The Daily Omnivore

A patent thicket is ‘a dense web of overlapping intellectual property rights that a company must hack its way through in order to actually commercialize new technology,’ or, in other words, ‘an overlapping set of patent rights’ which require innovators to reach licensing deals for multiple patents from multiple sources.’ The expression may come from the ‘SCM Corp. v. Xerox Corp’ patent litigation case in the 1970s, wherein SCM’s central charge had been that Xerox constructed a ‘patent thicket’ to prevent competition. Patent thickets are used to defend against competitors designing around a single patent.

It has been suggested by some that this is particularly true in fields such as software or pharmaceuticals, but Sir Robin Jacob has pointed out that ‘every patentee of a major invention is likely to come up with improvements and alleged improvements to his invention’ and that ‘it is in the nature of the patent system itself that [patent thickets] should happen and it has always happened.’ Patent thickets are also sometimes called ‘patent floods,’ or ‘patent clusters.’

A submarine patent is a patent whose issuance and publication are intentionally delayed by the applicant for a long time, such as several years. This strategy requires a patent system where, first, patent applications are not published, and, second, patent term is measured from grant date, not from priority/filing date. In the United States, patent applications filed before November 2000 were not published and remained secret until they were granted. Analogous to a submarine, therefore, submarine patents could stay ‘under water’ for long periods until they ’emerged’ and surprised the relevant market. Persons or companies making use of submarine patents are sometimes referred to as patent pirates.

Submarine patent practice was possible previously under the United States patent law, but is no longer practical since the U.S. signed the TRIPS agreement of the WTO: since 1995, patent terms (20 years in the U.S.) are measured from the original filing or priority date, and not the date of issuance. A few potential submarine patents may result from pre-1995 filings that have yet to be granted and may remain unpublished until issuance. Submarine patents are considered by some, including the US Federal Courts, as a procedural laches (a delay in enforcing one’s rights, which may cause the rights to be lost).

The Anti Security Movement (also written as antisec and anti-sec) is a movement opposed to the computer security industry. Antisec is against full disclosure of information relating to but not limited to: software vulnerabilities, exploits, exploitation techniques, hacking tools, attacking public outlets, and distribution points of that information. The general thought behind this is that the computer security industry uses full disclosure to profit and develop scare-tactics to convince people into buying their firewalls, anti-virus software, and auditing services. As recently as 2009, attacks against security communities such as ‘Astalavista’ and ‘milw0rm,’ as well as the popular image-host ‘ImageShack,’ have given the movement worldwide media attention.

The ‘anti-security movement” as it is understood today was coined a document which was initially an index on the anti.security.is website: ‘The purpose of this movement is to encourage a new policy of anti-disclosure among the computer and network security communities. The goal is not to ultimately discourage the publication of all security-related news and developments, but rather, to stop the disclosure of all unknown or non-public exploits and vulnerabilities. In essence, this would put a stop to the publication of all private materials that could allow script kiddies from compromising systems via unknown methods.’

A grey hat in the hacking community refers to a skilled hacker whose activities fall somewhere between white hat (lawful) and black hat (unlawful) hackers on a variety of spectra.

They usually do not hack for personal gain or have malicious intentions, but may be prepared to technically commit crimes during the course of their technological exploits in order to achieve better security. Whereas white hat hackers will tend to advise companies of security exploits quietly, grey hat hackers are prone to ‘advise the hacker community as well as the vendors and then watch the fallout.’

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