Automated Generation of Timestamped Patent Abstracts at Scale to Outsmart Patent-Trolls

The fundamental idea of patent systems is to protect inventors who have invested resources during the development of their invention. Patent trolls abuse these systems by filing obvious patents with significantly less cost and usually without the intention to produce or offer the invention. Instead, patent trolls sue other companies that allegedly violate their obvious patents. We propose a method that challenges patent trolls by generating large amounts of obvious patent abstracts automatically. In contrast to prior art, our approach generates abstracts for any patent category and achieves high diversity in content and structure of the resulting abstracts. Furthermore, we timestamp the generated abstracts using a decentralized timestamping service so that users can prove that a generated abstract existed at a certain point in time. In a survey, we found that the quality of the generated abstracts, using criteria defined by the European Patent Office, was 6% higher compared to prior art.