I am a bit surprised that most comments here focus on whether the guy's genuine or not.
What surprised me, in a bad way, is that to challenge a patent you have to have 6k USD to throw away plus the expertise and time (which the article estimates at 60k USD).
IMHO, if the patent ends up overturned, the patent holder should be liable for those costs. In fact, I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't be that way. Can you?
Maybe because then you could pick on small patents that a competitor isn't really using to hit them for 6k/60k a pop? Of course, that would only work if they have several dodgy patents, so you argue they should just be more careful.
Disclaimer: I'm just speculating and know nothing about patent law.
Why is the US Patent Office not liable for these obviously bad patent grants?
I think this patent mess ends when the Patent Office isn't self funded and thus doesn't have the perverse incentive to grant as many patents as possible.
If the patent office is liable it can still be self-funded and not have an incentive to grant as many patents as it can. Make the liability some multiple of what they charge for the filling and there you go. Vary the multiple as needed to increase/decrease how careful you want them to be (leading to less patent grants overall)
So Waymo was trying (and succeeding) to patent a basic electronic circuits designs that has existed for decades. This is not surprising at all as the grandiose claims of innovation coming out of SV, perpetuated by unscrupulous and mostly clueless tech news writers who don't understand the technology they're writing about, haven't had any substance behind them for a long while. The USPTO should be embarrassed as well for rubber stamping these applications coming from big companies.
Makes me wonder if Travis has a connection to Eric through Akamai. Eric's company, Speedera, was also acquired by Akamai in 2005. Travis's company, RedSwoosh, was acquired by Akamai in 2007.
I'm thinking the same thing. I mean... this whole article just smells off. It's a press hit about one patent claiming that somehow this invalidates the Waymo case in a dispute that is fundamentally about trade secrets anyway. I mean, he found prior art on a LIDAR patent. Good. But... why do we care?
It doesn't invalidate Waymo's whole case, just Waymo's infringement claims against patent 936. Now the case is only about trade secrets.
I'm not seeing what it is about the article that makes it a hit piece. Mark Harris, the guy who wrote it has been covering Uber, Waymo, and self driving cars for years. He's always digging up weird stuff like this. When Apple's project Titan was rumours and hearsay it was Mark Harris out there digging up tangible evidence about what was going on. Harris is pretty good at his job.
He can only report on Swildon's stated reasons for going to all the trouble he did, and Harris can't actually prove that Swildon's efforts were the real reason Waymo withdrew it's infringement claim, only that it seems that way.
Wired fell for this guy's story. This feels incredibly fishy. A random guy feels sorry for Uber, the lovable plucky underdog of all companies... and invests lots of time and $6K to invalidate patents?
It just doesn't compute. There must be a tie between this guy and someone at Uber. Or it's VC backers.
Why would it benefit Uber or its backers to hire him unofficially instead of hiring experts directly?
It seems like he was able to make a solid case for invalidating the patent, and hiring experts to investigate patent claims is pretty standard in patent lawsuits. It makes me wonder why Uber didn't hire such experts, or if they did and this guy beat them to the punch.
You don’t have to invalidate the patents at the USPTO. You can argue invalidity in court. Uber almost certainly looked for prior art.
And in most cases uber wouldn’t use ex parte re-examine. They’d do an inter partes review, which would them to stay in the proceeding and argue for invalidity.
The biggest difference is ex parte re-exam doesn't allow the requester to participate. It's just the patent owner and the examiners. If the patent owner makes an incorrect statement to try to keep the patent there is nothing you can do. An IPR is a full hearing on the validity. With evidence, depositions, briefing, and oral arguments.
Yeah, it makes Uber look kind of incompetent, like they didn't do their research (Google too). If he was hired by Uber to do the research, only Google would look incompetent.
Strategically, isn't it better for Uber to let Waymo yap on and on about it and then crush them during the trial than to ask the patent office for a review and let Waymo drop the issue before the trial even starts?
I mean... if I knew something embarrassing that opposing council didn't know, and I had no obligation to inform them, I would definitely see that knowledge as a weapon and a strategic tool. Letting Waymo drop it without embarrassment is a bit of a win for Waymo, IMO.
>Strategically, isn't it better for Uber to let Waymo yap on and on about it and then crush them during the trial than to ask the patent office for a review and let Waymo drop the issue before the trial even starts?
Uber would have to inform Waymo of their invalidity theory way before trial. You can't spring new prior art right before trial.
The article begins by making a plausible story for his motivation. He had been sued for patent infringement in his own company - "overreaching patents" caused a lot of damage to him personally before and he saw Alphabet use one to attack Uber. And Uber is indeed smaller than Alphabet.
The headline implies that. The content of the article actually only implies that it throws off Waymo's patent claims... and they did drop their patent claims related to 936.
Keep in mind, headlines are rarely written by the author of the piece. The headline writer has a very different goal than the reporter.
Inequality is driven in good part by stolen intellectual property and laws that make that increasingly legal or at least unregulated. Fraud in this case might be reversed, but I'll bet it's not prosecuted as such.
Defendants also moved for summary judgment of noninfringement of Waymo’s United States Patent No. 9,368,936, but Waymo’s dismissal of its patent claim moots that part of the motion
Ah, you're right. But I'm pretty sure I read some extremely sceptical/dismissive comments by judge Alsup months ago, so I'd hesitate to infer causality.
I don't really understand why this guy would feel like he needed to use a lot of his own time and $6000 to try and help Uber. In the article it says that he felt like it was a larger competitor attacking a larger competitor, but its not like Uber is some small plucky startup. With revenue in the billions, its not like they couldn't even afford millions in legal fees easily. Or is it that its not helping Uber, but fighting against what he feels are predatory practices from Alphabet?
When a lawsuit without merit took your startup from success to a below-valuation firesale, any similar situation might feel personal to you and it must feel good to do something about it.
I would understand if it was a small small startup like his that was in trouble, but even if Uber got in trouble for violating the patents, its still just research for developing self-driving cars that isn't critical to their day to day business. I am not asking why bother helping a company in a similar situation, but why bother helping a company that didn't really need helping?
Self driving cars is an existential threat to Uber if others have accesss to it while Uber doesn’t, or others have cheaper access. Why don’t you think helping Uber fighting off parent claims without merit would help?
There are many people who believe that this trial is very important to the survival of Uber. If they lose -- or otherwise can't develop self-driving cars -- they are 100% permanently screwed.
They are burning through way too much money and it's simply not sustainable long term. If they can bring self-driving cars to market -- allowing them to not have to pay drivers -- they'll be able to survive and may even do quite well.
Serious question- what is it that Uber does that requires such a burn rate? They've offloaded fleet costs on to the people that drive for them. Their mobile client apps don't need to do much. Whatever they need to run server-side isn't going to be rocket surgery, either.
(I understand that trying to develop self-driving cars is going to be a huge R&D expense. I'm talking about their day-to-day operational costs.)
The largest cost will be in sales and marketing. They offer large incentives to get drivers to sign up, such as offering cash for becoming an Uber driver. They also want to provide the best price possible to consumers, so that sometimes that means selling below cost, or at least selling below the cost when all sales and marketing expenses are included.
Growing so quickly in a short period of time there is also typically some level of over staffing as well as generally not being 100% diligent with use of funds.
There was an article before how they were spending over $100MM with an ad agency only to realize the numbers were inflated and eventually dropping them, but that is just one example of ineffective spend.
That's not to imply that they are 50% ineffective, but even being 10% ineffective when budgets are in the billions adds up.
The thought process is that the cost of switching between providers is very low when it comes to Uber/Lyft, when the cost of switching is low to consumers you want to establish your dominance in that market as rapidly as possible otherwise if you move slowly, then a competitor can steal market share away from you.
If there are any network effects to market penetration then that begins to create a bit of a moat. So if you think about the availability of cars/drivers at any time of the day to meet the demand, then having a large marketshare is beneficial to getting a ride for a customer quickly. That couple with marketing and lowering the cost of the ride as much as possible to establish the market is where the majority of that money goes.
You raise a good point about how the cost of switching on the consumer side being low implies that establishing a dominant mindshare becomes that much more important. Thanks for the answer.
My take was that it was an interest in and dislike of patent lawsuits, combined with some knowledge of the actual area, especially since it was actual hardware and not software nonsense patents.
In my experience, patent lawyers just keep writing claims until they feel they cover enough to be likely something novel in there. Not a lot of expertise on anybody's part. Lots of software patents in particular wander around making tiny claims for bits and pieces of the system, probably in the hope that something will stick. Not a fan of the process.
It's absolutely the new norm. Most news sites have an autoplaying video on almost every article now.
Sometimes the video will even follow you down the page as you scroll. Even worse, sometimes the video isn't even about the same story. I guess they just desperately need to show you a video even if they don't have a very relevant one.
It's terrible, and yet another reason to block almost everything by default with something like uMatrix.
I thought I was the last holdout, but I finally added a Chrome plugin that disables javascript on a domain-by-domain basis.
At this point I have JS disabled for pretty much every single news-related site - cnn, nytimes, bloomberg, sfgate, wsj, salon, etc... and dozens of less notable ones. It's incredible how much more usable these websites are without JS. No autoplay, no popups, no "CPU goes to 100% and scrolling takes 5s to respond". And usually it disables the paywall.
These sites are quite literally training their audience to disable Javascript.
media.autoplay.enabled = false on Firefox made my days so much brighter. Even on youtube, not having channels autoplaying some default video was a fresh breeze. You don't have to be on the lookout anymore each time you feel some sound or video might jump at your ears.
Talking about wired, it is SO GOOD to read "We're sorry, something went wrong." when their videos fail to deliver their crap to you!
This is epic. Just shows that now even the patent office has the resources to understand the work submitted to them. I am wondering if could automate this and flag all the patents that are granted by error.
I think we are getting stuck on his smallest investment. Even for a middle class person spending the time to research and write a 101-page challenge of the patent far outweighs investing $6k.
Most middle class people can find the time to dedicate to things that are important to them (even if those things are a 100 patent challenge). Wringing $6k out of your budget is a different story.
From personal experience it was different. When I did my PhD and was very low income I did invest more than 6k in projects, and writing the 120 page thesis was way harder even after my research was done.
Well if he'd sold below valuation (and in the middle of a lawsuit to his prosecutors no less!) it would be plausible that he didn't make out well. But I don't see how one can live in Los Altos Hills without having a lot of wealth.
EDIT: The comment below points out that Speedera took $51M in funding
Maybe not in this particular case, but I know someone about that age who grew up about 30 years ago off of Page Mill in the hills and he said their house was at least 20 times less than they are going for now, but sadly for him, his parents had to sell it when his family moved out of the area. This might have been before even 280 was built IIRC.
Total funding on Speedera was $51M. So assume a liquidation preference takes at least $51M off the top. He was an engineer and not a founder or an exec. So yeah, I’ll take him at his word. He probably didn’t clear anywhere near a $1M.
Wikipedia and Bloomberg also list him as a cofounder, CTO, and VPE. Oddly there appears to have been another cofounder who was also CTO, but I expect that he got a good payday.
From the sounds of it, he wasn't "a typical engineer with not enough stock." He lives in Los Altos Hills. The cheapest house for sale on Zillow right now is $5.5 M [1]. This guy made out just fine
Most self-made million/billionaires tend to get there by being cognizant of the cost and benefit of every monetary expenditure. This doesn't count how assets like a home (especially one used by the owner directly) count very little towards someone's actual liquidity.
For a non-profitable move that is probably not even tax deductible, $6,000 is not a trivial investment.
What his total wealth is seems a bit irrelevant. Do you think that he is not genuine about paying for this himself? If so, what do you base that on?
The rest of the story seems to support his story that he did this on his own, especially because from the way the journalist describe the court proceedings it seems like Uber didn't capitalize on his work at the right time when they could have if they were aware of it.
Also, this article was published yesterday which is multiple court proceedings after his work was submitted to the USPTO and what was supposed to be court date. If this is a PR effort I would have expected it to be done a bit earlier.
I'm specifically talking about his statement that "It’s definitely not a drop in the bucket for me" seems disingenuous when he appears to have a large amount of wealth. I'm not disputing that he paid for the fee himself.
It's almost like he's trying to make himself seem more relatable by saying the fee was a bigger deal for him than it actually was. To me, it comes off like he's trying to hide something
I would imagine spending $6k is a consideration even for a millionaire. Spending the time to research and write a 101-page challenge to the patent seems like quite a considerable investment for anyone, dwarfing the $6k even for a middle class person.
Why do you think $6k is not a consideration given his liquid capital? What do you expect his liquid wealth to be and what do you base that on?
If he owns a house which is worth at least 5.5M USD then he's more than a millionaire; at least a multimillionaire.
Just to put it in perspective: 6k USD is 0,6% of 1M USD. If I got a savings of 10k USD, and I donate 0,6% of that to EFF during Christmas, then we're talking about 60 USD while I keep 9940 USD or 99,4%.
Even that doesn't tell us much though because your networth isn't descriptive to your income. If you own 0,5M but you don't have income that's something different than owning 0,5k but having 2k to spend every month.
> If you own 0,5M but you don't have income that's something different than owning 0,5k but having 2k to spend every month.
I think this is the key. Having a big fancy house usually comes with a big fancy mortgage, and who knows what his cashflow looks like. Did he invest his windfall and lose it? Did the tax man take it? Did his wife leave him soon after along with "half"? Any massive medical situations he's dealt with in his family? Is he heavily invested in a new project?
The claim is not that $6,000 is a hardship to him, just that it is not "a drop in the bucket". Ie, $6K is not an amount he would spend unthinkingly because of having so much money. Depending on where you live it's not odd to know people in houses worth over a million but who couldn't pick up a another car because the monthly payments would be too much. Technically they can afford it, but practically it's not "a drop in the bucket", so they have other priorities.
I lived in a town full of millionaires, and while I've met plenty who are just as or even more decent than the average person, there's also the ones who would spend 20€ on a piece of cake, but then not tip the waitress. Yet others seem to think that because they're so rich (and in their mind, that makes them important) they shouldn't have to pay for anything, even a penny is a penny to much for them, and the richer they are, the more time they spend whining about expenses. For some people, money is an end in itself, and that's because they have no personality worth writing home about and nothing else to fill their lives with. Nietzsche was exactly right when he said for some utterly impotent people money is the crowbar of power. But ironically, the more power they have, they weaker they become.
As I said initially, I don't mean "all rich people", not by a long shot -- but anyone who is rich and still a fully fledged human being will know even more of the people I'm talking about than I do -- and there's plenty of poor people who are petty, too. Idiocy and insanity don't care much for class. But just because people do something doesn't mean there is a good reason for it, sometimes it's really just psychopathology combined with not having anyone who is strong enough and cares for them enough, and/or no accidents of life, that force them to stop going deeper into their dead end. They need help, not excuses. That is not aimed at the person in the article, just generally.
Nice. Lawyers love ex parte and amicus curveballs.
Wasn’t there some kind of prior art project set up to coordinate a large part of work like this? I seem to recall a big splash about crowdsourcing citations of prior art a few years ago, and now I’m wondering how this process and that are related. Was someone filing to challenge patents once enough people claimed prior art through that system or something?
Seems strange to make it so expensive to call bullshit, particularly since it sounds like the examiner erred on something so basic as the presence of an inductor.
Does the cheap/free pre-issuance submission really matter when you have to spend thousands of dollars on a reexamination fee whether or not the patent gets invalidated or modified in the end?
I get that this is to help cover the USPTO's reexamination costs. But whatever the reason, it's still really expensive to call bullshit. And as the grandparent comment laments, this is a real shame given the low quality of many patents that are granted.
In this case a third party did the job the USPTO should have done when the patent was first filed by actually reading the patents citations and finding that the new patent wasn't a novel innovation on the cited patent.
Wouldn't it be nice if the USPTO paid the third party his $6000 back if they determine that he's right the patent should have never been granted in the first place?
Travis resigned June 20. Technically at that point he's not part of Uber, right? Maybe he tipped this guy off and then he has 40 days to prepare the re-exam docs. Even if it's true, though, I don't know nearly enough about the subject to know why or whether it would matter if a "3rd party" challenged the patent instead of Uber, though.
What surprised me, in a bad way, is that to challenge a patent you have to have 6k USD to throw away plus the expertise and time (which the article estimates at 60k USD).
IMHO, if the patent ends up overturned, the patent holder should be liable for those costs. In fact, I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't be that way. Can you?