5 ms·

Option a) work harder to make products people want and create value Option b) sue the companies that do that Hooray for patents.

gaius 9y ago
BlackBerry was first to (mass-)market with many of these features, and validated that customers wanted them and would use them. You would assume that a startup-oriented community would understand that that’s often the hard part, and that many good ideas are obvious in retrospect. BlackBerry blundered e.g. by not opening up BBM earlier, but that wasn’t a failure of the technology nor the product-market fit.
- mtgx 9y ago
  Even if we are to take that for granted, which I don't think we should with software patents because many companies and developers could invent the same feature in parallel independent of each other, and I don't think it's fair for just one to get a 20 year monopoly, I do still think that the longevity of the patent should be granted based on the difficulty to implement of the invention. Something as easy to implement as a read-receipt shouldn't receive a 20 year monopoly, because there are like a million other features like it that could also receive a 20 year patent monopoly, and then we get into this situation where rent-seeking even from companies that didn't invent the thing in the first place, get to sue others for "copying them" (but again, could have been independently developed). If there are a million patents on stuff like read-receipt it also doesn't help innovation, but hurts it. The big companies will acquire as many of those patents as possible and then crush the newcomers. The first reason this doesn't happen as often as it should based on how many useless patents are out there, is because most companies aren't assholes and don't enforce their patents against others. The second reason is because most companies don't waste time looking at all the other companies' code and patents to see if they can sue them for infringement. Only a certain class of companies do that. The third reason is that among the big established players that somehow avoided getting crushed in the early days because enforcement of patent infringement couldn't be perfect, there is a certain "mutual destruction agreement", so even if they infringe on ton of each other's patents, they can't practically sue each other, because it would be pointless, most of the time. However, this mutual destruction agreement was never supposed to be part of the patent system, it's just the natural outcome of a broken system that grants patents for everything. I think it was Bloomberg that had an article once saying that there are like 250,000 patents for building a smartphone. If everyone wanted even 1 cent for each of those patents, and the enforcement would be 100% perfect, the smartphone would never even be invented (as an aggregation of all of those patents).
  - gaius 9y ago
    Even if we are to take that for granted, which I don't think we should with software patents because many companies and developers could invent the same feature in parallel independent of each other Everyone says this but I don't think it's true. I could probably have come up with Bresenham's algorithm myself, but no way could I have conceived of Duff's Device - that's sheer voodoo.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      I suspect that Duff’s Device is more or less obvious to someone who started out working in assembly language on constrained systems. It’s a direct translation of a simple computed jump.
      - gaius 9y ago
        started out working in assembly language on constrained systems Right, I started out with a 2Mhz 6502 with 32k RAM and it still boggles my mind!
        mikeash 9y ago
        Maybe if you were around for the invention of C? I'll just keep adding qualifiers until it works.
- dpwm 9y ago
  The exclusivity of BBM was one of the big selling points for blackberries. That and their integration with corporate IT infrastructures. For a while that worked really well, and BBM was the reason to buy a blackberry after the keyboards and the security features. I recall at the time there was huge demand from executives to have IT support their iphones. Once the path had been found for that to happen, others followed. The other major thing that reduced the advantage that BBM gave RIM was that SMS costs reduced drastically in price, with many even lower-end contracts moving to unlimited SMS as mobile data and MMS became the new means of extorting customers. As such, the cost of BBM being exclusive to blackberry was no longer offset by the benefits it gave. It's worth noting that one of the other things that the blackberry gave us was probably the first example of widespread mobile zero rating. I recall if you bought a blackberry on some contracts, your BBM data usage was unmetered. Both of the features in the patent claim are obvious or there is prior art. Density maps have been used for a long time. Weather maps are a great example of this where they are often used to show rain probability or cloud density. It just seems we have just moved from x on a computer patents to x on a mobile device patents.
  - rosege 9y ago
    In my part of the world once Whatsapp was discovered messaging changed pretty quickly from BBM to Whatsapp. Then the main advantage BB had was the keyboard. But soon after smart phone apps started to rule and that was that.
    - gaius 9y ago
      WhatsApp was pretty much 1:1 clone of BBM
- lordnacho 9y ago
  Good on them for finding something people want. However, you're not supposed to be able to protect that knowledge with a patent. If I start making cheeseburgers where the buns are replaced by croissants, and it turns out to be so compelling that a billion people are hooked on it, should that be something that can be protected? No, of course not. We want many entrepreneurs to be able to make these burgers so that everyone can have them at a sensible price, in whatever varieties are popular, and where and whenever they are in demand. Allowing one entity to have control over this "discovery" (cheeseburger + croissant = heaven) will mean that consumers cannot have any of those things until the discoverer has built up the business empire required.
  - djrogers 9y ago
    > If I start making cheeseburgers where the buns are replaced by croissants, Dang, that sounds good - if I wasn’t trying to lose another 7lbs...
  - Spare_account 9y ago
    I may be misunderstanding you, or missing a piece of your argument, but you appear to be arguing that patents should not exist? Is there any area that you feel would be acceptable to allow patents?
    - lordnacho 9y ago
      Well I'm no expert on it, but it would seem that patents are not justified in a great number of industries. There's a bunch of businesses where capital and knowledge exists, and can be turned to making more or less anything. For instance, if you come up with some new shape of plastic coathanger, you can find some guy in China to make it for you, in millions. The key isn't that you're smart and can make a clever shaped coathanger, the key is that you are able to convince people it's useful and worth buying for more than what it costs you to open a webshop and pay the factory. You shouldn't be able to patent that. Some other person may be able to make it without your help, cheaper, and for more consumers. Or you could make software. Pretty much any old UI innovation can be made by anyone in the field for peanuts. If it turns out everyone wants a circular knob to scroll up and down, it would not take long before every browser, application, and mobile app could implement that. You shouldn't be able to patent that; it's an obvious thing that takes no input from the original "inventor" to make. I already had an example from the food industry. You can mash together any number of foods, pretty much anyone can. Pharma is one area where it is perhaps legitimate, due to the cost of research. If you don't have someone doing tests to show some molecule works, nobody will know what works. And if you don't have someone showing you how to make a particular molecule, it may take a long time before consumers have that drug. I'm still reserved about it in this area though. The potential for abuse is considerable.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  I don't think it's self-contradicting to understand good ideas are one of the hard things to come up with and validate, but also believe that they shouldn't be patentable for long, if at all. Just because something is hard doesnt automatically make it deserving of large profits and legal protection.
edanm 9y ago
People use cars to rob banks. It doesn't logically follow that cars are bad. Just because patents are abused in some cases (in your opinion), doesn't mean patents are bad.
- Nullabillity 9y ago
  Cars have a legitimate use, but this is the only thing patents have ever accomplished.
  - edanm 9y ago
    That's a pretty controversial statement, considering it contradicts what most people think about the issue, including people who study it, and also contradicts common sense.
  - dx034 9y ago
    Patents have an important role in some industries, e.g. pharma. Not that I'm a fan of the industry but without patents, developing a drug over 10+ years would make no sense as anyone could copy it immediately after its release. Same for product design. Why hire designers and engineers if you can just copy a competitor?
- Deestan 9y ago
  > People use cars to rob banks. Yeah. But it's not legal and they get in trouble. It would be a better comparison if cars allowed people to legally drain bank accounts.
  - edanm 9y ago
    Fair enough. We can change it to "people using cars get into accidents - doesn't mean cars are necessarily bad".

gaius 9y ago

BlackBerry was first to (mass-)market with many of these features, and validated that customers wanted them and would use them. You would assume that a startup-oriented community would understand that that’s often the hard part, and that many good ideas are obvious in retrospect. BlackBerry blundered e.g. by not opening up BBM earlier, but that wasn’t a failure of the technology nor the product-market fit.

mtgx 9y ago
Even if we are to take that for granted, which I don't think we should with software patents because many companies and developers could invent the same feature in parallel independent of each other, and I don't think it's fair for just one to get a 20 year monopoly, I do still think that the longevity of the patent should be granted based on the difficulty to implement of the invention. Something as easy to implement as a read-receipt shouldn't receive a 20 year monopoly, because there are like a million other features like it that could also receive a 20 year patent monopoly, and then we get into this situation where rent-seeking even from companies that didn't invent the thing in the first place, get to sue others for "copying them" (but again, could have been independently developed). If there are a million patents on stuff like read-receipt it also doesn't help innovation, but hurts it. The big companies will acquire as many of those patents as possible and then crush the newcomers. The first reason this doesn't happen as often as it should based on how many useless patents are out there, is because most companies aren't assholes and don't enforce their patents against others. The second reason is because most companies don't waste time looking at all the other companies' code and patents to see if they can sue them for infringement. Only a certain class of companies do that. The third reason is that among the big established players that somehow avoided getting crushed in the early days because enforcement of patent infringement couldn't be perfect, there is a certain "mutual destruction agreement", so even if they infringe on ton of each other's patents, they can't practically sue each other, because it would be pointless, most of the time. However, this mutual destruction agreement was never supposed to be part of the patent system, it's just the natural outcome of a broken system that grants patents for everything. I think it was Bloomberg that had an article once saying that there are like 250,000 patents for building a smartphone. If everyone wanted even 1 cent for each of those patents, and the enforcement would be 100% perfect, the smartphone would never even be invented (as an aggregation of all of those patents).
- gaius 9y ago
  Even if we are to take that for granted, which I don't think we should with software patents because many companies and developers could invent the same feature in parallel independent of each other Everyone says this but I don't think it's true. I could probably have come up with Bresenham's algorithm myself, but no way could I have conceived of Duff's Device - that's sheer voodoo.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    I suspect that Duff’s Device is more or less obvious to someone who started out working in assembly language on constrained systems. It’s a direct translation of a simple computed jump.
    - gaius 9y ago
      started out working in assembly language on constrained systems Right, I started out with a 2Mhz 6502 with 32k RAM and it still boggles my mind!
      - mikeash 9y ago
        Maybe if you were around for the invention of C? I'll just keep adding qualifiers until it works.
dpwm 9y ago
The exclusivity of BBM was one of the big selling points for blackberries. That and their integration with corporate IT infrastructures. For a while that worked really well, and BBM was the reason to buy a blackberry after the keyboards and the security features. I recall at the time there was huge demand from executives to have IT support their iphones. Once the path had been found for that to happen, others followed. The other major thing that reduced the advantage that BBM gave RIM was that SMS costs reduced drastically in price, with many even lower-end contracts moving to unlimited SMS as mobile data and MMS became the new means of extorting customers. As such, the cost of BBM being exclusive to blackberry was no longer offset by the benefits it gave. It's worth noting that one of the other things that the blackberry gave us was probably the first example of widespread mobile zero rating. I recall if you bought a blackberry on some contracts, your BBM data usage was unmetered. Both of the features in the patent claim are obvious or there is prior art. Density maps have been used for a long time. Weather maps are a great example of this where they are often used to show rain probability or cloud density. It just seems we have just moved from x on a computer patents to x on a mobile device patents.
- rosege 9y ago
  In my part of the world once Whatsapp was discovered messaging changed pretty quickly from BBM to Whatsapp. Then the main advantage BB had was the keyboard. But soon after smart phone apps started to rule and that was that.
  - gaius 9y ago
    WhatsApp was pretty much 1:1 clone of BBM
lordnacho 9y ago
Good on them for finding something people want. However, you're not supposed to be able to protect that knowledge with a patent. If I start making cheeseburgers where the buns are replaced by croissants, and it turns out to be so compelling that a billion people are hooked on it, should that be something that can be protected? No, of course not. We want many entrepreneurs to be able to make these burgers so that everyone can have them at a sensible price, in whatever varieties are popular, and where and whenever they are in demand. Allowing one entity to have control over this "discovery" (cheeseburger + croissant = heaven) will mean that consumers cannot have any of those things until the discoverer has built up the business empire required.
- djrogers 9y ago
  > If I start making cheeseburgers where the buns are replaced by croissants, Dang, that sounds good - if I wasn’t trying to lose another 7lbs...
- Spare_account 9y ago
  I may be misunderstanding you, or missing a piece of your argument, but you appear to be arguing that patents should not exist? Is there any area that you feel would be acceptable to allow patents?
  - lordnacho 9y ago
    Well I'm no expert on it, but it would seem that patents are not justified in a great number of industries. There's a bunch of businesses where capital and knowledge exists, and can be turned to making more or less anything. For instance, if you come up with some new shape of plastic coathanger, you can find some guy in China to make it for you, in millions. The key isn't that you're smart and can make a clever shaped coathanger, the key is that you are able to convince people it's useful and worth buying for more than what it costs you to open a webshop and pay the factory. You shouldn't be able to patent that. Some other person may be able to make it without your help, cheaper, and for more consumers. Or you could make software. Pretty much any old UI innovation can be made by anyone in the field for peanuts. If it turns out everyone wants a circular knob to scroll up and down, it would not take long before every browser, application, and mobile app could implement that. You shouldn't be able to patent that; it's an obvious thing that takes no input from the original "inventor" to make. I already had an example from the food industry. You can mash together any number of foods, pretty much anyone can. Pharma is one area where it is perhaps legitimate, due to the cost of research. If you don't have someone doing tests to show some molecule works, nobody will know what works. And if you don't have someone showing you how to make a particular molecule, it may take a long time before consumers have that drug. I'm still reserved about it in this area though. The potential for abuse is considerable.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
I don't think it's self-contradicting to understand good ideas are one of the hard things to come up with and validate, but also believe that they shouldn't be patentable for long, if at all. Just because something is hard doesnt automatically make it deserving of large profits and legal protection.

edanm 9y ago

People use cars to rob banks. It doesn't logically follow that cars are bad. Just because patents are abused in some cases (in your opinion), doesn't mean patents are bad.

Nullabillity 9y ago
Cars have a legitimate use, but this is the only thing patents have ever accomplished.
- edanm 9y ago
  That's a pretty controversial statement, considering it contradicts what most people think about the issue, including people who study it, and also contradicts common sense.
- dx034 9y ago
  Patents have an important role in some industries, e.g. pharma. Not that I'm a fan of the industry but without patents, developing a drug over 10+ years would make no sense as anyone could copy it immediately after its release. Same for product design. Why hire designers and engineers if you can just copy a competitor?
Deestan 9y ago
> People use cars to rob banks. Yeah. But it's not legal and they get in trouble. It would be a better comparison if cars allowed people to legally drain bank accounts.
- edanm 9y ago
  Fair enough. We can change it to "people using cars get into accidents - doesn't mean cars are necessarily bad".