Get their best advice on beating patent trolls at their own game
We’re delighted to announce the winners of our first Cloud Native Heroes Challenge!
In that first challenge, we asked participants to find prior art that would undermine the patent on a distributed software networking system. With a new contest of a type that’s new to our community, we weren’t sure what to expect, but, no surprise the CNCF community came through and in the end we had three winners from 3 different continents, two of whom were happy to share insights about their process and experiences.
In first place
Our first place winner, who asked not to be identified, found prior art from a virtualization environment that analyzes and manages data from virtual machines. Like the target patent, it allows for the use of APIs, and it was filed a few months before the target patent. Our partner in this process, Unified Patents, was satisfied this submission would “check all the boxes” and undermine the validity of the patent troll’s efforts.
Battling patent trolls by *diagramming sentences*
Chris Buccella, one of our two-second place winners, has searched for prior art as part of a previous job, so he’s no stranger to this. He decided to join the challenge because he has a “personal disdain” for patent trolls and also because he wants to contribute to CNCF. “I’m a user of CNCF projects, but not a code contributor,” he wrote. “So I was looking for some other way I could make a positive impact.”
The biggest challenge he ran into was actually deciphering the patent claims because “the terminology used is often intentionally vague and non-standard. No one would write a user story like this!” His old school tactic? Diagram the sentence structure, rewrite the clauses and then paraphrase. Those efforts broke down the complicated claims into something that was just plain English.
He also warned about the reality of “link rot.”
“Release notes from just five years ago are ancient history, and can be difficult to surface,” Buccella wrote in an email. “Domains expire, redirects fail, and code repos are sometimes restructured. It takes some detective work.”
For those new to looking for prior art, Buccella strongly suggests looking beyond patents. “Prior art doesn’t have to be other patents. The main asset we have being in the tech community is that we’ve all used and developed lots of different software over the course of our careers. New projects pop up frequently. With that broad exposure to different technologies, we have first-hand knowledge of how a lot of different technologies work. There are many nearly-forgotten (or even failed) projects from the past that are good examples of prior art. And thanks to being open source, publicly-accessible code repos provide timestamped proof of when the software was written. This is ideal. The code is out there… the key part we can play is to connect the dots.”
Academic research skills for the win
Our other second-place winner, Emidio Neto, was brand new to the world of patent trolls and prior art but he described the entire process as very “fun” and he enjoyed it so much he hopes to participate in the next challenge.
Neto, who was talked into this contest by a professor, said he leaned into his background in SDN to help him find the winning prior art. The biggest challenge was wading through all the papers trying to find something that pre-dated the target patent.
His best advice for those new to searching for prior art? Always check the references! “Authors of papers usually have references, so check those references and see where they lead you to on the Internet,” Neto suggested. “And don’t overlook powerpoints or other presentations – those are all good places to look for prior art.”
Feeling inspired to go after some patent trolls? It’s not too late to enter our current Cloud Native Heroes Challenge!