Sweeeeeet.
Love the content, but that format is what I stare at every day so now I’m back at work in my free time!
This is absolutely awesome: 👍😎
Project Jengo is Cloudflare’s effort to fight back against patent trolls by flipping the incentive structure that has encouraged the growth of patent trolls who extract settlements out of companies using frivolous lawsuits. We do this by asking the public to help identify prior art that can invalidate any of the patents that a troll holds, not just the ones that are asserted against Cloudflare.
Emphasis by me.
CloudFlare makes more than a billion dollars a year in revenue. The work done for this project is probably worth millions to them and they paid out $100,000. That sounds like bullshit to me. Let corporations hire lawyers instead of doing their work for a pittance.
Patents shouldn’t be valid for more than 5 years imo. If you can’t make a large enough profit from your idea in 5 years maybe it wasn’t that good or original.
Disagree. Look at Sawstop. It took years to even get to the patent filing phase. Then he tried to get companies to adopt it. They didn’t. So he spent years building a company and manufacturing base to support it. By the time he finally got things into stores and had a chance to pay back his investment the patent would have expired under your idea. There would have been zero incentive to do all that investment and the technology would have never become available.
Your five year rule would harm anyone not already extremely wealthy. It would further incentivize corporations to maintain control over markets. It would also create a situation where companies would be trying to recoup all their investment costs in that 5 year period which would result in extremely high prices. Like the pharma companies on steroids charging a 5000% markup.
There are rumblings that all tablesaws will have to ship with something like that installed. It could make it illegal to sell your old tablesaws just like it’s illegal to sell old lawn darts.
The patents are expiring and once they do regulators will kind of have their hand forced. Trying to mandate a solution only available through one provider is a nonstarter. And that’s part of the darker side of Sawstop. He did try to have it mandated by law after companies didn’t buy in. It was a very self serving move that made a lot of enemies.
Instead of a flat five years across the board, length of time could be variable based on assets and political connectedness
…and thereby including potentially even more corruption in that process. Who decides what patent lives for how long?
