone complaining about the smartphone duopoly should look here for a big reason why there are no meaningful competitors.
From the perspective of policy makers, the biggest advantage of the modern patent system was to give US companies a leg up over foreign competitors, as we had the largest patent portfolios, better R&D, and legal frameworks we could use to our advantage. But this no longer works, as our biggest competitor understandably decided this wasn’t a fair bargain and has ignored IP rules to their own benefit. (Why nobody saw this coming is a mystery.) IMHO most patents now harm the economy more than they help.
I have been one of the small inventors who wrote patents and ultimately sold them to a company that makes most of its money suing over patents.
Patents are a form of business insurance you can get on expensive R&D work. When you go into the market to sell your products, your marketing material and the function of your product naturally leaks how it works. Motivated competitors can then reverse-engineer what you did or otherwise figure out how to enter the market that you revealed was valuable. If they do it by actually out-innovating you, your patents don't really protect you, but if they just take what you're doing, the patent is there so you can claim the fruits of your labor regardless. In general, you cash in on this insurance contract by either contracting with lawyers to sue the infringers (usually on contingency or with litigation financing to remove the cash cost) or by selling your patent portfolio to someone who will sue the infringers.
In return for this insurance contract, you have to publicly disclose the details of your inventions in a way that a motivated party can read and understand (it's patentese, not English, but you can decipher it if you know the language). It also frees you up to publish internal details through other fora like scientific journals because this disclosure becomes pure upside (raising your company's reputation) rather than making you balance that upside against the downside of revealing information. Google is a good example of a firm that does a lot of balancing there: they publish a lot of their old, antiquated work while keeping the new stuff secret because it's mostly software and software is mostly unpatentable. In electrical engineering, small companies are much more likely to publish a lot more details on their newest devices because their devices are usually patented.
On HN, people mostly think about software patents. Many of these are stupid patents, and almost all of them have been invalidated through a decision called Alice Corp. vs CLS Bank. The digital shopping cart is one of these patents that Alice invalidated. By value, most patent litigation is about drugs, and after that you have things like computer hardware. The patent system really isn't for the HN crowd, and it really doesn't make sense for these software patents to be a thing - there's usually no expensive R&D to insure, and you have to write your patent before finding out if you have PMF.
Am I crazy or was there a strategy reason that inter partes review at USPTO was disfavored over trial? Like the legal standards are easier for the patentholder at USPTO or something like that?
It's not really about cost for most people who really like the IPR. It's a way to get a second chance to invalidate a patent and a way to drag out litigation. The cost of an IPR is actually not that much less than the cost of invalidation during a trial (although it saves you on other discovery because you can often stay the trial during your IPR), but it's a second invalidation path you can take at the same time.
The reality is that you get multiple bites at the apple. You challenge at trial and in an IPR. Lose both, challenge with an EPR and appeal the trial. IPRs were initially created to simplify trial and cost, but once the estoppel provisions were determined not to have much teeth, it just became something you did because there was no downside.
USPTO doesn't really have the budget or even often the expertise/depth.
> Like the legal standards are easier for the patentholder at USPTO or something like that?
It is much easier to get a patent than it is to use that patent successfully in legal proceedings. The bar that you have to clear to get it through the USPTO has never been particularly high.
So this is kinda, if you squint at it a little, just writing down what the status quo already is.
(As sibling mentions - if it did work, of course it's way cheaper to nip it in the bud earlier. You just can't really guarantee that you'll get enough expert eyes to get a reasonable decision out of the USPTO)
I would have to ask more to be able to explain more, but that's how things have been explained to me growing up.
> USPTO doesn't really have the budget or even often the expertise/depth.
Oh yeah, there are so many patents with obvious prior art, or that are so much "the obvious way to do it" (to anyone with expertise in the field) that they're inherently unpatentable, but which get through the US Patent and Trademark Office because the reviewers have no experience in software development, so they get fooled by language designed to conceal what the patent is really about.
I still remember a case from the early 2000's or perhaps late 1990's, which I can't dig up now since I don't remember enough keywords to get a search engine to find it for me. So no link, sorry, you'll have to rely on my could-be-missing-a-detail memory. But I recall reading a patent and realizing that under the complex language, it was essentially patenting scrollbars, which at that point had been around for years. But to someone who didn't understand programming terminology, they might have thought this was a novel idea, rather than a snowjob designed to hide the fact that prior art on this patent submission had existed for over a decade, making the patent submission invalid on its face.
There have been other patents which, when I read them, I realized were patenting something that had lots of prior art, but I don't remember them. Maybe someone has more examples. But that patent that boiled down to "clicking a mouse on a designated area to scroll a page" stuck in my mind for years. (At least two decades, in fact).
> Oh yeah, there are so many patents with obvious prior art, or that are so much "the obvious way to do it" (to anyone with expertise in the field) that they're inherently unpatentable, but which get through the US Patent and Trademark Office because the reviewers have no experience in software development, so they get fooled by language designed to conceal what the patent is really about.
Yea that's exactly what I mean
One solution would potentially be to increase the USPTO budget by a lot. But... nobody does that I guess. So here we are.
I believe that by now patents have transformed from a tool to protect little guy and encourage research and creativity to a dick wielded by big corps to stall the rest of the world.
If it was up to me I would probably eliminate patent enforcements against small entities completely. If they grow over some certain size then sure, let 2 big gorillas fight each other
You can thank them properly by submitting a comment on this matter and add your voice to the chorus so the proposed ruling gets shoved right back into the orifice it was pulled from.
This is critically important and I filed a comment on behalf of my 250 full time employees at Coalition Technologies. We have been harassed by patent trolls and it is a nightmare.
Um, the public comment form lists first and last name as required fields (with address and phone number optional), then at the bottom includes this warning:
"Do not submit personally identifiable information through this form."
Before I discovered HN (of which I'm on daily), I was a frequent reader of Groklaw[0]- a site primarily devoted to covering the fragile intersection of the technology sector and legal system; where the two are often at odds with one another. We're more than a decade beyond it's voluntary closure after the Snowden revelations and it's left a large void on substantive coverage of these issues. The site was the blog of an anonymous tech reporter named Pamela Jones that did detailed deep-dives into the parties & issues involved in high-profile lawsuits between tech companies, like Apple vs. Samsung on the issue of design patents for rounded corners, over what have often been patents containing broad language that resulted in hindrances to innovation ranging from being unwilling to license to extortion of revenue streams for entire product lines. Part of why I find the technology industry to be continually interesting is its desire to innovate instead of litigate- there needs to be a check on bad faith actors whose goal is capture of a niche through regulatory means instead of fair competition; else we get these cases relegated to the infamous eastern district of Texas which has historically played favor towards non-practicing patent trolls. I'll be submitting my comment and suggest others do the same.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groklaw
Oh dear. Its digital tombstone has been relegated to be adware for crypto gambling.
why would Snowden reveals cause it to close?
"everything is so bad it's hopeless" or smth?
> On August 20, 2013, a final article appeared on Groklaw, explaining that due to pervasive government monitoring of the Internet, there could no longer be an expectation of the sort of privacy online that was necessary to collaborate on sensitive topics. Citing the closure of Lavabit earlier that month, Jones wrote "I can't do Groklaw without your input.... and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate." and "What I do know is it's not possible to be fully human if you are being surveilled 24/7... I hope that makes it clear why I can't continue. There is now no shield from forced exposure."
Just on the pervasive passive monitoring aspect, I think an under-discussed aspect of the time frame covered in the material of Snowden's leaks is that sites/services by and large wasn't using encrypted protocols (HTTPS).
So much could be intercepted back then because of this. It wasn't until 2010 that various large services—including Yahoo Mail and Facebook—got a kick in their ass by a whitehat browser plugin that allowed anyone on the same network to trivially hijack session cookies of others, stimulating an adoption of HTTPS[1] during 2011-2012.
By the time the Snowden leaks occurred in 2013 the trend was heading toward encrypted-by-default and governments were having to adapt.
[1] https://threatpost.com/facebook-kills-firesheep-new-secure-b...
I thought these “lawful intercept” organisations had their taps inside the data centers after https tsl to the user had already been terminated. And so the infamous ssl removed here slide from prism.
I am surprised this hasn't gotten more attention. I feel like HN used to love nothing more than complaining about patent trolls. Anyway, this article suggestions an action through regulation.gov which, based on the content of the page, seemed worth doing to me.
Fast and easy to take action on that page.
Submitted. We’re still here!
I submitted a comment on Regulation.gov, and if any of you actually give a shit about tech, I suggest you do it too.
regulations.gov
Right, can't fix a typo this late. HN really needs to extend that window a bit.
Who wants this? Is it just patent troll regulatory capture?
There is a fairly vocal contingent of patent people on LinkedIn swearing this is good for the solo guy, the small independent inventor. But yes, it does feel like it will be trolls that are in favor -- maybe some pharma wants this.
People who are paying for it to happen ... which is the standard mode of operation for this administration. This is just one of many such disasters they are generating.
All patent aggressors I'd guess, especially with a big pile of patents they weaponize.
honestly i think the whole patent framework is quite literally ready for the dumpster. the spirit of a patent is quite worthy, but the execution over the years has been pretty piss poor and I think the bad is almost out weighing the good; perhaps we only heard about the bad bits. Surely readers of hacker news can chime in good parts of patent? living off fruits of of your knowledge labour and earning that sweet sweet patent licencing fees into the sunset days of leisure?
Most small inventors/innovators don’t benefit. In recent times it’s mostly been good for large companies who can afford to hoard patent portfolios, for defense against other large companies and to crush potential upstarts. Everyone complaining about the smartphone duopoly should look here for a big reason why there are no meaningful competitors.
From the perspective of policy makers, the biggest advantage of the modern patent system was to give US companies a leg up over foreign competitors, as we had the largest patent portfolios, better R&D, and legal frameworks we could use to our advantage. But this no longer works, as our biggest competitor understandably decided this wasn’t a fair bargain and has ignored IP rules to their own benefit. (Why nobody saw this coming is a mystery.) IMHO most patents now harm the economy more than they help.
I have been one of the small inventors who wrote patents and ultimately sold them to a company that makes most of its money suing over patents.
Patents are a form of business insurance you can get on expensive R&D work. When you go into the market to sell your products, your marketing material and the function of your product naturally leaks how it works. Motivated competitors can then reverse-engineer what you did or otherwise figure out how to enter the market that you revealed was valuable. If they do it by actually out-innovating you, your patents don't really protect you, but if they just take what you're doing, the patent is there so you can claim the fruits of your labor regardless. In general, you cash in on this insurance contract by either contracting with lawyers to sue the infringers (usually on contingency or with litigation financing to remove the cash cost) or by selling your patent portfolio to someone who will sue the infringers.
In return for this insurance contract, you have to publicly disclose the details of your inventions in a way that a motivated party can read and understand (it's patentese, not English, but you can decipher it if you know the language). It also frees you up to publish internal details through other fora like scientific journals because this disclosure becomes pure upside (raising your company's reputation) rather than making you balance that upside against the downside of revealing information. Google is a good example of a firm that does a lot of balancing there: they publish a lot of their old, antiquated work while keeping the new stuff secret because it's mostly software and software is mostly unpatentable. In electrical engineering, small companies are much more likely to publish a lot more details on their newest devices because their devices are usually patented.
On HN, people mostly think about software patents. Many of these are stupid patents, and almost all of them have been invalidated through a decision called Alice Corp. vs CLS Bank. The digital shopping cart is one of these patents that Alice invalidated. By value, most patent litigation is about drugs, and after that you have things like computer hardware. The patent system really isn't for the HN crowd, and it really doesn't make sense for these software patents to be a thing - there's usually no expensive R&D to insure, and you have to write your patent before finding out if you have PMF.
Am I crazy or was there a strategy reason that inter partes review at USPTO was disfavored over trial? Like the legal standards are easier for the patentholder at USPTO or something like that?
Cost -- it is way cheaper to use IPR and avoid discovery associated with the other factors that happen at trial. Speed, the PTO is generally faster.
It's not really about cost for most people who really like the IPR. It's a way to get a second chance to invalidate a patent and a way to drag out litigation. The cost of an IPR is actually not that much less than the cost of invalidation during a trial (although it saves you on other discovery because you can often stay the trial during your IPR), but it's a second invalidation path you can take at the same time.
The reality is that you get multiple bites at the apple. You challenge at trial and in an IPR. Lose both, challenge with an EPR and appeal the trial. IPRs were initially created to simplify trial and cost, but once the estoppel provisions were determined not to have much teeth, it just became something you did because there was no downside.
I would guess USPTO (or at least some people at it) probably wants it, because they would rather not deal with these reviews.
USPTO doesn't really have the budget or even often the expertise/depth.
> Like the legal standards are easier for the patentholder at USPTO or something like that?
It is much easier to get a patent than it is to use that patent successfully in legal proceedings. The bar that you have to clear to get it through the USPTO has never been particularly high.
So this is kinda, if you squint at it a little, just writing down what the status quo already is.
(As sibling mentions - if it did work, of course it's way cheaper to nip it in the bud earlier. You just can't really guarantee that you'll get enough expert eyes to get a reasonable decision out of the USPTO)
I would have to ask more to be able to explain more, but that's how things have been explained to me growing up.
> USPTO doesn't really have the budget or even often the expertise/depth.
Oh yeah, there are so many patents with obvious prior art, or that are so much "the obvious way to do it" (to anyone with expertise in the field) that they're inherently unpatentable, but which get through the US Patent and Trademark Office because the reviewers have no experience in software development, so they get fooled by language designed to conceal what the patent is really about.
I still remember a case from the early 2000's or perhaps late 1990's, which I can't dig up now since I don't remember enough keywords to get a search engine to find it for me. So no link, sorry, you'll have to rely on my could-be-missing-a-detail memory. But I recall reading a patent and realizing that under the complex language, it was essentially patenting scrollbars, which at that point had been around for years. But to someone who didn't understand programming terminology, they might have thought this was a novel idea, rather than a snowjob designed to hide the fact that prior art on this patent submission had existed for over a decade, making the patent submission invalid on its face.
There have been other patents which, when I read them, I realized were patenting something that had lots of prior art, but I don't remember them. Maybe someone has more examples. But that patent that boiled down to "clicking a mouse on a designated area to scroll a page" stuck in my mind for years. (At least two decades, in fact).
> Oh yeah, there are so many patents with obvious prior art, or that are so much "the obvious way to do it" (to anyone with expertise in the field) that they're inherently unpatentable, but which get through the US Patent and Trademark Office because the reviewers have no experience in software development, so they get fooled by language designed to conceal what the patent is really about.
Yea that's exactly what I mean
One solution would potentially be to increase the USPTO budget by a lot. But... nobody does that I guess. So here we are.
Or we could stop giving patents for software, that would probably dramatically reduce the number of applications USPTO has to review.
And if we reduced the length of patent validity, then invalid patenta would expire sooner and wouldn't be quite as much of an issue.
I believe that by now patents have transformed from a tool to protect little guy and encourage research and creativity to a dick wielded by big corps to stall the rest of the world.
If it was up to me I would probably eliminate patent enforcements against small entities completely. If they grow over some certain size then sure, let 2 big gorillas fight each other
I think it would be better to abolish patents entirely, but maybe that could potentially be another alternative way.
And this just after the USPTO gained some good karma for re-examining a bad patent from Nintendo in the Palworld vs Pokemon feud:
https://www.sportskeeda.com/mmo/news-nintendo-vs-palworld-po...
Did you notice that LFP batteries became more prevalent and much cheaper recently? That's because some key patents expired.
The same thing happened with 3D printing a while ago. It only took off after the patents expired.
Patents are a pest. They're just another mechanism to pump money from below to above.
I submitted a comment.
Thank you EFF.
You can thank them properly by submitting a comment on this matter and add your voice to the chorus so the proposed ruling gets shoved right back into the orifice it was pulled from.
Ah, more IP sclerosis. Great.
This is critically important and I filed a comment on behalf of my 250 full time employees at Coalition Technologies. We have been harassed by patent trolls and it is a nightmare.
The deadline for comments was November 17.
It’s December 2 as explained in the article and the page on regulations.gov. Where do you see Nov 17?
Via the link in the article to: Revision to Rules of Practice Before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/10/17/2025-19...
It would be nice to have some confirmation, but I'm assuming there was an extension.
Given that EFF and the comment form at regulations.gov cite Dec 2nd.
In any case, I'm filing my comment now, and encouraging others to do so as well.
Anyone who's ever been through any kind of patent process should understand just how egregious this is...
There was an extension. I don't have link handy, but an extra 15 days were provided.
Um, the public comment form lists first and last name as required fields (with address and phone number optional), then at the bottom includes this warning:
"Do not submit personally identifiable information through this form."
Um, the point is to not associate personal information with your name, which would make that information "personally identifiable".
The form will accept "Anonymous" for first, last. It would be nice if it actually said this...