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Apple is now banned from selling its latest Apple Watches in the US (www.theverge.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I could understand filling a provisional patent and then only pulling the trigger on the whole shebang when you actually have to protect it.

That is trolling.

Patents are intended as a social contract:

An inventor: gets a limited time monopoly to sell their invention
Everyone else: gets to see how they did it, then get to do it for free once the monopoly time expires

Filing claims and keeping them hidden, then rewording them for publication when "you actually have to protect it", is trolling.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Patent trolling is buying up patents from their actual inventors for the purpose of suing and extorting money from companies that actually make use of the tech, while not actually doing anything productive with them.

Two facts here: 1) they invented the tech, and 2) they used the invention to legitimately produce items for sale.

Trolling is not a fit for this.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

They kept provisional filings on hold for over 15 years, released their own product without filing for the actual patent, and only did so after a competitor announced their own product.

If you don't want to call it "trolling", what do you call "abusing the patent process to keep competitors unaware of pending patents that can be used against them retroactively"? What would be a shorter word for that?