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I can't stand the idea that I might be at my computer, working with code, and develop something independently which later causes me to get sued. Abolish all sof

I can't stand the idea that I might be at my computer, working with code, and develop something independently which later causes me to get sued. Abolish all software patents. edited to add "software".

nimrody 15y ago
If you abolish all patents you leave two options for inventors [some patents truly are ingenious]: - Keep it as a trade secret. You get one source for a product, and less innovation. - Publish it and suffer the consequences of the big companies copying it and making profit on your work.
- robryan 15y ago
  Trade secret actually isn't a bad option, if you patent truly had legs then your secret is probably going to be safe for a fair amount of time. If your patent is getting people on a technicality and really isn't very innovative then your secret won't be much of a secret.
  - notJim 15y ago
    The argument against trade secrets is that they hurt innovation by impeding the flow of information. Patents allow a company to publish their innovations without fear of someone coming along and simply stealing it. By allowing inventors to publish their information with little competitive disadvantage, we enable other inventors to build on their predecessors efforts.
    - bediger 15y ago
      The current state of patent disclosure is such that your arguement makes little sense. Virtually nothing in software patent disclosures informs people about "how to do it". Almost all of the disclosures are vague and unspecific. If you, as a programmer, hear the title of a patent, you basically know how to do it.
      - robryan 15y ago
        Yeah, with Google search patents, they have been published years after the system was developed and is probably much evolved by now. Looking at the text in them, they only provide very vague guidelines to say SEO's try to learn more how how ranking works.
    - barrkel 15y ago
      That's not how software patents work in practice. They are written to be as broad and non-specific as possible, because their purpose is to be legal weapons. They are not about spreading innovation; competition, in functioning markets, is sufficient for that.
      - notJim 15y ago
        I think patents can be (and have been) distorted to be used as weapons, but their real purpose is to help innovation as I described. The argument you're making is basically that the system right now is broken, so we should just throw it out. I do agree that it's broken, but I argue that fixing the system is a better solution than throwing it out.
        barrkel 15y ago
        The purpose of a patent system and the purposes of people using a patent system are two different things. The first one might motivate lawmakers; but it is the second one that actually matters. Do you honestly believe there is such a problem with sharing innovation in the software industry, that we need government intervention to encourage sharing?
    - shasta 15y ago
      The better argument for software is that secrecy doesn't work.
      - Locke1689 15y ago
        Complexity does -- SaaS is very hard to reverse engineer.
- jxcole 15y ago
  You know, I heard PG argue this in his software patent article, and I don't buy it. In the end, necessity is the mother of invention. Software engineers invent things because they need them. They would not, by default, either try to keep it as a secret or patent it. Let's take the funny example of Amzon vs B&N on the one-click system. Do you think Amazon would not use the one click system if it were unpatenable? In the case of modern software patents, keeping it a secret is equivalent to not using it all. Since you invented it in the first place, I find this outcome to be excessively unlikely. You are also suffering under the misconception that a lone programmer or programming pair would be incapable of standing up to big markets with a software invention. If his invention is really worth it's muster, he can come out with a profitable product that blows big companies out of the water. I've seen it happen before.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  I call B.S. Let's take what I often here cited as one of the best software patents (personally, I think it is the worst.. but that's another story), RSA. Did that patent really prevent others from using/profiting on it? Hardly (although in most cases the "profiting off of" thing is a stretch, unless the explicit purpose of their product was cryptographic in nature. Now, what if they had kept it a trade secret? Just look at their RC4. They kept it a secret and got a few years of exclusivity but eventually we all got the algorithm, because that's just how software works. 20 year exclusivity contracts are waaaay too long. I think the trade secrets route where "you have it until others figure it out" is far more fair and workable.
- abrahamsen 15y ago
  I very much favor the trade secret option, at least for software. Patents are (theoretically) a pragmatic compromise between 1) the benefits to society of having people publish their ideas, and 2) the drawbacks to society of giving someone a time limited monopoly on the exploitation of the idea. For software I believe the drawbacks in general far outweigh the benefits. There might be examples of "nobody else would have thought of this within the patent period" inventions, but they are rare enough that it does not make sense to have special laws for those cases. In the physical "better mousetrap" world the issue is different. The situation is similar to the Hacker News startup world in that ideas are plenty. However, the cost of productizing the ideas is high, and there is less of a first mover advantage, access to distribution channels is more important. So patents in the "better mousetrap" world protects not the idea, but the investment of turning the idea into a product. The drawbacks of patents here are also smaller, as you rarely build unrelated products upon the "better mousetrap", so the cost of a monopoly often stays limited to the specific market. Patents here might be a good compromise. In medicine there is a similar situation in that many ideas are "free" from public funded research, but useless without the very expensive clinical trials. The patents basically protects the investment in clinical trials, and no so much original research. However the cost of patents is huge. People die because they can't afford patented medicine (which include initial cost for the clinical tests, marginal cost, distributed cost of failed products, and profit), even though they could easily afford the marginal cost alone. It would be good to get rid of patents here, but they must be replaced with another system to cover the cost of the clinical tests.
- bborud 15y ago
  your first point wrongfully assumes that the patent system is the dominant mechanism for spreading inventions. it may have been intended to work this way, but this is not how it works in real life. if you have ever worked for a software company that has a competent legal department, you know that you must stay away from patents. under no circumstances are you allowed to communicate that you have looked at any given patent or even acknowledge the existence of a patent. patents are treated with more fear than toxic waste in IPR sensitive businesses. besides, if you don't publish and you do something clever, how long do you think it would take for the competition to figure out what you were doing? or for people in academia to publish something on it? or for some independent blogger with too much time on his or her hands? I wish people would consider reality rather than some make-believe world that does not exist when thinking about patents. so much time, money and intellectual energy is wasted on this nonsense. not to mention that it is clogging up the courts with absolutely pointless legal battles. we, as a society, have better things to do.
- dspeyer 15y ago
  Trade secrets are less secret than patents, because outside engineers don't carefully avoid reading trade secrets. Also, hardly any secret can be kept for as long as a patent lasts.
albedoa 15y ago
This John Carmack quote is relevant and shares your sentiments: "The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack
- jcromartie 15y ago
  Except it's even worse than that: usually patent trolls haven't even written the code to solve the problem. Working code is not required to be granted a patent.
  - dspillett 15y ago
    And they could file for the patent after you have done the work. You then have the hassle and expense of proving that your work came first and even then such cases often don't go the way they should.
    - nkassis 15y ago
      I great example of the trouble someone had to go to prove they were first is the ABC computer. It's an important case if you consider that without John Atanasoff the personal computer would never have existed. At the time IBM and some other corp I can't remember the name held some important patent on memory and other things that would prevent anyone from creating a personal computer without paying IBM. Those patents which had come from the creators of ENIAC were later found to have been heavely (well in reality stolen) from the ABC computer. After years of battles, IBM lost the patents and right after that the PC came to be. For a worse horror story, just take a look at Farnsworth trouble with RCA about the TV patents.
    - ahlatimer 15y ago
      You could still lose that fight, even if your work came first, if you never published it or filed a patent for it. First to invent only holds if you reduced it to practice (either by actually inventing the thing, or boiling it down so someone reasonably skilled in the art could then invent it) within that year. You lose rights to it after that if someone else wants to patent it. There's also first to conceive stipulations. The intellectual property class I took last semester would have been a lot easier if the U.S. just went first to file (like basically everywhere else).
nh 15y ago
devils advocate: What if you independently came up with tablet like device and called it an 'iPad'
- monochromatic 15y ago
  That's not a patent question.
  - nh 15y ago
    No, but it is a intellectual property question. My point was that if you violate a trademark even though you independently came up with it, the same would apply for patents.
    - Steve0 15y ago
      In that case, it's easy to change a name, then continue selling your product. Not if (some part) of your product is patented.
    - monochromatic 15y ago
      Well, true... up to a point. But the motivations behind patent law are so different from those behind trademark law that I'm not sure it's a relevant comparison.
      - dodo53 15y ago
        And one of the tests in trademark law is if a reasonable person would be confused between the original and the imposter. So you only have to have 'reasonable' knowledge of other brands in your industry.
        ahlatimer 15y ago
        I think the actual test is if the intended audience would get confused between the original and the imposter (see the H. R. Pufnstuf v. McDonald's case, although that's copyright, not trademark).
anamax 15y ago
> I can't stand the idea that I might be at my computer, working with code, and develop something independently which later causes me to get sued. Abolish all patents. I can't stand the idea that I might be in my shop/lab, working with metal/wood/plastic/chemicals, and develop something independently which later causes me to get sued. Abolish all patents.
- postfuturist 15y ago
  Yes, patents infringe on people's rights, to foster innovation. Getting to patent something isn't a right, it's a privilege. As you've illustrated, all patents are inherently undesirable--at least for certain parties. And I agree. They should be abolished.
  - petegrif 15y ago
    That is precisely what they don't do. All they do is stop someone else from claiming it as an innovation with the associated IP rights. There is nothing to stop someone innovating like a fiend. But surely it is blindingly obvious that copying something someone has already patented is not innovating. Everything else however is fair game. Knock yourself out and innovate.
- jerf 15y ago
  You're missing a critical difference. Patents are supposed to be "unobvious". A normal person just working in their shop should not just accidentally stumble across a patented thing, because by definition the patented thing should not be obvious to one skilled in the art. Programmers on the other hand can indeed pop open an editor, spend a few minutes with Ruby on Rails implementing "a standard business procedure, but on the Internet!", and violate a patent. Or multiple patents. In fact, the very fact that we have patent trolls that can run around and sue business after business after business for the same patent, while the businesses have no evidence that shows they have communicated with each other about the patented subject, ought to be proof positive that the patent is obvious and shouldn't be patentable. An amazing number of patents that actually are being litigated really are "X, but on a computer!" or some variant thereof ("X, but on a network device!" is one the company I work for has gotten hit with). I'm not exaggerating, for all the verbiage and diagrams this really is a reasonable summary of many of them. Your metaphor fails, because what is not a realistic risk for people working in shops or labs is a perfectly reasonable risk for a hobby programmer, let alone a pro. Perhaps programmers are overreacting because of all the bad ones and there is a core of goodness deep down in there, but I'm willing to find out the hard way.
mrcharles 15y ago
Sorry to all, I specifically meant software patents. Hardware patents are different as they often rely on physical creation of objects and a non-trivial investment in materials/development. Conversely a software idea can be thought up in a few minutes and implemented in the same. In app purchases isn't exactly a clever idea or something that was revelatory. It was simple software evolution.
- notJim 15y ago
  You're saying all software ideas can be thought of and implemented in a few minutes? That is both absurd, and an insult to the innovation that happens in software. You have 10 minutes, give me an implementation of something that improves upon H.264 by 30%.
  - sp332 15y ago
    You have 10 years. Write me a patent for something that improves upon H.264 by 30%.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - barrkel 15y ago
    That's not how it works. If you're familiar with the area, you might come up with an idea that improves it by 3%. If you have 9 of those ideas, you might get a 30% improvement. Where the ideas come from is serendipity combined with fertile ground. It might be by analogy, a technique from a different domain, from similarity with something you did with lego blocks when you were 9 years old, from a mishearing when discussing something with a fellow developer, from ignorance of the known techniques in a particular area and trying to solve it from first principles, etc. You do need some familiarity and experience in the domain in order to recognize the utility of the novel technique. It might happen once to you, but it's unlikely to happen 9 times. More importantly, it's also probably going to occur to someone else, sooner or later. New discoveries tend to be repeated, that's a common theme in the history of scientific and mathematical development. By advocating patents for these things, you suggest the mere chance of coming first means you get a government-granted right to extort from other people.
rlpb 15y ago
Fixing your problem would only need the current system to be modified such that independent invention is not infringing. One way, for example, is to make it permissible for independent invention to be considered evidence that the patent is obvious to those skilled in the art and thus not patentable. A patent already granted would be repealed under these circumstances. Would you still be in favour of abolishment, and if so why?
- jcromartie 15y ago
  How would you prove an "independent" invention was really developed independently of the patent? You can't prove that someone didn't read something.
  - rlpb 15y ago
    The "first to invent" system already in US patent law already faces the same issue, so if it can be done there it then can be done here.
  - simpleTruth 15y ago
    IMO a reasonable test is: If a patent can be used to sue one company it may be patentable. If it can be used to sue 100 companies working on separate products it's probably obvious. Basically, you can't prove 1 person did not read it. But, you can be positive 100 people did not read it. Now clearly this depends on the number of people working on the problem. So, while 100 is excessive in most fields, somewhere around 3-10 is probably a good lower bound.
    - petegrif 15y ago
      That is clearly not a reasonable test. In fact it is almost certainly a great test for someone having innovated in a valuable way. If you file a worthless patent then no-one will be interested in your innovation and there will be no-one to sue. If however you file something valuable you would expect to potentially have lots of people to sue. In your example the question arises, why have so many people trespassed on this patent? We know they have an incentive - it is valuable. But why in this hypothetical case did they trespass? Did they think the patent was breakable? the patent holder weak? the market opportunity so great that they would build now pay later? Perhaps they didn't find the patent? So many questions. But as a cursory study of hindsight bias will make plain it is extremely common for something that is not at all obvious at the time of its invention of appear so later. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias
podperson 15y ago
I voted for the "abolish all" option despite the fact I'm actually in favor of patents in general and don't think software should be distinct from hardware, but the situation has gotten ridiculous (as has the situation with patents in general). I think that software should only be protected by copyright if the source code is placed in escrow and made available when the company goes belly-up or when the (strictly limited) copyright period expires. I think that the patent system needs to be thoroughly reformed so as to do a better job of covering software, hardware, and a blend of the two. John Carmack's example is compelling but if patents were handled properly the odds of such a thing occurring would be as remote as the odds of doing the same thing in your backyard workshop with a lathe.
- seanp2k 15y ago
  >"the odds of such a thing occurring would be as remote as the odds of doing the same thing in your backyard workshop with a lathe." No. The difference is that PHYSICAL TANGIBLE things exist in the "analog" realm have infinite possibilities. Things that exist in the digital realm have a finite number of possibilities, and if you limit yourself to a particular subset of things you can even possibly do (such as those things which are implemented in computer programming languages), the odds go up greatly. If I tell someone to build a table leg on a lathe, there would probably be many variations between skilled builders. If I tell someone to make an efficient file store (or in patent speak "digital storage"), lots of people would probably come up with something similar...but that's patented: http://www.google.com/patents?q=digital+storage&btnG=Search+Patents http://www.google.com/patents?q=digital+storage&btnG=Sea...
  - haikurion 15y ago
    There are many flaws here. While a digital (or discrete) space (or realm of infinite possibilities as you put it) has a limited size as a function of the allowed length, 1. The length can be infinitely long, therefore the number of possibilities can be infinitely long. 2. For all practical purposes the space is so large it is infinite. How many possible permutations of 1s and 0s can you get in a 1024 KB program. Many. 3. If we go into the more practical example you raised I doubt there is much difference between the variance in resulting table legs and digital storage applications. If anything, I would say there would be more variation in the software, simply because the high cost of iteration and experimentation (and stricter physical constraints) have narrowed the design space of table legs, in a way which is much less apparent in software.
anigbrowl 15y ago
Me neither. But what about the opposite case - you work on something for a long time, and then make a breakthrough. Genius! You apply your breakthrough to do something awesome and release it out into the world. Someone else notes, it, reverse engineers it, and has a better marketing operation than you so they make $$$ and you get nothing. without patents, how do you protect your genuinely original work? I'm not a fan of software patents. To be honest, I wish we didn't need a patent system at all. But since we don't live in the Star Trek universe and world communism turns out not to be the economic panacea that its creators hoped, we need something to protect the rights of inventors. Same thing with copyright - before it came into being, artists and writers had to rely either on fickle patronage or else hope to make some money on their first sales run because after that it was a free-for-all. Although I hate the way IP law and institutions have swung towards the opposite extreme and are now damaging to consumers and the general cause of innovation, those rules exist to solve a genuine economic problem. It would be easier to overturn software patents if there were some alternative proposal to reliably secure the fruits of innovation to the inventor. If that task is left to the market, then a) there's abundant evidence that profit will win over ethics, and consumers won't know or care and b) people whose time is best spent innovating will have to spend more effort on marketing and monetizing their IP and fending off competitors, which is inefficient for solo inventors or small firms. So is spending a lot of time on patent work, admittedly, but a patent is a more reliable shield against having one's invention ripped off.
- stewbrew 15y ago
  Are you able to tell/estimate what's the proportion of software patent cases that will bring profit to the people who actually did the work? And how many cases were initiated by those people because they felt at risk.
  - anigbrowl 15y ago
    That's more research than I want to do for free on a Monday morning, and one might ask the same question about patents in general. The current system is broken, but simply abolishing it is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's a reason the patent and copyright systems exist in the first place, and simple abolition would just exchange new problems for old.
petegrif 15y ago
There are many ideas that I can't stand. Fortunately I weigh them against their likelihood and find that reassuring. I suggest you do likewise. The probability that in your noodling you will develop something non-obvious and worthy of intellectual protection and will nonetheless continue obliviously developing it, without the slightest idea there may be protected prior art is vanishingly small. Consequently your paranoid intuition that we should abolish all software patents may be laid to rest. There may well be good reasons to investigate the patent system. IMHO this is not one of them. Hope this helps.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
checoivan 15y ago
There's a money incentive at work for each patent submission. Every time I stare at that patent submission form I can't help but to imagine somebody doing a cool thing which does something similar, getting squashed by a lawyer. I've a couple of those forms which I filled, but never submitted.
blantonl 15y ago
I apologize in advance for being short with this question, but what do you consider a "software patent?"

nimrody 15y ago

If you abolish all patents you leave two options for inventors [some patents truly are ingenious]: - Keep it as a trade secret. You get one source for a product, and less innovation. - Publish it and suffer the consequences of the big companies copying it and making profit on your work.

robryan 15y ago
Trade secret actually isn't a bad option, if you patent truly had legs then your secret is probably going to be safe for a fair amount of time. If your patent is getting people on a technicality and really isn't very innovative then your secret won't be much of a secret.
- notJim 15y ago
  The argument against trade secrets is that they hurt innovation by impeding the flow of information. Patents allow a company to publish their innovations without fear of someone coming along and simply stealing it. By allowing inventors to publish their information with little competitive disadvantage, we enable other inventors to build on their predecessors efforts.
  - bediger 15y ago
    The current state of patent disclosure is such that your arguement makes little sense. Virtually nothing in software patent disclosures informs people about "how to do it". Almost all of the disclosures are vague and unspecific. If you, as a programmer, hear the title of a patent, you basically know how to do it.
    - robryan 15y ago
      Yeah, with Google search patents, they have been published years after the system was developed and is probably much evolved by now. Looking at the text in them, they only provide very vague guidelines to say SEO's try to learn more how how ranking works.
  - barrkel 15y ago
    That's not how software patents work in practice. They are written to be as broad and non-specific as possible, because their purpose is to be legal weapons. They are not about spreading innovation; competition, in functioning markets, is sufficient for that.
    - notJim 15y ago
      I think patents can be (and have been) distorted to be used as weapons, but their real purpose is to help innovation as I described. The argument you're making is basically that the system right now is broken, so we should just throw it out. I do agree that it's broken, but I argue that fixing the system is a better solution than throwing it out.
      - barrkel 15y ago
        The purpose of a patent system and the purposes of people using a patent system are two different things. The first one might motivate lawmakers; but it is the second one that actually matters. Do you honestly believe there is such a problem with sharing innovation in the software industry, that we need government intervention to encourage sharing?
  - shasta 15y ago
    The better argument for software is that secrecy doesn't work.
    - Locke1689 15y ago
      Complexity does -- SaaS is very hard to reverse engineer.
jxcole 15y ago
You know, I heard PG argue this in his software patent article, and I don't buy it. In the end, necessity is the mother of invention. Software engineers invent things because they need them. They would not, by default, either try to keep it as a secret or patent it. Let's take the funny example of Amzon vs B&N on the one-click system. Do you think Amazon would not use the one click system if it were unpatenable? In the case of modern software patents, keeping it a secret is equivalent to not using it all. Since you invented it in the first place, I find this outcome to be excessively unlikely. You are also suffering under the misconception that a lone programmer or programming pair would be incapable of standing up to big markets with a software invention. If his invention is really worth it's muster, he can come out with a profitable product that blows big companies out of the water. I've seen it happen before.
burgerbrain 15y ago
I call B.S. Let's take what I often here cited as one of the best software patents (personally, I think it is the worst.. but that's another story), RSA. Did that patent really prevent others from using/profiting on it? Hardly (although in most cases the "profiting off of" thing is a stretch, unless the explicit purpose of their product was cryptographic in nature. Now, what if they had kept it a trade secret? Just look at their RC4. They kept it a secret and got a few years of exclusivity but eventually we all got the algorithm, because that's just how software works. 20 year exclusivity contracts are waaaay too long. I think the trade secrets route where "you have it until others figure it out" is far more fair and workable.
abrahamsen 15y ago
I very much favor the trade secret option, at least for software. Patents are (theoretically) a pragmatic compromise between 1) the benefits to society of having people publish their ideas, and 2) the drawbacks to society of giving someone a time limited monopoly on the exploitation of the idea. For software I believe the drawbacks in general far outweigh the benefits. There might be examples of "nobody else would have thought of this within the patent period" inventions, but they are rare enough that it does not make sense to have special laws for those cases. In the physical "better mousetrap" world the issue is different. The situation is similar to the Hacker News startup world in that ideas are plenty. However, the cost of productizing the ideas is high, and there is less of a first mover advantage, access to distribution channels is more important. So patents in the "better mousetrap" world protects not the idea, but the investment of turning the idea into a product. The drawbacks of patents here are also smaller, as you rarely build unrelated products upon the "better mousetrap", so the cost of a monopoly often stays limited to the specific market. Patents here might be a good compromise. In medicine there is a similar situation in that many ideas are "free" from public funded research, but useless without the very expensive clinical trials. The patents basically protects the investment in clinical trials, and no so much original research. However the cost of patents is huge. People die because they can't afford patented medicine (which include initial cost for the clinical tests, marginal cost, distributed cost of failed products, and profit), even though they could easily afford the marginal cost alone. It would be good to get rid of patents here, but they must be replaced with another system to cover the cost of the clinical tests.
bborud 15y ago
your first point wrongfully assumes that the patent system is the dominant mechanism for spreading inventions. it may have been intended to work this way, but this is not how it works in real life. if you have ever worked for a software company that has a competent legal department, you know that you must stay away from patents. under no circumstances are you allowed to communicate that you have looked at any given patent or even acknowledge the existence of a patent. patents are treated with more fear than toxic waste in IPR sensitive businesses. besides, if you don't publish and you do something clever, how long do you think it would take for the competition to figure out what you were doing? or for people in academia to publish something on it? or for some independent blogger with too much time on his or her hands? I wish people would consider reality rather than some make-believe world that does not exist when thinking about patents. so much time, money and intellectual energy is wasted on this nonsense. not to mention that it is clogging up the courts with absolutely pointless legal battles. we, as a society, have better things to do.
dspeyer 15y ago
Trade secrets are less secret than patents, because outside engineers don't carefully avoid reading trade secrets. Also, hardly any secret can be kept for as long as a patent lasts.

albedoa 15y ago

This John Carmack quote is relevant and shares your sentiments: "The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack

jcromartie 15y ago
Except it's even worse than that: usually patent trolls haven't even written the code to solve the problem. Working code is not required to be granted a patent.
- dspillett 15y ago
  And they could file for the patent after you have done the work. You then have the hassle and expense of proving that your work came first and even then such cases often don't go the way they should.
  - nkassis 15y ago
    I great example of the trouble someone had to go to prove they were first is the ABC computer. It's an important case if you consider that without John Atanasoff the personal computer would never have existed. At the time IBM and some other corp I can't remember the name held some important patent on memory and other things that would prevent anyone from creating a personal computer without paying IBM. Those patents which had come from the creators of ENIAC were later found to have been heavely (well in reality stolen) from the ABC computer. After years of battles, IBM lost the patents and right after that the PC came to be. For a worse horror story, just take a look at Farnsworth trouble with RCA about the TV patents.
  - ahlatimer 15y ago
    You could still lose that fight, even if your work came first, if you never published it or filed a patent for it. First to invent only holds if you reduced it to practice (either by actually inventing the thing, or boiling it down so someone reasonably skilled in the art could then invent it) within that year. You lose rights to it after that if someone else wants to patent it. There's also first to conceive stipulations. The intellectual property class I took last semester would have been a lot easier if the U.S. just went first to file (like basically everywhere else).

nh 15y ago

devils advocate: What if you independently came up with tablet like device and called it an 'iPad'

monochromatic 15y ago
That's not a patent question.
- nh 15y ago
  No, but it is a intellectual property question. My point was that if you violate a trademark even though you independently came up with it, the same would apply for patents.
  - Steve0 15y ago
    In that case, it's easy to change a name, then continue selling your product. Not if (some part) of your product is patented.
  - monochromatic 15y ago
    Well, true... up to a point. But the motivations behind patent law are so different from those behind trademark law that I'm not sure it's a relevant comparison.
    - dodo53 15y ago
      And one of the tests in trademark law is if a reasonable person would be confused between the original and the imposter. So you only have to have 'reasonable' knowledge of other brands in your industry.
      - ahlatimer 15y ago
        I think the actual test is if the intended audience would get confused between the original and the imposter (see the H. R. Pufnstuf v. McDonald's case, although that's copyright, not trademark).

anamax 15y ago

> I can't stand the idea that I might be at my computer, working with code, and develop something independently which later causes me to get sued. Abolish all patents. I can't stand the idea that I might be in my shop/lab, working with metal/wood/plastic/chemicals, and develop something independently which later causes me to get sued. Abolish all patents.

postfuturist 15y ago
Yes, patents infringe on people's rights, to foster innovation. Getting to patent something isn't a right, it's a privilege. As you've illustrated, all patents are inherently undesirable--at least for certain parties. And I agree. They should be abolished.
- petegrif 15y ago
  That is precisely what they don't do. All they do is stop someone else from claiming it as an innovation with the associated IP rights. There is nothing to stop someone innovating like a fiend. But surely it is blindingly obvious that copying something someone has already patented is not innovating. Everything else however is fair game. Knock yourself out and innovate.
jerf 15y ago
You're missing a critical difference. Patents are supposed to be "unobvious". A normal person just working in their shop should not just accidentally stumble across a patented thing, because by definition the patented thing should not be obvious to one skilled in the art. Programmers on the other hand can indeed pop open an editor, spend a few minutes with Ruby on Rails implementing "a standard business procedure, but on the Internet!", and violate a patent. Or multiple patents. In fact, the very fact that we have patent trolls that can run around and sue business after business after business for the same patent, while the businesses have no evidence that shows they have communicated with each other about the patented subject, ought to be proof positive that the patent is obvious and shouldn't be patentable. An amazing number of patents that actually are being litigated really are "X, but on a computer!" or some variant thereof ("X, but on a network device!" is one the company I work for has gotten hit with). I'm not exaggerating, for all the verbiage and diagrams this really is a reasonable summary of many of them. Your metaphor fails, because what is not a realistic risk for people working in shops or labs is a perfectly reasonable risk for a hobby programmer, let alone a pro. Perhaps programmers are overreacting because of all the bad ones and there is a core of goodness deep down in there, but I'm willing to find out the hard way.

mrcharles 15y ago

Sorry to all, I specifically meant software patents. Hardware patents are different as they often rely on physical creation of objects and a non-trivial investment in materials/development. Conversely a software idea can be thought up in a few minutes and implemented in the same. In app purchases isn't exactly a clever idea or something that was revelatory. It was simple software evolution.

notJim 15y ago
You're saying all software ideas can be thought of and implemented in a few minutes? That is both absurd, and an insult to the innovation that happens in software. You have 10 minutes, give me an implementation of something that improves upon H.264 by 30%.
- sp332 15y ago
  You have 10 years. Write me a patent for something that improves upon H.264 by 30%.
- deleted 15y ago
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- barrkel 15y ago
  That's not how it works. If you're familiar with the area, you might come up with an idea that improves it by 3%. If you have 9 of those ideas, you might get a 30% improvement. Where the ideas come from is serendipity combined with fertile ground. It might be by analogy, a technique from a different domain, from similarity with something you did with lego blocks when you were 9 years old, from a mishearing when discussing something with a fellow developer, from ignorance of the known techniques in a particular area and trying to solve it from first principles, etc. You do need some familiarity and experience in the domain in order to recognize the utility of the novel technique. It might happen once to you, but it's unlikely to happen 9 times. More importantly, it's also probably going to occur to someone else, sooner or later. New discoveries tend to be repeated, that's a common theme in the history of scientific and mathematical development. By advocating patents for these things, you suggest the mere chance of coming first means you get a government-granted right to extort from other people.

rlpb 15y ago

Fixing your problem would only need the current system to be modified such that independent invention is not infringing. One way, for example, is to make it permissible for independent invention to be considered evidence that the patent is obvious to those skilled in the art and thus not patentable. A patent already granted would be repealed under these circumstances. Would you still be in favour of abolishment, and if so why?

jcromartie 15y ago
How would you prove an "independent" invention was really developed independently of the patent? You can't prove that someone didn't read something.
- rlpb 15y ago
  The "first to invent" system already in US patent law already faces the same issue, so if it can be done there it then can be done here.
- simpleTruth 15y ago
  IMO a reasonable test is: If a patent can be used to sue one company it may be patentable. If it can be used to sue 100 companies working on separate products it's probably obvious. Basically, you can't prove 1 person did not read it. But, you can be positive 100 people did not read it. Now clearly this depends on the number of people working on the problem. So, while 100 is excessive in most fields, somewhere around 3-10 is probably a good lower bound.
  - petegrif 15y ago
    That is clearly not a reasonable test. In fact it is almost certainly a great test for someone having innovated in a valuable way. If you file a worthless patent then no-one will be interested in your innovation and there will be no-one to sue. If however you file something valuable you would expect to potentially have lots of people to sue. In your example the question arises, why have so many people trespassed on this patent? We know they have an incentive - it is valuable. But why in this hypothetical case did they trespass? Did they think the patent was breakable? the patent holder weak? the market opportunity so great that they would build now pay later? Perhaps they didn't find the patent? So many questions. But as a cursory study of hindsight bias will make plain it is extremely common for something that is not at all obvious at the time of its invention of appear so later. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

podperson 15y ago

I voted for the "abolish all" option despite the fact I'm actually in favor of patents in general and don't think software should be distinct from hardware, but the situation has gotten ridiculous (as has the situation with patents in general). I think that software should only be protected by copyright if the source code is placed in escrow and made available when the company goes belly-up or when the (strictly limited) copyright period expires. I think that the patent system needs to be thoroughly reformed so as to do a better job of covering software, hardware, and a blend of the two. John Carmack's example is compelling but if patents were handled properly the odds of such a thing occurring would be as remote as the odds of doing the same thing in your backyard workshop with a lathe.

seanp2k 15y ago
>"the odds of such a thing occurring would be as remote as the odds of doing the same thing in your backyard workshop with a lathe." No. The difference is that PHYSICAL TANGIBLE things exist in the "analog" realm have infinite possibilities. Things that exist in the digital realm have a finite number of possibilities, and if you limit yourself to a particular subset of things you can even possibly do (such as those things which are implemented in computer programming languages), the odds go up greatly. If I tell someone to build a table leg on a lathe, there would probably be many variations between skilled builders. If I tell someone to make an efficient file store (or in patent speak "digital storage"), lots of people would probably come up with something similar...but that's patented: http://www.google.com/patents?q=digital+storage&btnG=Search+Patents http://www.google.com/patents?q=digital+storage&btnG=Sea...
- haikurion 15y ago
  There are many flaws here. While a digital (or discrete) space (or realm of infinite possibilities as you put it) has a limited size as a function of the allowed length, 1. The length can be infinitely long, therefore the number of possibilities can be infinitely long. 2. For all practical purposes the space is so large it is infinite. How many possible permutations of 1s and 0s can you get in a 1024 KB program. Many. 3. If we go into the more practical example you raised I doubt there is much difference between the variance in resulting table legs and digital storage applications. If anything, I would say there would be more variation in the software, simply because the high cost of iteration and experimentation (and stricter physical constraints) have narrowed the design space of table legs, in a way which is much less apparent in software.

anigbrowl 15y ago

Me neither. But what about the opposite case - you work on something for a long time, and then make a breakthrough. Genius! You apply your breakthrough to do something awesome and release it out into the world. Someone else notes, it, reverse engineers it, and has a better marketing operation than you so they make $$$ and you get nothing. without patents, how do you protect your genuinely original work? I'm not a fan of software patents. To be honest, I wish we didn't need a patent system at all. But since we don't live in the Star Trek universe and world communism turns out not to be the economic panacea that its creators hoped, we need something to protect the rights of inventors. Same thing with copyright - before it came into being, artists and writers had to rely either on fickle patronage or else hope to make some money on their first sales run because after that it was a free-for-all. Although I hate the way IP law and institutions have swung towards the opposite extreme and are now damaging to consumers and the general cause of innovation, those rules exist to solve a genuine economic problem. It would be easier to overturn software patents if there were some alternative proposal to reliably secure the fruits of innovation to the inventor. If that task is left to the market, then a) there's abundant evidence that profit will win over ethics, and consumers won't know or care and b) people whose time is best spent innovating will have to spend more effort on marketing and monetizing their IP and fending off competitors, which is inefficient for solo inventors or small firms. So is spending a lot of time on patent work, admittedly, but a patent is a more reliable shield against having one's invention ripped off.

stewbrew 15y ago
Are you able to tell/estimate what's the proportion of software patent cases that will bring profit to the people who actually did the work? And how many cases were initiated by those people because they felt at risk.
- anigbrowl 15y ago
  That's more research than I want to do for free on a Monday morning, and one might ask the same question about patents in general. The current system is broken, but simply abolishing it is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's a reason the patent and copyright systems exist in the first place, and simple abolition would just exchange new problems for old.

petegrif 15y ago

There are many ideas that I can't stand. Fortunately I weigh them against their likelihood and find that reassuring. I suggest you do likewise. The probability that in your noodling you will develop something non-obvious and worthy of intellectual protection and will nonetheless continue obliviously developing it, without the slightest idea there may be protected prior art is vanishingly small. Consequently your paranoid intuition that we should abolish all software patents may be laid to rest. There may well be good reasons to investigate the patent system. IMHO this is not one of them. Hope this helps.

deleted 15y ago

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checoivan 15y ago

There's a money incentive at work for each patent submission. Every time I stare at that patent submission form I can't help but to imagine somebody doing a cool thing which does something similar, getting squashed by a lawyer. I've a couple of those forms which I filled, but never submitted.

blantonl 15y ago

I apologize in advance for being short with this question, but what do you consider a "software patent?"