Nobody's trying to tell you that you have to do this. They're trying to help you understand why other people want to do it.

Is there a name for the fallacy "I don't see why people do X", "they do it because Y", "but I don't care about Y!" ?

Fair enough. Replace "I" with "someone" in my previous comment. I can see why people would do these patent searches, but I still think it's a bad idea for those folks do these patent searches for so little.

I don't think it's paying most of them to do a patent search.

It's a way to get media attention for people to glance at it. It's providing a nudge for them to tell you about something that they know off the top of their head.

Patent trolling is a big problem, and a lot of us view opposing it in a small way as a type of community of service.

That's like saying it's a bad idea to contribute to Open Source. It's a similar motivation: people want to do good in the world and don't necessarily need to be paid for it.

I think I see his point though, and it's not quite the same as working on FOSS. He made a sibling comment about helping a "multi-billion dollar" corporation (CloudFlare) for so little reward. So in his view, this volunteer effort didn't really help regular people that much, and instead benefited a huge company mostly.

People usually work on FOSS because they have a personal interest in a project, and want to share that with everyone. So we end up with stuff like device drivers for hardware where the mfgr couldn't be bothered to make a Linux driver, or various useful utilities, a whole OS (which everyone can use), etc. What we don't see much in FOSS is "enterprise software": stuff that's only really useful if you're a huge company. Where's the FOSS alternatives to proprietary human resource management systems, supply chain management systems, etc.? Generally, stuff like that doesn't exist, because no one wants to spend their free time working on things that they personally have no use for, and no one's found a good business case to make a company producing an open-source version.

Taking out patents is like FOSS, though, in that the effect is that, once the patent is gone, anyone can work in that area without worrying about infringing that patent. So, even if the occasion might be a threat to a multi-billion dollar company, this is a case where helping such companies is well-aligned with the needs of the FOSS movement.

>once the patent is gone, anyone can work in that area without worrying about infringing that patent.

I agree, and that's a great point I think the patent examiner person was missing. These patents are a hazard for everyone, big or small.

For a patent search? Too little.

Screwing over a patent troll? That’s priceless.

No amount of money can provide that satisfaction. Heck, I’m not even impacted and I’m gleefully happy. Whoever helped deserves a free beer. Patent trolls are a blight.

The problem is there's a lot of patent tools and only a few make the news. Passion can't win them all.

> Passion can't win them all.

If you do the numbers, yes it can. There are a lot of people who could do this searching.

Patent trolls win because they are a protection racket, and it takes resources to fight them.

This battle took 2 years, I think ?

It is the same with programmers who writes open source programs just for fun of it. And I remember in 2000x there were people who thought that it is a bad idea. There were even lawsuits filled by programmers who couldn't sell their programs because they were left without customers due to open source solutions.

Or the whole Wikipedia thing, that at first was dismissed by traditional publishers, whom then were bankrupted and buried by an army of free working amateurs.

You don’t still consult your Encarta CD-ROM? How do you ever figure out what’s what?

isn't this exactly the point?

from the viewpoint you've presented it's a bad idea to volunteer for basically anything.

even something like enlisting in a nation's armed forces is a bad idea since the risk is so high vs the monetary reward, and the only way people would become soldiers is to join mercenary armies where there is a price exacted that matches the performance.

for many people, they value the intangible more than the money.

Okay, I think appreciate your perspective and that of some others here more. If you all think it's a good use of your time, go ahead. Personally, I have more pressing concerns. And for what it's worth, (and I know this won't be popular here) the entire patent troll narrative is overblown, which seems to be the consensus opinion of people working in patent law. For example, see this blog post:

https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/06/22/myths-patent-trolls-preven...

Given that I think the narrative is overblown, I don't really see this as a "public service". It's a problem, sure, but it's not a major one.

My first startup had 3 different firms with no real product try to shake us down using patents with obvious prior art at different times. It was a major distraction and costly in resources when we had limited capital.

We did manage to convince them all to go away, but it might have been cheaper to just pay them off. I'm guessing that all they really wanted was a long list of capitulations and licensees before litigating against the big guys.

I'm not surprised that the IPR industry which thrives upon resulting legal fees is less inclined to view things as trolling and any trolling that happens to be not too severe, though. ;)

Sorry to hear about your experience.

To reply to you and some others:

I'm not saying that patent trolling is not a problem. My point is that it's not as big a problem as commonly believed (in terms of total monetary losses over the US). The real problem is poor patent quality, which goes beyond patent trolling but does allow trolls to exist in the first place. For those who want to do a public service, address poor patent quality as it's the root cause.

> And for what it's worth, (and I know this won't be popular here) the entire patent troll narrative is overblown, which seems to be the consensus opinion of people working in patent law.

"People working in patent law" have a conflict of interest. The arguments being made in that link are practically in bad faith, e.g.:

> Google and Uber are locked in a patent battle over self-driving automobiles, so does that make Google and Uber patent trolls?

The ordinary definition of a patent troll is a firm that sues for patent infringement as its primary business. Say what you will about Google and Uber, they clearly derive the bulk of their revenue from offering products and services to the public.

> As we consider all of this it is also important to keep in mind that the U.S. tech sector spending on patent trolls is less than 1% of all IT spending.

If you compare a smaller number to a bigger number, the bigger number is bigger. But the thing that matters isn't the size of the problem relative to the size of the industry, it's whether the shakedowns are net positive or net negative.

For software patents in particular, it's the latter, because software is inherently and purposely abstract. Which is incompatible with the reasonable operation of the patent system, because it makes the two viable strategies to patent the abstraction or to patent some specific implementation which is required for compatibility, so that alternate implementations can't be used without disrupting interoperability. Otherwise the number of alternate software implementations of any given abstraction are so large that nobody would purposely use somebody else's software patent, they'd just create their own non-infringing implementation of the same abstraction.

But patenting the abstraction itself is not supposed to be allowed (even though these patents are all too often granted) and using a patent for the purposes of preventing interoperability should be an antitrust violation for the same reason as tying is illegal even when the original monopoly was lawfully obtained, because the value you're extracting isn't the value of the invention, it's the value of compatibility with the existing system. And then there's nothing of merit left.

You do? You’ve spent more time here commenting than some of the people who got paid under Project Jengo. #odd

You're right. I do think arguing with people on the internet was a bad way to spend my day off.

You apparently have difficulty understanding that other people have different experiences and priorities from you. This shows up in every aspect of your argument here.

Of course the people deeply in the system don’t see a problem with. You might as well have linked a “smoking is good for you” study from Phillip Morris.

> And for what it's worth, (and I know this won't be popular here) the entire patent troll narrative is overblown, which seems to be the consensus opinion of people working in patent law.

The consensus among lawyers who benefit from people unnecessarily having to hire lawyers is that the situation is not bad. Well, there's a shocker...

I think the severity of this problem depends on context. I can share that as a small startup we had a patent troll come after us and it was almost fatal because it shattered our fund raising process.

We prevailed and lived to fight another day but that was an incredibly unproductive and stressful time.

So I see this differently as do the many team members who kept their jobs and made good money when we were acquired.

Wow, that is an awful article. Straw-manning everyone who wants patent reform as "those who prefer to take technologies they did not innovate rather than pay a reasonable royalty to innovators." Multiple paragraphs devoted to tearing down the straw-man argument "every company that tries to enforce its patents is a patent troll" -- which nobody is claiming. An insane argument about how "America's technology companies" are hypocritical because both the trolls and the ones complaining about trolls are technology companies -- so what? That's like when people claim "Reddit" is hypocritical. They're different people!

That author is barely even trying to hide his extreme slant, and you posting an obviously extremely biased article as some sort of evidence dramatically undermines your opinion on the topic and frankly calls into question the limits of "assume good faith".

You clearly don't understand how much people hate patent trolls and software patents in general. It's all a cruel joke, and getting paid some token sum of money to invalidate a bunch of worthless patents is just a nice bonus. You wouldn't do it for free because generating these patents is your job.

You are mistaken. I'm a former patent examiner as pointed out in the third word of my first comment here. So I have no conflict of interest. And I think I have a solid understanding of how much people hate patent trolls and software patents in general, which is why I added the qualifier about how I know my comment would be unpopular in some other comments here.

You really are hilarious. “…third word of my first comment…”

I love the fact that you exist.

"I'm going to say something you hate"

> Says something we hate

"Why do you hate what I said?"

Conflicts of interest don't really work like that. You are a patent examiner even after you stop working as one, and for as long as your loyalties and ideas remain with your former job.

I’d say the conflict of interest has gone away, but the years of rationalizing cognitive dissonance have solidified certain opinions.

I don't know that it's a fallacy that has a name, but it could be considered an appeal to authority (person is claiming authority on what other should care about) or ignoratio elenchi (irrelevant conclusion) since the conclusion (nobody should care about this) obviously doesn't follow (I don't care about this).

It's inductance from the particular (me) to the general case

Since I hate crab, all people hate crab and confronted by a crab meat liker I have no capacity to imagine why, since I hate it and therefore everybody should and therefore you're wrong.

In reality, it's the exception proving (testing) the case and showing it's flaw: all people do not hate crab therefore my generalisation is specious. Instead of doubting why anyone likes crab I should ask why I hate it.

Induction?

Projection?

If the patent trolls were only harming CloudFlare then I would not be so concerned. But it is my impression that they mostly try to go after very small, independent companies because those can be guaranteed to not have enough funds to fight in court, so they will either pay up or go out of business.

I consider it a public service to try and drive these patent trolls out of business because the harm they do is done to the the entire industry, especially the most vulnerable companies in that industry.

Of course, I would much prefer to change the law so that patent trolling was not allowed or was not profitable.

For what it's worth, and I know this won't be popular here, the entire patent troll narrative is overblown. Patent trolls are not as big a problem as big tech companies want you to believe. See what people working in patent law actually think, for instance, I found this blog post in a minute or so:

https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/06/22/myths-patent-trolls-preven...

I think it's good that Cloudflare didn't pay this particular troll, but even if they had, it's not that big a deal.

And the best way to stop patent trolls would be to prevent bad patents from being granted in the first place by giving examiners more time. The USPTO is funded solely by fees, not taxes, creating a perverse incentive to grant invalid patents. Fix that, increase patent fees, and give examiners more time.

> For what it's worth, and I know this won't be popular here, the entire patent troll narrative is overblown. Patent trolls are not as big a problem as big tech companies want you to believe. See what people working in patent law actually think, for instance, I found this blog post in a minute or so:

Nothing in the article you cited says patent trolls aren't a problem. It claims (without really supporting it) that modern patent trolling is the fault of the technology industry, which I can almost believe, but "the technology industry" is large, and non-practicing entities which are commonly identified as "trolls" are very different than entities that actually do R&D.

> And the best way to stop patent trolls would be to prevent bad patents from being granted in the first place by giving examiners more time. The USPTO is funded solely by fees, not taxes, creating a perverse incentive to grant invalid patents. Fix that, increase patent fees, and give examiners more time.

I think you are probably right about this, at least in direction if not in magnitude. The "patent troll myth" argument isn't persuasive, however, and I don't think you are convincing many people here.

Patent trolls are clearly a problem, in particular for startups and independent software developers who lack the resources to effectively fight the trolls. The cost of settling with a troll might bankrupt a small startup before they have a chance to raise a lot of capital and hire expensive lawyers. Open source projects are also harmed greatly by patents and patent trolls on a regular basis. There are many famous and well studied examples since the early days of the free software movement. I'd recommend reading some random articles on techdirt.com (or even just skim the headlines) for a quick refresher.

I am strongly in the anti-patent camp. I don't think we should enforce any patents, especially not software patents but even beyond that. It seems to me that all forms of Monopoly are bad, including the time-limited, government sponsored ones.

The promise of patents is that you have to reveal a useful invention, in such a way that it would enable others to copy that invention, but then they must pay you a license to do so. I've read a lot of patents and I have encountered only a few that actually divulged something useful that I wouldn't have known otherwise. The vast majority of them simply utilize a specialized genera of legalese to carefully craft a pretext for interfering in other people's business. The idea is to make the language as convoluted and ambiguous as possible in order to cover the most potential situations and cast the most doubt about what is actually covered. Meanwhile they are careful to control the amount of useful / valuable content to a level that is practically zero. I'd argue that with the vast majority of patents, it's actually pretty far into negative value territory. Besides litigation and hypothetical IP value listed on a balance sheet, the only real service that most patents provide to the world is to fill the world with more FUD. Just what we all need, more things to worry about. I'm sure every god fearing individual goes to sleep at night praying for another reason to hesitate before trying something new. Everyone loves that hesitation which comes along with every inspiration: will this exciting idea I have for making something useful turn into a successful business or will I get the attention of some scummy lawyers and wind up on the wrong end of a ruinous lawsuit.

> Why should I do a "public service" for a company with a market cap measured in the tens of billions of dollars? They can pay for it.

It's right there in the name: public service. Yeah, it benefits cloudflare, but it also benefits nearly everyone else. Some people just want to improve the world, even if they're not fairly compensated for it. Some people see living in a world with one less patent troll as compensation enough.

The alternative is that Cloudflare pays a patent search firm to get the same result, albeit at a higher cost to Cloudflare. That would benefit everyone else too as the prior art would be on legal record. Why can't Cloudflare do a "public service" by paying a patent search firm like most other companies would?

>Why can't Cloudflare do a "public service" by paying a patent search firm like most other companies would?

I'm sure they did that too, like any other major company sued by a troll. This isn't an either/or situation.

Jengo draws from many, many people across the industry. They can surface all sorts of prior art, not just earlier patents, and they know where to look due to their experience.

As I said, every large company that gets sued by trolls pays patent search firms to find prior art. I can't imagine that Cloudflare didn't do the same. Why wouldn't they, there is a lot of money at stake? They added to that through the search program because the yield from patent search firms is often poor.

“You didn’t pay enough to my view of experts, but you won, but you could have won and paid more, and that’d be better.” That’s your argument? Just to be clear?

And, note, this strategy has worked pretty (cost) effectively for us before:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/winning-the-blackbird-battle/

But you’d suggest we do what everyone else does and hire expensive “experts”? K. Good luck with that.

Oh, forgot, that’s your profession… expensive expert. Carry on.

I do think that you all should have paid more. But I'm fine with the bounty program, as long as it's fairly compensated. I don't like the compensation of you all's program, but from the discussion I've had here, it's clear to me that many folks are fine with it. Fair enough, they can participate if they want to.

Also: I'm not saying that patent search firms are perfect. Albert Cory had a comment here about how the quality of search firms varies dramatically. But I do think that searching is a skill which can be developed. Many of the examiners I worked with at the USPTO were outstanding searchers who could find information in their area very quickly. It can be hard for someone looking to purchase patent search services to know who is good, unfortunately.

And your profession is…?

I'm a mechanical engineer. I mostly run and write fluid simulation code for a living. Much better paid and much lower stress than patent examining.

:-p

It isn't that uncommon to see patents were subject matter experts can easily point to unpatented prior art. I doubt such patents were filed without first paying experts to search for prior art. But such experts are experts in patents, not in the technology being patented, so they might not know the best places to look.

Why should a company that is doing a public service for the rest of us, at their own expense, pay more than it needs to to do that service?

If Cloudflare was to behave rationally, it would simply pay the troll to go away. Trolls are very good at making that the logical choice, which is why virtually everyone else just pays up. Cloudflare fights because the act of taking a stand fits with their values.

You're clearly not civic minded enough to appreciate why Cloudflare does what it does. And so you don't understand why other people, who share Cloudflare's values, would be motivated to help them accomplish their good deeds.

Yup!

> If Cloudflare was to behave rationally, it would simply pay the troll to go away.

Well, maybe.

Cloudflare is a company that sells to developers. A lot of developers hate patent trolls. Fighting back against a patent troll is a good way to gain respect and goodwill from those developers. So it could effectively be an advertisement campaign, and for the target audience, probably a lot more effective than paying for banner ads. It could also benefit recruiting, and moral of developers who like seeing someone stand up to patent trolls.

Also, by setting a precedent of fighting back, they might deter future attempts at shakedowns from other patent trolls.

That's not to say that their motives are completely selfish. I'm sure there were altruistic motivations as well (and motivations no doubt varies among individuals involved in this). But it isn't irrational.

> It could also benefit recruiting, and moral of developers who like seeing someone stand up to patent trolls.

For sure. I actually had the thought that I should consider applying to work there, exactly for the reasons you mention and one other reason as well: I enjoyed some of the snarky comments posted here which appear to be from folks at Cloudflare. They seem like people I would enjoy working with. So that's +1 to my opinion of the company in general and +2 to their desirability as a potential employer where I might consider working in the future.

To explain the thought process: most people doing this aren’t doing this to help CloudFlare. They’re doing this because they want to hurt patent trolls. Their time might be better spent forming a lobbying group and calling their representatives, but CloudFlare’s role in this is to provide them with a way to do what they wanted to do in the first place.

Not saying CloudFlare shouldn’t reward them better.

Because it isn't just helping the one company when you invalidate patents. It's helping future startups and even mom & pop operations in some cases.

Shit, why does anyone even work on open source software, it's just going to help some company with a market cap measured in billions.