This is critically important and I filed a comment on behalf of my 250 full time employees at Coalition Technologies. We have been harassed by patent trolls and it is a nightmare.

If you want the patent holders to lose, NPEs or otherwise, then you want to fight through litigation and not the incredibly high bar set by the IPR. IPRs are expensive, time consuming and difficult. I've mainly seen them used strategically to encourage the court to grant a stay. Continuing litigation by focusing on invalidity contentions in response to infringement contentions is a better path forward.

A successful IPR will most likely need multiple forms of prior art. Each prior art must cover every independent and dependent claim of the patent in question, either through anticipation or combined obviousness.

Typical infringement contentions will not cover every claim and are therefore easier to defend.

Did you notice that LFP batteries became more prevalent and much cheaper recently? That's because some key patents expired.

The same thing happened with 3D printing a while ago. It only took off after the patents expired.

Patents are a pest. They're just another mechanism to pump money from below to above.

Thank you EFF.

IPR's are generally used by Big Tech companies and I have no idea how EFF's position could be construed as in the interest of the general public at all.

I submitted a comment.

Ah, more IP sclerosis. Great.

Could someone make an LLM that is only trained up to the day before a patent was filed, then ask it to solve the problem at hand.

Hopefully it would come up with the patented idea and thus 'prove' it is obvious and thus not able to be patented. Then you could make different vintage LLMs and basically spam them at trolls to invalidate the patents.

...just a thought from a lurker

The deadline for comments was November 17.

Um, the public comment form lists first and last name as required fields (with address and phone number optional), then at the bottom includes this warning:

"Do not submit personally identifiable information through this form."