Summary: What happens when notorious charlatans falsely claim to have invented things and then sue large companies or, contrariwise, large companies claim credit for the work of public sector research, ultimately patenting that work

A few days ago the press made it known that Shiva Ayyadurai, who falsely claims to have invented E-mail (right after the real inventor of E-mail died), continues to SLAPP people who say the truth. I should know because he threatened me too (threatening legal letters) and he's one of those people who would conflate trademarks with patents to rewrite history.

"Sadly, a long time ago the patent system departed from this original purpose (short-term monopoly in exchange for publication rather than secrecy)..."We are not against patents; we believe that they help manage attributions w.r.t. contributions to science and they help document useful ideas (the good patents anyway, not the many bogus ones). Sadly, a long time ago the patent system departed from this original purpose (short-term monopoly in exchange for publication rather than secrecy) and now we have another charlatan -- a worse one than Ayyadurai -- suing all sorts of people and firms (even more than Ayyadurai does). Raniere (a charlatan and troll) we last wrote about just a few months ago and Joe Mullin, who joined the EFF earlier this year, wrote about the patent of Raniere, calling it "Stupid Patent of the Month" [1, 2]. TechDirt, which is the main target of Ayyadurai's SLAPP campaign, published a copy of the EFF's article:

In April, Mexican federal police arrested Keith Raniere, taking him from the $10,000-per-week villa where he was staying and extraditing him to New York. According to the NY Daily News, Raniere, leader of self-help group NXIVM (pronounced “nexium”), is now being held without bail while he awaits trial on sex-trafficking charges. Through NXIVM, he preached “empowerment,” but critics say the group was a cult, and engaged in extreme behavior, including branding some women with an iron.

This was not the first controversial program Raniere was involved in. In 1992, Raniere ran a multilevel marketing program called “Consumer Buyline,” which was described as an “illegal pyramid,” by the Arkansas Attorney General’s office. More recently, he has collected more than two dozen patents from the U.S. Patent Office, and has more applications pending—including this one, which is for a method of determining “whether a Luciferian can be rehabilitated.”

So Raniere is basically a fraud, his patent is a joke, and even though he's suing a company we strongly dislike we hope that he loses badly and goes bankrupt (eventually). These people are just very major parasites and the only way to stop their bad behaviour is cause them to go bankrupt or go to a mental asylum.

"So Raniere is basically a fraud, his patent is a joke, and even though he's suing a company we strongly dislike we hope that he loses badly and goes bankrupt (eventually)."Asymmetric numeral system (ANS) is an example of a large company doing the opposite thing, namely claiming credit for the work of low-profile researchers. This was revisited recently [1, 2] in light of Google's persistence and insistence. As Google is the "devil" in Watchtroll (for various misguided reasons) they too caught up with this story. This is what they wrote:

Last June, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published U.S. Patent Application No. 20170164007, titled Mixed Boolean-Token ANS Coefficient Coding. Originally filed by Google with the USPTO in December 2016, the patent application claims a method for decoding an encoded bitstream using a computing device, the bitstream including frames having blocks of pixels, which involves the use of an entropy decoder state machine including a Boolean asymmetric numeral system (ANS) decoder and a symbol ANS decoder. The claimed invention is intended to improve the transmission of digital video streams with the use of the entropy decoder to reduce the amount of data involved in the transmission of digital streams.

This time we agree with Watchtroll (that what Google does it absolutely not OK and should be widely condemned); it's not often that we agree with Watchtroll. Usually it's just a load of nonsense, spin and yesterday Watchtroll was trying to sells services.

Techrights has a long tradition calling out charlatans and liars. All they ever do is threaten their critics because the risk of being publicly exposed as frauds is high and rather costly. ⬆