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49 points by bootload 15y ago

reader5000 15y ago
I like these trolls trying to rationalize their trolling by attempting and failing to sound intellectual. The thing is 99.9% of software patents were obvious at granting and therefore invalid, this being one of them. I highly doubt the creator of this patent invested anywhere near the resources to actually "discover" the patented "invention" that these trolls are seeking to extract through abuse of the legal system. I hope somebody in Congress is paying attention to these hijinks, but I know Congress is too occupied with making bittorrenters felons.
dominikb 15y ago
It's clear that their goal is to force Apple to acquire their patent portfolio. Clever trolls.
- sudhirj 15y ago
  Either that or they don't realize that Apple, Google and Amazon (Microsoft too?) all know that their own App Stores are at risk. I wonder if this troll can take any two of those legal mountains falling on him.
- Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
  You say that but it's not just Apple that's being talked about - they've pointed out that Google and Microsoft have also licensed the technology and other large companies such as HP have been contacted about the fact that they haven't. This isn't an Apple issue, this is an industry wide issue. Apple owning the patent would make the issue go away for Apple but it might actually make it worse for other app stores (if Apple decided to be a dick about it). On the surface this feels remarkably broad and uninnovative as patents go (similar to the Amazon one click one which I believe was recently said to be invalid - potentially pending an appeal from them). If this is the case (and it's hard to know without knowing more detail and more law than I do) then it really needs to be fought and overturned. It would be nice to see the big players - Apple, Google and Microsoft - setting up some sort of fund to allow the small developers to fight this properly for everyone's benefit. The actions of patent trolls might be curtailed if they knew that there was a distinct possibility that the next letter they sent off to a one man software house was going to be met with an army of the most vicious lawyers money can buy queuing up to kick your ass from here to kingdom come. Does US law allow for 3rd party funding of such cases?
  - ZeroGravitas 15y ago
    Lodsys say that Apple, Microsoft and Google are "licensed", but they don't make clear whether those companies actually paid for a licence, or if they were granted it freely by Lodsys as part of a PR campaign to make them look bad for abandoning their developers.
    - Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
      Lodsys don't care about making Apple look bad. They're patent trolls, they care about making money. If anything they'd want to avoid upsetting Apple because the minute Apple's legal and financial muscle gets involved things are a lot lot harder if you're Lodsys.
      - ZeroGravitas 15y ago
        Not if Apple's "financial muscle" decides it's easier/quicker/cheaper to buy Lodsys out than to let the uncertainty hang over their developer community. They're fairly clearly communicating "we are only in this for the money" in their blog posts. They clearly have been thinking of the best way for them to make money from these patents (which IV used to own but clearly didn't feel they could profitably licence or sue on the basis of) and creating PR problems for Apple that can be solved at a high price seems pretty good to me.
    - jonbro 15y ago
      I didn't realize how true this was, in reading this page this morning, I decided that he was just lying about Google, Apple and MS licensing the patent, of course they don't need to do anything for him to grant them license. It would probably be good for him to show some proof of the license, but I don't expect him to. Also, at the percentages that he is seeking, how much does he truthfully expect to get out of something like pCalc. I don't know how much it is selling, but I kinda expect that it is a bit south of 1Mil. Is there any resolution to this situation in a similar way that EA games shut down the "Edge" trademark (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Games http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Games). I hope so.
  - 15y ago
sudhirj 15y ago
What happens if all the iOS developers gang up and file a class action suit to have the patents reconsidered?
- dominikb 15y ago
  It will take a year to reconsider. Apple needs to act quickly and aggressively on this to show the public and media that they stand behind the developers. They can't let the App Store become a feared, shady, legal-gibberish ecosystem.
  - sudhirj 15y ago
    Very true. I find it disturbing that they haven't already issued a statement about this - I would have thought they'd scramble to get out a statement saying that they're aware of the situation and are considering options.
    - foobarbazetc 15y ago
      Only in magical HN land do companies "scramble" to address issues like this. The best thing to do is to pretend these companies don't exist and you've never heard of them, their patents, or what they're up to. Once your patent lawyers have had time to study what's going on, then you're ready to do something. It's not "disturbing" at all. It's just common sense.
      - sudhirj 15y ago
        I'm looking at more from a developer relations standpoint - I would think every developer who's got one of these letters is wondering where Apple is and why they haven't handled it already.
      - mechanical_fish 15y ago
        Yes. It is quite possible that Apple's patent lawyers are scrambling. It's just that scramble-speed in legal land is weeks, not hours. Lawyers can read and write at superhuman speed, but it still takes time to prepare all that material and do all that research. It's not a field that rewards those who shoot from the hip.
reitzensteinm 15y ago
I could maybe buy this line of reasoning if the inventor in question was a true visionary that foresaw in app purchasing, and laid out a roadmap for everyone to follow. But the thing is, the patent is an invention of something completely different - customer satisfaction surveys on fax machines - and has to be interpreted in the most general way possible to even approach covering what they're seeking licenses for. This patent has added zero value to the iPhone developers it is targeting.
- flipbrad 15y ago
  The other thing is that I frankly don't see many reports of people using out-of-date patents as roadmaps for anything!
maqr 15y ago
> Oil companies do not drill on land where they don’t have the rights. Movies aren’t released that don’t clear all the music rights. Clothing manufacturers license logos from Disney or the NFL to include them in their product. It's pretty hard to drill on someone else's land, use someone else's music in a production, or use someone else's logo without realizing it. Software patents are nothing like this. Software patents would be more akin to it being patented for an oil company to drill with a very hard diamond bit, or a guitarist to hold their guitar a certain way during a solo, or perhaps a clothing manufacturer to wash their jeans for a more rugged look. Maybe other industries do have patents like these, but I certainly never hear about them.
- adestefan 15y ago
  Please don't think that this is only a software issue. There's patent abuse in every industry. The problem is with the implementation of the patent system, not the idea.
  - adamc 15y ago
    If the idea can't be implemented with the kind of patent examiners we are likely to get, or with the resources one could reasonably expect, then there's a problem with the idea.
    - stcredzero 15y ago
      It's the implementation of patents that has legal and monetary implications, not the idea/ideals of patents.
- bruce511 15y ago
  >> Oil companies do not drill on land where they don’t have the rights. Movies aren’t released that don’t clear all the music rights. Clothing manufacturers license logos from Disney or the NFL to include them in their product. > Software patents would be more akin to it being patented for an oil company to drill with a very hard diamond bit It's even worse than that. If you want to drill for oil on some land, then you need to get rights to drill on _that land_. A software patent though prevents you from drilling on _any_ land. It's not a right to the oil that's in question, it's a right to drill at all. A software patent is akin to "we've patented searching for oil". No wait, why stop there, let's patent "Digging a hole in the ground". You wanna plant a tree over there? Yeah, sure, digging a hole to put it in is kinda obvious, but I've got the patent on digging holes. The problem with patents is when they move from patenting a "true invention" (and yes, that could be software, like say a better compression algorithm) to patenting the "obvious". therein lies the rub - who determines the legal standard for "obvious". Is Bitblt'ing obvious? Is Public-Private-Keys? Is buying-something-with-a-click? Given the impossibility of defining the "obvious" I'm in favor of just dropping the whole sorry mess, and going back to the days when _machines_ were protected, the implementation of ideas, not the ideas themselves. Yes programs are copyrighted, but not code-snippets.
extension 15y ago
"This ideation, as expressed in the patent, enabled a building block for others to build on and create more value." And right in the next paragraph... "Many industries study the IP landscape prior to releasing a product or service and either design around or acquire necessary patent rights if they need them to do their solution." So we need to hire lawyers to research whether we are inadvertently building on the ideas of others? The patent trolls are now justifying patents by explaining exactly why they are unjustified.
- kabdib 15y ago
  Big companies tell all new employees: DO NOT GO LOOKING AT PANTENTS. Because if you read a patent, and you knowingly infringe, it's triple damages. The system is broken. You can't know what is patented because it's too bleeping risky to even look. There is no "teaching." All you can do is build up a war chest and rattle paper at people who try to come after you.
- jcromartie 15y ago
  This is the core of it: Dan Abelow's "ideation" has absolutely no influence whatsoever on the tech industry. Nobody cares about his "inventions". Nobody took any spark of inspiration from Dan Abelow. But if I, sitting in a room with nothing but my own mind and a keyboard, actually WRITE THE F&#@ING CODE that is covered by one of these patents, then someone who never did an ounce of work actually implementing it will come along and demand a fee. How can anybody think that's a reasonable system?
Derbasti 15y ago
This makes me sick. I don't care whether this is legal or not and whether this is morally justified or not. It plain makes me sick.
jcromartie 15y ago
"Dan Abelow is an independent inventor who visualized/created metaphors, documented for the world to see (in exchange for exclusivity) and created value for doing so." Dan Abelow sounds like a self-aggrandizing jerk when he talks about himself in the third person.
- barrym 15y ago
  I'm not sure it's written by Dan Abelow - http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/13/honan-lodsys http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/13/honan-lodsys and http://www.lodsys.com/1/post/2011/05/q-what-is-dan-abelows-involvement-is-intellectual-ventures-behind-lodsys-or-controlling-lodsys-in-some-way.html http://www.lodsys.com/1/post/2011/05/q-what-is-dan-abelows-i...
  - jcromartie 15y ago
    Then someone must just really like him, since he's mentioned by name on most pages.
AeroQ 15y ago
Lodsys uses a web design from http://andreasviklund.com/ http://andreasviklund.com/ without crediting him!
numeromancer 15y ago
Do not take this article too seriously. It is not an article in the old-fashioned sense, but an experiment in post-modern essaying. The paragraphs were written by 9 separate undergraduate freshman, in separate places across the English speaking world. The students had no contact with each other before or after the essay.

49 points by bootload 15y ago

I like these trolls trying to rationalize their trolling by attempting and failing to sound intellectual. The thing is 99.9% of software patents were obvious at granting and therefore invalid, this being one of them. I highly doubt the creator of this patent invested anywhere near the resources to actually "discover" the patented "invention" that these trolls are seeking to extract through abuse of the legal system. I hope somebody in Congress is paying attention to these hijinks, but I know Congress is too occupied with making bittorrenters felons.

dominikb 15y ago

It's clear that their goal is to force Apple to acquire their patent portfolio. Clever trolls.

sudhirj 15y ago
Either that or they don't realize that Apple, Google and Amazon (Microsoft too?) all know that their own App Stores are at risk. I wonder if this troll can take any two of those legal mountains falling on him.
Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
You say that but it's not just Apple that's being talked about - they've pointed out that Google and Microsoft have also licensed the technology and other large companies such as HP have been contacted about the fact that they haven't. This isn't an Apple issue, this is an industry wide issue. Apple owning the patent would make the issue go away for Apple but it might actually make it worse for other app stores (if Apple decided to be a dick about it). On the surface this feels remarkably broad and uninnovative as patents go (similar to the Amazon one click one which I believe was recently said to be invalid - potentially pending an appeal from them). If this is the case (and it's hard to know without knowing more detail and more law than I do) then it really needs to be fought and overturned. It would be nice to see the big players - Apple, Google and Microsoft - setting up some sort of fund to allow the small developers to fight this properly for everyone's benefit. The actions of patent trolls might be curtailed if they knew that there was a distinct possibility that the next letter they sent off to a one man software house was going to be met with an army of the most vicious lawyers money can buy queuing up to kick your ass from here to kingdom come. Does US law allow for 3rd party funding of such cases?
- ZeroGravitas 15y ago
  Lodsys say that Apple, Microsoft and Google are "licensed", but they don't make clear whether those companies actually paid for a licence, or if they were granted it freely by Lodsys as part of a PR campaign to make them look bad for abandoning their developers.
  - Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
    Lodsys don't care about making Apple look bad. They're patent trolls, they care about making money. If anything they'd want to avoid upsetting Apple because the minute Apple's legal and financial muscle gets involved things are a lot lot harder if you're Lodsys.
    - ZeroGravitas 15y ago
      Not if Apple's "financial muscle" decides it's easier/quicker/cheaper to buy Lodsys out than to let the uncertainty hang over their developer community. They're fairly clearly communicating "we are only in this for the money" in their blog posts. They clearly have been thinking of the best way for them to make money from these patents (which IV used to own but clearly didn't feel they could profitably licence or sue on the basis of) and creating PR problems for Apple that can be solved at a high price seems pretty good to me.
  - jonbro 15y ago
    I didn't realize how true this was, in reading this page this morning, I decided that he was just lying about Google, Apple and MS licensing the patent, of course they don't need to do anything for him to grant them license. It would probably be good for him to show some proof of the license, but I don't expect him to. Also, at the percentages that he is seeking, how much does he truthfully expect to get out of something like pCalc. I don't know how much it is selling, but I kinda expect that it is a bit south of 1Mil. Is there any resolution to this situation in a similar way that EA games shut down the "Edge" trademark (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Games http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Games). I hope so.
- 15y ago

sudhirj 15y ago

What happens if all the iOS developers gang up and file a class action suit to have the patents reconsidered?

dominikb 15y ago
It will take a year to reconsider. Apple needs to act quickly and aggressively on this to show the public and media that they stand behind the developers. They can't let the App Store become a feared, shady, legal-gibberish ecosystem.
- sudhirj 15y ago
  Very true. I find it disturbing that they haven't already issued a statement about this - I would have thought they'd scramble to get out a statement saying that they're aware of the situation and are considering options.
  - foobarbazetc 15y ago
    Only in magical HN land do companies "scramble" to address issues like this. The best thing to do is to pretend these companies don't exist and you've never heard of them, their patents, or what they're up to. Once your patent lawyers have had time to study what's going on, then you're ready to do something. It's not "disturbing" at all. It's just common sense.
    - sudhirj 15y ago
      I'm looking at more from a developer relations standpoint - I would think every developer who's got one of these letters is wondering where Apple is and why they haven't handled it already.
    - mechanical_fish 15y ago
      Yes. It is quite possible that Apple's patent lawyers are scrambling. It's just that scramble-speed in legal land is weeks, not hours. Lawyers can read and write at superhuman speed, but it still takes time to prepare all that material and do all that research. It's not a field that rewards those who shoot from the hip.

reitzensteinm 15y ago

I could maybe buy this line of reasoning if the inventor in question was a true visionary that foresaw in app purchasing, and laid out a roadmap for everyone to follow. But the thing is, the patent is an invention of something completely different - customer satisfaction surveys on fax machines - and has to be interpreted in the most general way possible to even approach covering what they're seeking licenses for. This patent has added zero value to the iPhone developers it is targeting.

flipbrad 15y ago
The other thing is that I frankly don't see many reports of people using out-of-date patents as roadmaps for anything!

maqr 15y ago

> Oil companies do not drill on land where they don’t have the rights. Movies aren’t released that don’t clear all the music rights. Clothing manufacturers license logos from Disney or the NFL to include them in their product. It's pretty hard to drill on someone else's land, use someone else's music in a production, or use someone else's logo without realizing it. Software patents are nothing like this. Software patents would be more akin to it being patented for an oil company to drill with a very hard diamond bit, or a guitarist to hold their guitar a certain way during a solo, or perhaps a clothing manufacturer to wash their jeans for a more rugged look. Maybe other industries do have patents like these, but I certainly never hear about them.

adestefan 15y ago
Please don't think that this is only a software issue. There's patent abuse in every industry. The problem is with the implementation of the patent system, not the idea.
- adamc 15y ago
  If the idea can't be implemented with the kind of patent examiners we are likely to get, or with the resources one could reasonably expect, then there's a problem with the idea.
  - stcredzero 15y ago
    It's the implementation of patents that has legal and monetary implications, not the idea/ideals of patents.
bruce511 15y ago
>> Oil companies do not drill on land where they don’t have the rights. Movies aren’t released that don’t clear all the music rights. Clothing manufacturers license logos from Disney or the NFL to include them in their product. > Software patents would be more akin to it being patented for an oil company to drill with a very hard diamond bit It's even worse than that. If you want to drill for oil on some land, then you need to get rights to drill on _that land_. A software patent though prevents you from drilling on _any_ land. It's not a right to the oil that's in question, it's a right to drill at all. A software patent is akin to "we've patented searching for oil". No wait, why stop there, let's patent "Digging a hole in the ground". You wanna plant a tree over there? Yeah, sure, digging a hole to put it in is kinda obvious, but I've got the patent on digging holes. The problem with patents is when they move from patenting a "true invention" (and yes, that could be software, like say a better compression algorithm) to patenting the "obvious". therein lies the rub - who determines the legal standard for "obvious". Is Bitblt'ing obvious? Is Public-Private-Keys? Is buying-something-with-a-click? Given the impossibility of defining the "obvious" I'm in favor of just dropping the whole sorry mess, and going back to the days when _machines_ were protected, the implementation of ideas, not the ideas themselves. Yes programs are copyrighted, but not code-snippets.

extension 15y ago

"This ideation, as expressed in the patent, enabled a building block for others to build on and create more value." And right in the next paragraph... "Many industries study the IP landscape prior to releasing a product or service and either design around or acquire necessary patent rights if they need them to do their solution." So we need to hire lawyers to research whether we are inadvertently building on the ideas of others? The patent trolls are now justifying patents by explaining exactly why they are unjustified.

kabdib 15y ago
Big companies tell all new employees: DO NOT GO LOOKING AT PANTENTS. Because if you read a patent, and you knowingly infringe, it's triple damages. The system is broken. You can't know what is patented because it's too bleeping risky to even look. There is no "teaching." All you can do is build up a war chest and rattle paper at people who try to come after you.
jcromartie 15y ago
This is the core of it: Dan Abelow's "ideation" has absolutely no influence whatsoever on the tech industry. Nobody cares about his "inventions". Nobody took any spark of inspiration from Dan Abelow. But if I, sitting in a room with nothing but my own mind and a keyboard, actually WRITE THE F&#@ING CODE that is covered by one of these patents, then someone who never did an ounce of work actually implementing it will come along and demand a fee. How can anybody think that's a reasonable system?

Derbasti 15y ago

This makes me sick. I don't care whether this is legal or not and whether this is morally justified or not. It plain makes me sick.

jcromartie 15y ago

"Dan Abelow is an independent inventor who visualized/created metaphors, documented for the world to see (in exchange for exclusivity) and created value for doing so." Dan Abelow sounds like a self-aggrandizing jerk when he talks about himself in the third person.

barrym 15y ago
I'm not sure it's written by Dan Abelow - http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/13/honan-lodsys http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/13/honan-lodsys and http://www.lodsys.com/1/post/2011/05/q-what-is-dan-abelows-involvement-is-intellectual-ventures-behind-lodsys-or-controlling-lodsys-in-some-way.html http://www.lodsys.com/1/post/2011/05/q-what-is-dan-abelows-i...
- jcromartie 15y ago
  Then someone must just really like him, since he's mentioned by name on most pages.

AeroQ 15y ago

Lodsys uses a web design from http://andreasviklund.com/ http://andreasviklund.com/ without crediting him!

numeromancer 15y ago

Do not take this article too seriously. It is not an article in the old-fashioned sense, but an experiment in post-modern essaying. The paragraphs were written by 9 separate undergraduate freshman, in separate places across the English speaking world. The students had no contact with each other before or after the essay.