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Valve wins legal battle against patent troll Rothschild and associated companies (www.gamingonlinux.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 10 points 7 months ago (10 children)

80% of patent work is coming up with ideas and filing them. The remaining 20% is ensuring there's no prior art, prior patents, etc.

Besides, patent trolling is not completely negative. The silver lining is that the same system that allows this, also allows e.g. Sony to perpeetum own the patent for interactive TV ads that require the user to yell a word at the TV to ensure they're watching the ad. Sony owns the patent but never implemented it, nor did they license it to others.

Now imagine what would happen if you had to implement your patent into a commercial product or lose the rights to it...

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  • [–] 24 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    Besides, patent trolling is not completely negative.

    The very idea of intellectual property is ludicrous and absurd. The concept of owning ideas is one of the most ridiculous notions that capitalism ever came up with. There are absolutely zero positive benefits to society when it comes to patents. They are the very reason people can’t afford lifesaving medicines and farmers can’t replant their own seeds. Anyone who owns a patent is a leech and should be hanged by the neck until dead.

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  • [–] 17 points 7 months ago

    This.

    Even the original argument, that patents exists to reward inventors with a period of time where they have the sole ability to sell their product, is gone. Now patents are simply owned by the company or university and rarely the inventor or scientist, they're allowed to be renewed over and over so that they are effectively eternal.

    It's a shit system designed to encourage rent seeking behaviors without the risk and cost of having to invent new things.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (3 children)

    Patents give an incentive to actually do the R&D for new products and projects? How would you feel if you spent millions of dollars and 15yrs designing a product and then some random dude just buys one, reverse engineers it and undercuts you? It basically disincentivizes anyone from doing any innovation since the game theory would be to just wait for someone else to do it and then take it for your own.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Patents give an incentive to actually do the R&D for new products and projects?

    when Sir Frederick Banting invented insulin, he patented it not for greed, but to protect it from the patent system. he famously said, ''Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.''

    a hundred years since then, and corporations have patented new forms of insulin that slightly changed the original formula. they sue anyone who tries to make generic insulin, in order to prevent competition. the EXACT FUCKING THING BANTING TRIED TO PREVENT. the patent system is a weapon that has literally taken untold thousands of lives just from that one example.

    patents don't incentivize shit, and you're just the latest person without critical thinking skills to fall for that capitalist bullshit propaganda. the patent system exists for one reason, and that's to monetize ideas so that corporations can choose who gets to improve the world based on who has the biggest wallet.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    The fact that you consider it so black and white tells me you aren't thinking critically. Yes, the patent system can and has been abused over its long life. Literally every legal system has and will be. That's how it goes. The struggle is how to come up with a system that minimizes the loopholes while not entirely crippling the things they are intended to protect.

    Without some protections on human creations you end up with a war of who can steal the most ideas vice who can make the new best thing. You end up putting resources toward protecting your ideas and keeping them entirely secret, which arguably is worse than a public patent everyone can review and be inspired by.

    I'm not arguing that they have no downsides, I'm arguing that the position of "it's all bad, get rid of it" is reductive, at best.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    The struggle is how to come up with a system that minimizes the loopholes while not entirely crippling the things they are intended to protect.

    the "things they are intended to protect" is profits for the rich.

    The fact that you consider it so black and white

    it is black and white. the patent system is a capitalist invention with no benefit to society.

    Without some protections on human creations you end up with a war of who can steal the most ideas

    you can't "steal" ideas any more than you can copyright them. you think that just because you signed some piece of paper, that nobody else can come along and do it anyway? as a pirate who "steals" all media and video games they consume, let me be the first to tell you that you are out of your mind. the only thing enforcing patents is the monopoly the government has on violence. the same government whose police force started as slave catchers. the same government that refuses to charge the rich and powerful from the Trump-Epstein list. patents exist to protect the profits of the rich and powerful, they do not exist to protect you.

    You end up putting resources toward protecting your ideas and keeping them entirely secret

    the patent system is no different than that. "your" ideas might not be secret, but nobody else can legally make use of them. there's no practical difference. either way, the benefits those idea bring are restricted to the few people with enough money to purchase access to them.

    I’m not arguing that they have no downsides, I’m arguing that the position of “it’s all bad, get rid of it” is reductive, at best.

    that's because you either don't understand the basics of capitalism, or you defend it because it's the only chains you've ever known. or you're rich and pretending you're not.

    whatever the case, anyone who has a patent is a leech on society, and all patent holders should be hanged by the neck until dead. when we said "eat the rich", what we mean is kill them all. sorry if that bit confused you.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago* (2 children)

    You don't know what patent trolling is.

    You are describing patent enforcement.

    Patent trolling is when a small company/firm solely, only exists as a kind of legal container that currently owns ... well, usually a broad array of all kinds of patents that they bought from some other person or company at some point.

    They then go around and do nothing other than see who they can shakedown for money, via threatening all kinds of lawsuits, which would be extremely expensive and time consuming to fight, so most companies just fold and settle.

    Nintendo suing Palworld over copyright and patents?

    That's not patent trolling.

    Yes, the existence of patents and how IP law works is a complex and contentious topic, in general.

    But... patent trolling?

    It is a specific thing that occurs because of the current state of IP laws in the US, and basically everyone from any kind of relevant and related academic and/or legal background agrees that it is terrible and Congress should really revamp the laws to at least specifically fix it.

    Patent and IP law are complicated.

    Patent trolling is completely negative.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Sitting on a patent, not implementing it, while also not allowing others to implement it, is a form of patent trolling.

    Hell I'd even go as far as to call what Qualcomm does with their 4G/5G patents, trolling (they basically offer to sell patent licensing but it's generally much more expensive to get the license AND develop+manufacture your own modem with it than to buy modems from Qcom directly, which is essentially stifling any potential innovation on the modem market).

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago*

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll

    You can argue whatever you want, the actual common definition of a patent troll is what I described, a person/entity that did not invent, but owns or purchases or otherwise legally acquires as many patents as they can, then goes around trying to sue or legally threaten people they claim are using it... as a form of making money for themselves.

    Patent trolls operate much like any other company that is protecting and aggressively exploiting a patent portfolio. However, their focus is on obtaining additional money from existing uses, not from seeking out new applications for the technology.

    The fact stands that you in your original comment just broadly described basically the entire concept of patents and patent law existing... as a specific subset of activity enabled by that system.

    Which you described as 'not completely negative'.

    No, it is completely negative, it is a form of parasitic wealth accumulation only available to the wealthy, and it only has negative effects for everyone other than the patent troll.

    You can just make up a new colloquial meaning and sure, that's valid in the sense that the meanings of words change overtime... but like, this is specific, technical/legal/academic term with specific meaning.

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