from Hacker News

Crowdfunding campaign against US patent on personalized content

by izqui on 9/20/16, 9:35 AM with 50 comments

• by leksak on 9/20/16, 10:55 AM

  Wouldn't funding this be in the interest of mid-sized companies? Albeit it's not likely that they'll be targeted it seems like an awfully cheap insurance policy. By "they" I mean "a company".

  Seeing as they are a potential target for the next six years they'd effectively pay 20000/6 which rounds up to four grand a year that has to be much cheaper than the legal fees they'd incur if they were targeted.

  Split that cost with a few other companies and it hardly costs a thing in the relative scheme of things. Makes for a good PR opportunity as well: "We will not sit idly by when others are bullied into paying licensing fees on such a nonsensical patent, effectively robbing the cradle of new businesses"

• by Cozumel on 9/20/16, 10:20 AM

  Related-ish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12538224 Apple trying to patent a paper bag!

• by danirod on 9/20/16, 10:19 AM

  Even if the 'invalidating bad patents' idea sounds promising, I still think that in order to stop 'stupid patents', as described in their front page, the smartest move would be to fix this broken patents system so that no more stupid patents could be registered.

• by MichaelBurge on 9/20/16, 10:40 AM

  Can you buy patent troll insurance?

  $500/month to protect against a 0.1% chance of being sued by a patent troll over a 7 year period gives $42 million in expected value to fight a bogus patent when it does come up. Adjust the numbers to whatever's realistic.

  It seems more sustainable than asking strangers to fund patent lawsuits.

• by watermoose on 9/20/16, 11:03 AM

  I'm glad that they are doing this to raise awareness about the problem, and it seems like a good idea to request prior art on this page.

  And, it looks to have a great team behind it: https://unpatent.co/about

  So, I'm curious, is Lee Cheng going to be the one going after Marc and his group, and is the $20k just to try to help pay his court expenses? Because, it seems like it's going to be a lot more expensive than that. I'm asking because there isn't much information about how the money will be used on the campaign page, and I think more would give if this were clearer.

  Good luck to Unpatent in this! I think this is an inventive way to help start to solve this problem.

  Something else that people could do is write to their representatives about it. These patent problems are solvable with law that penalizes organizations that try to blackmail organizations with patents that are overly broad.

  http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/

  http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_c...

• by xg15 on 9/20/16, 11:23 AM

  Patent noob here, but wouldn't this violate the basic "you can patent implementations but not ideas" rule?

  Did they actually patent all possible methods and apparatuses to select products based on personal information? Or was the patent for one concrete method and apparatus that did so and just formulated intentionally vague?

• by dest on 9/20/16, 10:41 AM

  Sorry if dumb question, but isn't that patent expired? " Legal status: Expired - Lifetime" https://patents.google.com/patent/US8738435

• by sjclemmy on 9/20/16, 11:01 AM

  Am I missing something? This patent is specific to automated insurance marketing. The unpatent.co campaign seems to imply that is some kind of catch all patent that covers all automated decision making. I don't see the link.

• by BillyParadise on 9/20/16, 10:18 AM

  OT, but I like the use of Semantic UI on that site. Nice and clean design.

• by infodroid on 9/20/16, 12:40 PM

  Is there any reason why an unpatent campaign is limited to 30 days? Wouldn't it be better if campaigns expired only after their funding threshold was achieved?