Cloudflare Defeats Another Patent Troll With Crowd-Sourced Prior-Art Army - Slas...

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• Patent trolls have actually been losing some ground in ETX as of late, so they are coming over to WTX as apparently favorable. I can only see their scattering-roach behavior as a positive development, and living in WTX and having been summoned for service a number of times in this district court myself, I say keep em coming; we will keep tearing them new assholes. Despite having the appearance of a politically motivated court, I think that patent trolls will not be able to enjoy the same success as they have historically achieved in ETX. Slow steps in the right direction, I hope....

• Re:

  My (possibly flawed) recollection is that the Eastern District of Texas is concerned, as far as taking patent cases, was legislated/regulated (I forget which) out of the patent troll business. The judge tried to circumvent it, and got nailed for it. Well, nailed as hard as they ever nail a judge - batted with big fluffy pillows and a stern finger wag with a very cross look. And Horror of Horrors, a whispered "NO!".

• Re:

  Why is AV1 hard to encode?

  • A lot of it is how hardware encoders are limited by having to avoid patented techniques, which are usually faster ones. Eventually when enough patents expire a truly optimized encoder will be available, but AV1 right now is making the best of a difficult situation.

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  I broadly agree that patents are at least absurd as it stands, however to say "there can't be new ideas if we've been at it for 100 years" is a bit pessimistic.

  • Re:

    I thought you patent implementations and not ideas. Somewhere this got lost along the way. But generally 'on a computer' while sounding dumb, is another implementation that can be patented as long as it doesn't step on a prior implementation that did not use a computer.

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      Not really. A description of "one possible implementation" is required for an application. But it's the idea that counts.

      Except that "on a computer" or "using the Internet" are poor excuses for extending the patent coverage for prior art. Computers and the Internet have been around for a while. While they might have had patent coverage themselves at one time, that has long since expired. And their original innovation was very general purpose.

      Example to illustrate the point: Ages ago, farmers used to carry

      • Re:

        Just thought of an example. The original Lamarr/Antheil patent for frequency hopping radio described an implementation involving two synchronized player piano rolls. Some people in the war department declared it as useless because "We can't fit a piano in a torpedo." In reality, a tiny mechanical music box movement would have worked as well. And fit inside a torpedo.

        The patent covered the idea. Not the piano.

    • Re: Patents are getting too unreasonable

      It depends on if the new implementation is obvious or innovative. Like people wanted to do something with a computer that a human could already do, but something about the ecosystem just fundamentally couldn't be figured out.

      A typewriter existed, but I wouldn't be surprised if the first electronic computer keyboard was patented, despite being "a typewriter but on a computer".

      Conversely, if on the back of otherwise patented keyboards, processors, monitors, and data storage technologies you add "order a book

  • Re:

    Barely pessimistic. I was trying to think of anything absolutely new, without prior lineage, in electronics for the past 50 years and come up blank. Which is not to say there are not any, simply nothing that comes to my mind that I would consider as new in every way. I mean, REALLY new things, not like a blue LED (we've had LEDs since 1962), not MOSFETs (1959), I mean really new. Not chips either, as it is not a break through, simply a refinement of application of single transistors. Even Maggies aren't tha

• End it!

  The software patent system is just a jobs program for lawyers. Time to ban patents on software. The original reasons for having patents don't hold often enough for software to justify the waste and red tape. The few "gem" patents don't make up for the mass cruft. Killit! . Don't rob 100 Peters to save one Paul.

  A vaunted example often given is CAT-scanning. But it's merely glorified ray-tracing, and ray-tracing was "discovered" about a decade earlier (without a patent). And it has a lot of similarities to

• Re:

  Patents have always been unreasonable.

  In the late 18th century, the sewing machine was considered high-tech. It was impossible to build one however, as there were dozens of patents you were violating just by building one.

  Even worse, many patents were for the exact same thing. And more patents were issued every day that overlapped with dozens of other patents.

  The situation was only resolved because the Singer corporation decided to buy up all the patents and solve the problem by brute force. Of course, it al

• Re:

  That's a good one.

  The number of people who care wouldn't even be noticed in the noise of voters.