Ask HN: Will we ever do something about patent trolls?

2 points

2 months ago

Some of you may have seen a project like Mycroft AI (nothing to do with LLMs!) from back in around 2017 or so, it was an open source Alexa alternative, even had skills and everything. I kept wondering why it quietly disappeared, and the repo was archived. Turns out a patent troll hit them hard, drained them of all their funds in court, till they shut down.

https://patentprogress.org/2024/05/another-startup-bites-the-dust-courtesy-of-patent-trolls/

https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/13/linux_ai_assistant_killed_off/

Then there's many others, and I'm sure I'm missing some, but here's a list of companies / projects hit by patent trolls with various outcomes:

That time some company shut down a free / open source site with a patent that came 10 years after the technology already existed.

https://www.techdirt.com/2014/11/19/patent-troll-kills-open-source-project-speeding-up-computation-erasure-codes/

https://x.com/JamesBessen/status/532906754364149760

Here's one where the courts did the right thing for once, against the Gnome project (note Gnome probably has better funding than most of these other smaller projects).

https://opensource.org/blog/gnome-patent-troll-stripped-of-patent-rights

Here's one I didn't even know about, if you ever posted a job ad on LinkedIn a company might have contacted you threatening to sue you for violating their patent (Whiskey Tango F....):

https://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-fights-back-we-wont-get-patent-trolled-again/

A few years ago, CloudFlare did have their own brawl with some as well, and it looks like thankfully they did not backdown:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/three-new-winners-of-project-jengo-and-more-defeats-for-the-patent-troll/

Small mobile app developers were hit for having links to payment providers:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-14682700

Apple was sued over Facetime, of all things, and lost:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114

I ask here, because this is one of the most pro-startup pro-hacker anti-patent troll communities on the web, does anyone know if there's any org doing something about patent trolling? It's ridiculous that people who provide no value to society can just waste court time and siphon funds from hard working people just because they bought a patent. The patent framework needs to be reworked to force a patent holder to prove they are actually using their patent to build something, or show they have built something that is on the market, and that the violations endanger their efforts, if they cannot produce this, they should be made to pay all court and lawyer fees.

Just my thoughts, I'm sure there's better ways to handle it, but if the rules are changed to stop patent trolls from basically extorting hard working people who actually invent and produce things, I think we could see a lot more. In the giant shift of AI since Mycroft was birthed, I can't imagine how much more advanced Mycroft would have been by now.

I hate when simple things stifle innovation. I'm an innovation junkie, I want to see the future we all saw as kids in cartoons and scifi that fascinated us, but we're often held back by bad actors.

Are there orgs or initiatives? Is anyone ... and I hate the word, but it really should be done, is anyone lobbying to protect inventors from patent trolls? Because they do more harm than good, and they benefit no one but themselves, while again, stifling innovation.

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