4 ms·
I've come to terms with the fact that even here on HN, many people still mistake a summary for a legal definition of the invention covered. But I had held ou
by roc 16y ago
I've come to terms with the fact that even here on HN, many people still mistake a summary for a legal definition of the invention covered.
But I had held out hope that this wasn't the sort of place where one could condemn patents by title alone, let alone the sort of place where a false argument like that would find approval.
No point is bolstered by pretending the titles have any bearing on the legal or philosophical validity of those patents.
If you have a philosophical issue with patents in general or software patents in particular, just state that and save time.
- bhiggins 16y agoNice troll.
- rfrey 16y agoNobody mistakes a title for a summary, or a summary for an exhaustive 40 page patent. Nobody mistakes an academic article title for an abstract, or the abstract for the text, or the text for the data, either. But that doesn't stop us from mentioning articles by title. I thought it would be helpful to list the patents since they are not listed in the original article and one has to scan a 10 page pdf to find them. I'm not sure what you would prefer. Don't list the patents? Full text? Links to full text? Please educate me on proper summarization of a patent lawsuit.
- tzs 16y agoActually, people do commonly mistake the title of a patent for the claims of the patent. That's one of the main reasons discussions over specific patents on sites like Slashdot, Reddit and...well, pretty much everywhere that programmers hang out are almost always close to worthless. Probably best to post the patent numbers along with the titles, which makes it more likely some people will look at the patents themselves and subsequently post more information as to what is or is not actually being alleged. The best way to think of patent titles and abstracts is not as things telling you what the patent covers, but rather as telling you what it DOESN'T cover. When you are trying to figure out what patents might cover some particular thing of interest, you use the titles and abstract to eliminate patents. For those not eliminated, you then need to read the specification and claims. For instance, looking at the 9 titles you posted, I can quite confidently conclude that 7 of them cannot possibly cover anything I'm currently working on.
- mwerty 16y agoI think links to fulltext are best. I don't think summarizing patents makes sense in this case with such vague content-free titles.
- coderdude 16y ago"Sounds like they're being sued for deploying an AJAX application." You listed just the patent titles and then made a smart remark about them. Roc stated that you cannot tell what a patent covers simply by looking at its name. It sounds more like you mistake a title for an exhaustive 40 page patent. Otherwise, you were just wise-cracking for the sake of it.
- papachito 16y agoSoftware patents are always ridiculous.
- arethuza 16y agoI agree - and I have two.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]