Oh dear. Its digital tombstone has been relegated to be adware for crypto gambling.

why would Snowden reveals cause it to close?

"everything is so bad it's hopeless" or smth?

Submitted. We’re still here!

Fast and easy to take action on that page.

regulations.gov

There is a fairly vocal contingent of patent people on LinkedIn swearing this is good for the solo guy, the small independent inventor. But yes, it does feel like it will be trolls that are in favor -- maybe some pharma wants this.

Cost -- it is way cheaper to use IPR and avoid discovery associated with the other factors that happen at trial. Speed, the PTO is generally faster.

USPTO doesn't really have the budget or even often the expertise/depth.

> Like the legal standards are easier for the patentholder at USPTO or something like that?

It is much easier to get a patent than it is to use that patent successfully in legal proceedings. The bar that you have to clear to get it through the USPTO has never been particularly high.

So this is kinda, if you squint at it a little, just writing down what the status quo already is.

(As sibling mentions - if it did work, of course it's way cheaper to nip it in the bud earlier. You just can't really guarantee that you'll get enough expert eyes to get a reasonable decision out of the USPTO)

I would have to ask more to be able to explain more, but that's how things have been explained to me growing up.

I have been one of the small inventors who wrote patents and ultimately sold them to a company that makes most of its money suing over patents.

Patents are a form of business insurance you can get on expensive R&D work. When you go into the market to sell your products, your marketing material and the function of your product naturally leaks how it works. Motivated competitors can then reverse-engineer what you did or otherwise figure out how to enter the market that you revealed was valuable. If they do it by actually out-innovating you, your patents don't really protect you, but if they just take what you're doing, the patent is there so you can claim the fruits of your labor regardless. In general, you cash in on this insurance contract by either contracting with lawyers to sue the infringers (usually on contingency or with litigation financing to remove the cash cost) or by selling your patent portfolio to someone who will sue the infringers.

In return for this insurance contract, you have to publicly disclose the details of your inventions in a way that a motivated party can read and understand (it's patentese, not English, but you can decipher it if you know the language). It also frees you up to publish internal details through other fora like scientific journals because this disclosure becomes pure upside (raising your company's reputation) rather than making you balance that upside against the downside of revealing information. Google is a good example of a firm that does a lot of balancing there: they publish a lot of their old, antiquated work while keeping the new stuff secret because it's mostly software and software is mostly unpatentable. In electrical engineering, small companies are much more likely to publish a lot more details on their newest devices because their devices are usually patented.

On HN, people mostly think about software patents. Many of these are stupid patents, and almost all of them have been invalidated through a decision called Alice Corp. vs CLS Bank. The digital shopping cart is one of these patents that Alice invalidated. By value, most patent litigation is about drugs, and after that you have things like computer hardware. The patent system really isn't for the HN crowd, and it really doesn't make sense for these software patents to be a thing - there's usually no expensive R&D to insure, and you have to write your patent before finding out if you have PMF.

Most small inventors/innovators don’t benefit. In recent times it’s mostly been good for large companies who can afford to hoard patent portfolios, for defense against other large companies and to crush potential upstarts. Everyone complaining about the smartphone duopoly should look here for a big reason why there are no meaningful competitors.

From the perspective of policy makers, the biggest advantage of the modern patent system was to give US companies a leg up over foreign competitors, as we had the largest patent portfolios, better R&D, and legal frameworks we could use to our advantage. But this no longer works, as our biggest competitor understandably decided this wasn’t a fair bargain and has ignored IP rules to their own benefit. (Why nobody saw this coming is a mystery.) IMHO most patents now harm the economy more than they help.

I think it would be better to abolish patents entirely, but maybe that could potentially be another alternative way.

You can thank them properly by submitting a comment on this matter and add your voice to the chorus so the proposed ruling gets shoved right back into the orifice it was pulled from.

The form will accept "Anonymous" for first, last. It would be nice if it actually said this...

It’s December 2 as explained in the article and the page on regulations.gov. Where do you see Nov 17?