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   Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Nov-2024 01:55:01 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

   TIL that in 2011 the French government "invested" 100 million Euro to setup a company that was supposed to monetise patents by suing all around the planet. Despite some minimal "success" with an NFC patent, the concept that I would call patent trolling wasn't delivering the expected ROI (Return on Investment) and in 2022 the plug was pulled. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_Brevets

   • Embed this notice
     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Nov-2024 02:13:29 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     in reply to

     One of the patents they tried to monetise came from Nokia (filed 2008, granted 2010), was transferred to France Brevets (2013), who in turn transferred it to Burley Licensing LLC, Texas (2021), who in turn moved it to Nimitz Technologies LLC, Texas, 14 days later which finally sued 11 companies for patent violation. They didn't succeed in court. The patent is US 7,848,328 B2 and the claims are as vague as you would expect ;)

     https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/8e/a9/d6/b55ae845972bfb/US7848328.pdf

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     Boris Barbour (borisbarbour@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Nov-2024 02:15:15 JST Boris Barbour

     in reply to

     @jwildeboer

     Unsurprising. I believe Inserm (FR medical research org) has always lost money on patents, while the CNRS (general science) did make money for a while but because of single patent (Taxol).

     The world leader in technology transfer is MIT. They do make money, but still only 1-2% of their total budget. (Numbers from memory.)

     Hardly worth the effort.

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     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Nov-2024 02:19:31 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     in reply to

     Should you read about a patent case somewhere, here's the things you should know:

     - design patents are NOT patents. They are more like registered designs.
     - the *only* important thing about a patent are the claims. You can safely ignore all the descriptions, graphics and other stuff. Read the claims. The first one is the most important
     - Patents expire after 20 years (or missed fee payment, whichever comes first)

     1/2

   • Embed this notice
     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Nov-2024 02:22:29 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     in reply to

     - Patents also protect retroactively (12 months before filing date in most jurisdictions), meaning that prior art that could invalidate the patent must be publicly known before that priority date
     - Most patent cases don't go to court, far more often some kind of deal with license payments is offered to avoid that

     I am not a lawyer, but I am quite an expert in the patent field since 2002 when I joined the fight against software patents in the EU.

     2/2

   • Embed this notice
     lobingera (lobingera@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Nov-2024 17:41:37 JST lobingera

     in reply to

     @jwildeboer This might be a wording issue ... but i'm not aware of a jurisdiction that provides protection retroactively. Patents are protected from the priority date which is the filing date. The granting date might be later - after some (or many) iterations of checks by the patent office. The 12 (or 18) months time is the publication date which follows the filing date.

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     lobingera (lobingera@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Nov-2024 17:48:39 JST lobingera

     @jwildeboer Agree on the confusion.

     What i meant is: You will not get protection *before* the agreed priority date - which might be a filing in another jurisdiction.

     There was a time in USPO where they accepted "company documents" as proof of an "idea date" and that was a nightmare for both the PO and the companies trying to object. With the filing data many things got very, very clear.

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     lobingera (lobingera@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Nov-2024 19:50:21 JST lobingera

     @jwildeboer In my industry/work there is a lot of discussions on problems and solutions in documents (or as paper trail on email reflectors) therefore sometime state of the art can be documented to the day. And sometimes the day before filing something else.

     Your rule of thump will work well in classical patenting - looking at publication dates of the PO

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     lobingera (lobingera@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Nov-2024 20:11:54 JST lobingera

     @jwildeboer btw: are there known support groups (e.g. NGOs)?