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Ask HN: Cases where software patents have prevented progress?
A student writing a thesis about software patents emailed me asking about cases "in which having a patent on an algorithm prevented some significant technological progress." HN seemed the best place to find answers. What are the clearest examples of this happening, and how much did they slow things down?
- jacquesm 17y agoThe GIF patent is the first one that comes to mind. A more recent one is Acacias patent on video transmission via networks and this gem: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/04/acacia-claims-patent-on-cd-hyperlinks-sues-for-billions.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/04/acacia-claim... Are there cases where software patents can be proven to have fostered innovation?
- ryandvm 17y agoExcept moving to PNG was progress...
- jacquesm 17y agoIt could have been a backwards compatible extension to GIF instead. More formats = fragmentation = consumer confusion and problems. Progress is not a single variable either, there are plenty of ways that you can define progress that are more or less orthogonal to each other. Forward, sideways and 'up' are all movements that you can interpret as 'progress' depending on where you are and where you want to be. From that point of view PNG was sideways and 'around' rather than forward. Any kind of dataformat, any kind of protocol, anything that is not a completely closed box that performs a function (an 'appliance') should be as open as possible. And that should be enshrined in law, interfaces and formats are automatically in the public domain, and have to be documented. PNG as a GIF replacement is superior, for most applications. But if you think in terms of browser support then you could interpret it as a step back during the introduction phase as well.
- mbrubeck 17y agoFor example, the PNG standard still isn't fully supported by Internet Explorer. Who knows what could have been different if the early standard were open and extensible (without patent difficulties)..
- Quarrelsome 17y agoI'll back this up. Been banging my head against a brick wall because WindowsCE doesn't load .pngs properly..... sometimes (it's one of _those_). Convert to .jpg and everything is fine.
- eru 17y agoYes, but .jpg is not always what you want. The artifacts can look ugly on schematic drawings.
- bioweek 17y agoWere there patents on compression algorithms? Are there any weird things Linux has to do to work around patents?
- wclax04 17y agoLZW, but that is the problem with GIFs; and the subsequent move to PNGs
- jws 17y agoIn general, anywhere you find Huffman coding being done, it could achieve superior compression with Arithmetic Coding but is not because of IBM's patents. This is essentially every JPEG image on the planet. The standard provides for arithmetic coding, but no one implements it because of the patent. Wikipedia asserts that arithmetic coding saves about 5% of the files size. So that is 5% of every flash card sold for a camera wasted and 5% of the bandwidth costs for images on the internet wasted. If GATT hadn't tacked on three more years in 1995 these would have expired by now, but it looks like 2012 or 2013 is the date now. The MPEG series of standards probably could also have benefited similarly from Arithmetic Coding.
- dpcan 17y agoThis question is circular. The potential "technological progress" doesn't exist because it was thwarted by software patents, so there really is no way of knowing what doesn't exist because it couldn't be created to begin with. So, are you asking us what things don't exist?
- jacquesm 17y agoI think it is a perfectly valid question. If someone got sued by the holder of a patent and withdrew a piece of software or an application then that's proof positve. http://brej.org/yellow_star/letter.pdf http://brej.org/yellow_star/letter.pdf Would be a nice example, in http://brej.org/yellow_star/ http://brej.org/yellow_star/ there is a bit that says "There are instructions which are patented by MIPS and have been removed.". That's a clear impediment to progress, once the MIPS instruction set was documented and people started to write software for it anybody ought to be free to re-implement these instructions for the express purpose of interpreting MIPS object code.
- DenisM 17y agoBy analogy - name a great business impeded by corruption in the government. Unm. We know there are great businesses in America and not that many in (more) corrupt countries, but we can't point at killed businesses themselves.
- jacquesm 17y agoI can name you a great business from one country that was impeded by corruption (or at least a connection to industry that should not have existed) in the government of another though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enercon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enercon
- DenisM 17y agoMy point is that those examples will never be representative of the magnitude of the problem.
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- jfarmer 17y agoBlackboard's patents come to mind.
- arfrank 17y agoThey ended up losing a lot of those claims recently if I recall correctly, but that being said I agree for a long time it did and still does hurt the LMS environment. http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invalidated-by-uspto/ http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invali... (2008)
- petercooper 17y agoApple's patents on sub-pixel text anti-aliasing. The text in both Windows and Linux looks hideous by comparison. You can enable these features in certain situations on Linux with extra packages, though. Correctional update: Microsoft holds patents in this area but Apple has a cross-licensing agreement on them.
- vetinari 17y agoApple has patents on truetype hinting, not subpixel anti-aliasing. Ironically, when working around this patent, it is easier to get results similar the OSX, rather than similar to Windows.
- blasdel 17y agoThe patent covers the bytecode interpreter that reads the hinting instructions in the truetype file, not the hinting itself.
- yuvi 17y agoElliptic curve cryptography and LDPC codes are two that come to mind. Though afaik the latter hasn't really been improved since ~1960 and were only patented after rediscovering them in 1993, and I have no clue whether progress in elliptic curve cryptography stalled due to patents or because they don't offer any practical benefits over RSA.
- mrshoe 17y agoI would point to the current HTML5 video element debacle: http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-June/020620.html http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-Jun... Patents are playing a large role in ensuring that what could be a wonderful thing for the web will almost certainly not be.
- GHFigs 17y agoJune 2009 is not "current". That issue (of making one or another codec mandatory in the HTML5 spec) is dead with decision you linked, for the reason that "if a browser refuses to implement something, then we can't require it". I'm being pedantic here, but I think it's very misleading to connect the spec issue with your conclusion that <video> could have been nice but somehow isn't. Had one or the other codec been made mandatory in the spec, the reality today would be exactly the same.
- fragmede 17y agoI'd say that HTML5 is the tip of that particular iceberg. I mean, what was HTML 5 supposed to change? The fact that video (and audio) is broken on the web, leaving to flash as the closed de-facto standard. The whole situation that HTML5 was supposed to fix is, itself, a result of codec licensing/patent issues. I'd venture that without those issues, the <object> and <embed> tags would have had a bigger impact.
- GHFigs 17y agoI mean, what was HTML 5 supposed to change? Nothing. It was supposed to be, and is, a description of what browsers actually implement in common, just like every other HTML spec before it.
- BearOfNH 17y agoThere certainly have been cases where alleged software patent violations result in lawsuits. There the lawyers get rich while very senior engineers cool their heels in court or give depositions in places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant. I don't know how measurable this is but it is patently obvious it is preventing progress.
- rgiar 17y agoSorry, no time to do the legwork to see if this would work, but I wonder if this "wastage" could be crudely measured by taking some aggregate number of patent related lawsuits per year, multiplying by some factor to include those settled out of court, multipy again by a conservative mean cost of a patent action (attack, defense, commonwealth) == $wasted/year.
- pmichaud 17y agoOne thing that's difficult to measure but probably not trivial is the overall cooling effect. What I mean is that the tangible cases in which patents really ran into conflict don't indicate the number of cases in which technologies were never researched to begin with because of the risk of infringing a patent. The cooling effect probably isn't significant for the mythical basement hacker who does it for love, but decisions about what research to pursue are made all the time in larger companies, and one of the factors is potential for legal trouble.
- DanielStraight 17y agoThis is an excellent point. Basically the patent minefield concept. The insanity of software patents has created an overall sense of fear. There is no way to quantify this aspect of patents' negative effect on progress.
- gridspy 17y agoThe basement hacker still runs into trouble when they try to translate their cool technology into a viable startup and cannot source funding. It is hard to find funding when you are immobilised in a minefield.
- smokinn 17y agoI still don't know what the issue with supporting multi-touch devices in North America is but I strongly suspect it's because of software patents. Anytime a corporate rep is asked why their device doesn't support it they hem and haw and say that it's complicated but never give a real answer.
- 10ren 17y agoNot an example, but there are many cases of people "working around" a patent. In this case, it is a spur to technological progress. That is, preventing progress can encourage progress. There's a "prospect" theory for patenting (which with this student is probably familiar), that a patent is like staking a claim to minerals, with a samilar effect: that it encourages others to stake claims nearby, and so explore that region. If others could use the same area as the patent, they wouldn't be encouraged to explore, and you'd get a technological monoculture (in another sense, this would be greater progress, in that it is more widely adopted). I've been trying to think of an example, but I can't. I think the main way a patent can block progress is if the technology is not exploited well by the owner (like smalltalk being too expensive), and in such cases, we don't hear of it. When a patented technology is exploited successfully, money and time is reinvested in developing it, so that progress on it is accelerated.
- eru 17y agoHowever --- imagine that the claims on minerals would be hard to see [1], and accidental violation would put you at great legal risk. Then people might get discouraged from staking claims in that general region. [1] It's not easy to look through all the patents before building anything --- and may even be harmful to your legal position.
- ivankirigin 17y agoXerox Parc has a patent on a type of filter viewer that acts like a looking glass to see the effect of the filter. Every year, someone reinvents it and presents it at some HCI conference, only to be told they can't use it. They are sitting on it, not building it, and also enforcing it. SIFT is a vision technique that is patented and works very well. Patents are getting in the way of commercial progress http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transfo... Amazon Onc-Click is an absurd patent. If we grew to scale, Tipjoy would probably have had to pay them money, like Apple does.
- mattmaroon 17y agoDoes Amazon actually enforce that? My understanding (perhaps incorrect) was that they quit after the hubbub when they tried it on Barnes and Noble. Also, isn't Bezos notoriously opposed to software patents?
- ivankirigin 17y agoIt was a risk for us to do one-click payments. Some might have chosen to avoid that risk, thus stifling innovation. The degree is certainly debatable.
- Create 17y agoBeso et al. are bullies. btw: http://webshop.ffii.org/ http://webshop.ffii.org/ "Reback often tells the story of how a team of IBM patent lawyers went to Sun Microsystems Inc. in the 1980s and claimed that the then start-up was infringing on seven of its patents. After Sun engineers explained why they were not infringing, the IBM lawyers responded that with 10,000 patents, they would be sure to find some infringement somewhere." The Washington Post "One could be tempted to consider ever stricter IP protection regimes to provide ever more stimuli for innovation. This conclusion is wrong, however. A prime example is patents on software, which might at first sight be seen as a logical expansion of the classic technology patent. But creating software differs markedly from creating machinery and the like." Deutsche Bank Research "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." Bill Gates (1991) "The world's patent systems need reform so that innovation can be properly rewarded. (...) It is becoming ever more apparent that the patent system isn't working." The Economist (11 November 2004) "Building up a patent portfolio by engaging in defensive patenting cannot always protect against hold-up." Federal Trade Commission of the USA "More patents in more industries and with greater breadth are not always the best ways to maximize consumer welfare." Federal Trade Commission of the USA "The mild regime of IP protection in the past has led to a very innovative and competitive software industry with low entry barriers. A software patent, which serves to protect inventions of a non-technical nature, could kill the high innovation rate." PriceWaterhouseCoopers "SMEs are crucial providers of pathbreaking innovations, but would be most adversely affected by patentability. The majority of them is deterred by the costs of patenting themselves, but would have to navigate around software patent portfolios of large corporations." Deutsche Bank Research "Many large companies operating on a global scale, including European ones, seem to be in favour of a software patenting regime. But most small enterprises are strongly opposed." PriceWaterhouseCoopers Microsoft Corp. warned Asian governments on Thursday they could face patent lawsuits for using the Linux operating system instead of its Windows software. Reuters (18 November 2004) "A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors." Bill Gates (1991) "Patent law provides to inventors an exclusive right to new technology in return for publication of the technology. This is not appropriate for industries such as software development in which innovations occur rapidly, can be made without a substantial capital investment, and tend to be creative combinations of previously-known techniques." Oracle Corporation Patent Policy
- aidenn0 17y agoIt's been speculated that Apple dropped ZFS due to patent concerns.
- wmf 17y agoYeah, the NetApp-Sun ZFS lawsuit is like a big "patent minefield here" sign.
- te_platt 17y agoBy progress do you mean creation of new technology or making technology available? A case I followed (involving infringement on a fingerprint recognition patent) shows how even weak patents slow the development process. Summary - Small company receives patent, sues large companies for infringement, two years and more than a million dollars later patent is invalidated, technology moves on. All the gory details here: http://www.legalmetric.com/cases/patent/utd/utd_206cv00115.html http://www.legalmetric.com/cases/patent/utd/utd_206cv00115.h...
- tsally 17y agoNot software patents, but SCO v. Novell is certainly relevant as an example of commercial/legal forces hampering process.
- petewarden 17y agoI have a couple of examples from my personal experience, neither earth-shattering, but when you consider X million engineers running into similar issues, the cumulative tax on innovation is pretty large. Working on F1 '98, we had to scrap a whole training mode where you'd see your time compared to previous laps because lawyers were concerned it overlapped with the Atari 'ghost car' patent: http://kotaku.com/270035/patents-are-interesting-ghost-mode http://kotaku.com/270035/patents-are-interesting-ghost-mode We spent a lot of time and energy trying to work around this, we weren't showing any kind of ghost car, just a time indication, but apparently the patent was broad enough to cover any kind of comparison. The second was a patent on controlling any kind of video effect based on a sound input(!). This severely constrained what we could do on a major video-processing package, forcing us to avoid some features. They tried to extort independent developers out of a lot of cash, despite being a painfully obvious idea that had been around for decades before the patent was filed: http://www.trapcode.com/US_SK_advisory.html http://www.trapcode.com/US_SK_advisory.html
- fragmede 17y agoMicrosoft's long filename in FAT filesystem patent was recently threatened against TomTom (http://lwn.net/Articles/320737/ http://lwn.net/Articles/320737/). Instead of working on new features (whatever they may have been), TomTom must instead commit resources to working around the patent.
- jacquesm 17y agoExcellent example. Many camera manufacturers faced similar obstacles, and ended up fragmenting the market with proprietary formats or paying the 'microsoft tax'.
- jchonphoenix 17y agoThe most obvious one that comes to mind is LZW, which basically killed the entire compression scheme.
- btilly 17y agoThere is a ton of really interesting and cool stuff that was done in wavelet research years ago which got patented and hasn't really seen the light of day in the way it should. If the patents hadn't existed I'm sure we'd now have much better widely available voice recognition, image recognition, and related data processing software than we do now.
- dstorrs 17y agoI worked at a company called Pica9, generating PDFs on the fly. Another company has the patent on that, so we had to spend a considerable amount of effort working around it, making sub-optimal choices at easy decision point in order to make it legal.
- aristus 17y agoSingular Value Decomposition was held back for 20 years by patents owned by BellCore. I had to scrap large interesting portions of Dowser to avoid potential problems. As a counterexample, Autonomy has a patent on Bayesian text classification dating from the late 90's. I've always wondered why they didn't say anything after Paul popularized it for spam filtering.
- mattjung 17y agohttp://mises.org/story/3280 http://mises.org/story/3280
- ZeroGravitas 17y agoThat was one I was going to mention, along with the Wright Brothers, before I reread the question and realised it was only software patents they were interested in. Still fascinating how people that I'd always heard venerated as inventors could have spent so much time and energy holding other people back.
- tmitchell 17y agoDuring development of Doom 3, id Software fell into a bit of a patent conflict with Creative. Relevant snippet from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_3: "A week before the game's release, it became known that an agreement to include EAX audio technology in Doom 3 reached by id Software and Creative Labs was heavily influenced by a software patent owned by the latter company. The patent dealt with a technique for rendering shadows called Carmack's Reverse, which was developed independently by both John Carmack and programmers at Creative Labs. id Software would have placed themselves under legal liability for using the technique in the finished game, so to defuse the issue, id Software agreed to license Creative Labs sound technologies in exchange for indemnification against lawsuits." I remember something about Carmack coming up with a workaround that paid a performance penalty so others licensing their engine could bypass the Creative mess. Creative has also taken quite a bit of heat over the years for sitting on Aureal's IP and stifling innovation in sound technology, but I don't have specific examples to cite.
- drallison 17y agoI would direct the student to the working Paper by James Besser and Eric Maskin, Sequential Innovation, Patents, and Imitation, which builds an economic argument against software patents. It and other relevant papers on software patents are available at http://www.researchoninnovation.org/ http://www.researchoninnovation.org/.
- darrylArguss 17y agoit's hard to find any examples where patents have stiffled innovation. Of all the hundreds or millions of patents it's only possible to find very few if any historical examples where patents stifle innovation. What patents do achieve is exactly what they are there for. which is to protect the inventor of something usefull for a period of time. If you want to use innovation that has patent protection, you should reward the person who invented it, OR invent something better youreself. That applices to things like Ogg Thorbis, where new technologies were developed in spite of patents. If there were not patents on MPEG Ogg would not have been innovated. Same with file systems, if there were no patentson NTFS or FAT, then why would ext3 and so on mabey would not be where they are now. Fact is patents are there for a reason, (apart from it being law). They appear to work, and they dont appear to be affecting innovation to any degree. Sure, there are groups who would be happy to ride the coat tails of others innovations and inventions. But that is only so they are not able to innovate themselves. They like something that works, and have a 'me too' attitude. (why should someone else get rich, when I can copy that and get rich as well).
- Daniel_Mietchen 17y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_cubes#Patent_issues http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_cubes#Patent_issues