News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won. Parent comment

Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by mmerlin on Monday November 04, 2019 @08:05PM (#21448600)
Not only their assets, but also their right to practice as lawyers... the founders were reported to bar association in two states for ethics violations...

"what safeguards should be put in place to make sure that attorneys who take the oath are held to a standard beyond mere greed or base opportunism"

Cloudflare really is making the world a better place in this case, by fighting back against the kinds of legal weasel who exists purely to be a money leech with no benefit to anyone but themselves.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by vesinisa on Monday November 04, 2019 @08:53PM (#21448882)
Unfortunately, the challenges before the bar associations were apparently not successful. Their wording is careful since "disciplinary proceedings in front of bar associations are generally confidential", but they do remark that "it will take a broader change in orientation by these professional associations" before even obvious patent trolling is considered legal malpractice.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by kevin_thibedeau on Monday November 04, 2019 @08:55PM (#21448891)
We already have barratry laws on the books. Someone just needs to enforce them. Advancing disingenuous arguments in court should be an automatic year's suspension.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by rayiner on Monday November 04, 2019 @09:30PM (#21449058)
What is a "disingenuous argument?" Is it like reading the phrase "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" to mean something less than that based on a clearly set-off explanatory clause in front? (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

The standard for permissible arguments in court is having a good faith basis in law or fact, or a good faith argument for extending or changing the law. It's not clear to me that's wrong. Fee-splitting with non-lawyers is the bigger issue. That is impermissible for all sorts of good reasons.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by kevin_thibedeau on Monday November 04, 2019 @09:41PM (#21449106)
Court officers take an oath not to waste the court's time. Knowingly advancing baseless claims that are only meant to scare a victim into settling is a violation of that oath. This isn't hard stuff. The priesthood just doesn't want to hold its members accountable.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by rayiner on Monday November 04, 2019 @09:53PM (#21449167)
My point is that "disingenuous" sweeps quite a bit more broadly than "baseless."
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by areyousure on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @05:20PM (#21468177)
> Fee-splitting with non-lawyers is the bigger issue. That is impermissible for all sorts of good reasons.

Out of (sincere) curiosity, what are some of those reasons? Thanks.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by notSupplied on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @01:47AM (#21460288)
If it was so obvious, why did you omit the clause?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by mr_toad on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @06:00PM (#21457732)
What some of these outfits are up to is more than just barratry, it’s extortion and racketeering. I’d like to see them brought up on RICO charges.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by htrp on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @12:25PM (#21454461)
Doesn't matter if the disciplinary action is successful, the fact that cloudflare seizes the initiative is impressive.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by egdod on Monday November 04, 2019 @09:02PM (#21448929)
Patent trolling isn’t considered improper at all. I would hope that the complaints to the bar had a little more in them than “this lawyer is doing something we don’t like but that isn’t actually against the rules.”
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by agency on Monday November 04, 2019 @09:18PM (#21448997)
Per the post, their complaints were based on rules prohibiting attorneys from splitting contingency fees with non-attorneys. The patent they were asserting against Cloudflare was purchased from the inventor for $1 plus “other good and valuable consideration.” As part of their defense to the ethics complaint Blackbird asserted that they do not use contingency fee arrangements for the patents it acquires, but do something "similar."
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by vesinisa on Monday November 04, 2019 @09:15PM (#21448984)
Don't read too much into my paraphrasing, as per the article they did in fact raise substantiated malpractice complaints. The troll had entered into a forbidden profit sharing arrangement with a non-lawyer, and was being purposely ambiguous if it is a law firm at all.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by crispyambulance on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @08:08AM (#21451983)
> Patent trolling isn’t considered improper at all.

That's for the bar to decide. But what do you mean "... at all" ?

The sad truth is that many hard working companies have had to fork over thousands of dollars to law firms that happen to hold patents but which don't have any means or even intent to deploy the inventions in those patents. These law firms simply exist to extract money by virtue of holding vaguely-worded garbage patents. THAT's what a patent troll is and THAT is improper.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by rasz on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @06:43PM (#21458149)
>> Patent trolling isn’t considered improper at all.

>That's for the bar to decide.

and the bar decided those guys did nothing wrong ...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by egdod on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @08:45AM (#21452271)
What I mean is that it isn’t against the rules. You’re welcome to think it’s a little shady (and I won’t disagree), but it’s not improper.

What’s improper about creating liquidity in the market for inventions? And patents don’t require the holder to make or sell anything—they give the holder the right to prevent others from doing so.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by rhinoceraptor on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @04:16PM (#21456783)
There's a big difference between legal and ethical.

And it's not creating liquidity in the market for inventions. It's creating liquidity in state-sanctioned and enforced monopoly rights of inventions.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by egdod on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @11:18PM (#21459674)
Without that monopoly, there wouldn’t be much of a market for inventions.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by ric2b on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @08:11PM (#21469460)
Of course there would, there's a lot of money to be made from inventing something, even without a patent.

And the biggest companies in the world aren't the biggest because they have patent protected monopolies.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by jimmydddd on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @09:31AM (#21452645)
Some people own houses that they don't even intend to live in. Then they rent out those houses to other people who actually want to live there. Improper?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by ufmace on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @09:43AM (#21452758)
Rather different things. The right to own property and do what you want with it, outside of a relatively limited set of prohibitions, is a fundamental right that forms the basis of our economy. Patents are an artificial construct created for a specific purpose with specific limitations. They are meant to encourage technological innovation by providing temporary Government protection for the inventor in exchange for a disclosure of the details of the technology. For an entity that has not invented anything and has no intention to do any research or sell any products to use them to extort rents from companies that actually do those things is a distortion of the purpose of the system.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by marcus_holmes on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @10:02AM (#21452946)
no, this is similar to owning a plan for a house, then charging rent (without ever having built the house) to anyone who happens to live in a house that looks a bit similar to the plan.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by ta0xdeadbeef on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @10:06AM (#21452975)
IP isn't a tangible asset, so the analogy is unsound.

I think it's improper for someone not using IP or not the original developer of IP to be able to make IP claims. If you didn't develop the tech or aren't using the tech, you shouldn't have any claim over the usage of that tech.

The same goes for "defensive" patent strategies. They're an affront to the spirit of patents.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by egdod on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @10:30AM (#21453200)
> I think it's improper for someone not using IP or not the original developer of IP to be able to make IP claims

Congress, the Supreme Court, and hundreds of years of precedent would disagree.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by ta0xdeadbeef on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @10:36AM (#21453266) 

   assert_eq!(legal, moral || ethical || proper)
   > thread 0 panicked
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won by darkarmani on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @11:59AM (#21464424)
Do they also prevent anyone else from living in houses?
[ Parent | on HN ]