New USPTO Memo Makes Fighting Patent Trolls Even Harder

We dealt with some patent trolls back in the 2010-2020 era, for those who have not experienced it, it is absurd. In our case, the patent &quot;troll&quot; was an LLC w&#x2F; ~5 members - 2 lawyers, 1 person who owned the original patent, and some spouses. The only &quot;asset&quot; of the LLC was the patent. I think it was around scrollbars or some CSS overflow thing - they sent us a demand&#x2F;cease-desist letter saying they will sue for $1M and asked for a call. Classic Lawyer call &quot;well, we can make this all go away for $25k.&quot; We ended up fighting it a bit because of &quot;principles&quot; by our founder. - in discovery there was something like 1,000 of these exact demand letters they had sent.<p>The kicker? If you fight back, it costs a ton in legal fees, and even if you win, you can’t recover those fees — because the LLC’s only asset is the patent itself.<p>Just insane to me we would take a step back like this.

The policymaking with regards to industry is functioning more like a clearinghouse, where every interest group gets to have their targeted policy, than a coalition, where the event that one interest group&#x27;s target policy would hamstring another member would result in dealmaking and some sort of compromise. Certain industries like the steel industry receive steeply protectionist trade restraints, but they&#x27;re also being de-prioritized in favor of non-producing vexatious litigators who stop them from innovating. In essence this is similar to how some industries are seeing major policy-driven price increases on their outputs <i>and</i> inputs. Multiply that by every lobby and that&#x27;s all I can interpret out of the big picture.

&gt; Congress Created IPR to Protect the Public—Not Just Patent Owners<p>For this administration, this is a problem to be solved. Big business are the masters now and we need to make it easier for them to step on small business by any means.

Why do we keep moving toward a system where being ahead is the most viable way to get ahead?

We must get rid of the patent system. It is solely a way to grant monopolies to those who do not deserve them and slow down all human progress. Henry Ford said the gas engine was delayed twenty years by a frivolous patent.

Has the new administration replaced the leadership at the USPTO yet?

IPR is a tool that weakens all patents. Saying it helps trolls at the expense of everyone else (which this article says) is a bad faith argument. Weakening IPR helps all patent holders fight for their rights, including trolls. Considering how the tech industry has bullied its way past numerous rightful patents, this seems like it could be reasonable or might not be.<p>If you think we should have no patents be my guest, but this helps non troll patent holders and not just trolls.

Maybe it&#x27;s time for a patent pool for non-trolls covering patent to behavior.

USPTO is the U.S. Patent Troll Office?

We should have notarized LLM models for this. Timestamp your LLMs, put them in a notarized database. Then, if you en up in a patent lawsuit, just fire up the relevant LLM, and ask it in simple terms to reproduce troll&#x27;s claims.