The Intellectual Ventures-connected trolls' harbour, Dominion Harbor Group, is now attacking the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), having attacked me personally last week

Summary: A mix of interesting developments surrounding patents, including a nasty campaign by Dominion Harbor Group to smear patent reformers

THE world of patents is a hostile world where blackmail and extortion are common (albeit usually kept behind the scenes, away from the public eye). I often hear stories of people who suffered from patent trolls. It's a life-changing experience to them. It can make people suicidal.

Google and Asymmetric Numeral Systems (ANS)

"I often hear stories of people who suffered from patent trolls. It's a life-changing experience to them. It can make people suicidal."Several months ago Google too became part of the problem, having initiated a 'first strike' patent attack on a rival. It's worrying to see Google resorting to that and earlier today an article was published saying that "Google [is] Accused of Trying to Patent Public Domain Technology" (via, comments aplenty).

To quote:

A Polish academic is accusing Google of trying to patent technology he invented and that he purposely released into the public domain so companies like Google couldn't trap it inside restrictive licenses.

The technology's name is Asymmetric Numeral Systems (ANS) [1, 2], a family of entropy coding methods that Polish assistant professor Jarosław (Jarek) Duda developed between 2006 and 2013.

To all those who try to dub Google an "efficient infringer" or demonise Michelle Lee because she used to work at Google, say no more. Google is no different from the rest of them (not anymore). Google too has turned into a patent bully (when it suits Google). Even when it comes to entropy, which basically boils down to software patents...

"Encryption is very easily demonstrable as reducible to mathematics."In other news, this new press release speaks of "filing of patents for the encryption protocol Parano" (this won't be accepted post-Alice).

Encryption is very easily demonstrable as reducible to mathematics. All software patents are just maths. Computer vision too. AI? Obviously! Invalid patents. All of them. But why are these still being pursued and sometimes granted by the USPTO?

R3 and Corda

Earlier today someone told me about "another interesting #swpats [software patents] bullies case for you," citing this tweet which says: "My last tweet caused R3 to send me a cease and desist...

"So let's try again: can anyone find these Corda patent apps? I may have prior art."

More context is provided below that:

• .@r3cev has filed a patent application on it's new "Concord" platform. Anyone have a link? I may have prior art. [link]



• .@R3CEV also owes me $15k that they refused to pay, so I'm not exactly terribly happy with them. :) [link]



• My contract with @R3CEV required them to pay for the 1st month of full-time work, they canceled it, and then never paid up. [link]



• (That contract had a non-compete clause, which I respected - among other things by not paying @R3CEV had me out of work w/o compensation) [link]

Dominion Harbor Group Attacks Critics of Trolls

No post would be complete without the idiocy of infantile trolls, whose CEOs openly defame and ridicule people, just like a bunch of children in an elementary school (talking about testicle size etc. and bragging about having a dinner outside the house).

"They're like a couple of kids playing with a box of matches and it's incredible that anyone out there was willing to give them capital (investment).""For anyone believing EFF anti-patent stance helps small tech innovators, some hard facts show otherwise," a patent maximlist (Nick Gross, linking to his own post) wrote today in Twitter, linking to more EFF bashing from a site of a patent troll, Dominion Harbor Group (there's apparently more of that on the way as it's labeled "part I"). That same site now defames me by repeating crap which the troll's CEO and his sidekick know to be untrue. So desperately trying to shoot the messenger. "IPWire (tm) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dominion Harbor, Dallas Texas," it says. So basically, trolls don't like the EFF, which doesn't like them either. Big surprise!

Keep an eye on these people. They're like a couple of kids playing with a box of matches and it's incredible that anyone out there was willing to give them capital (investment). They'll burn themselves. After TC Heartland there's not much they can do in Texas, either. ⬆