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Woah, back up. The patent system is messed up for software but that wasn't the intent. You weren't supposed to be able to defend algorithm-based patents in cour

Woah, back up. The patent system is messed up for software but that wasn't the intent. You weren't supposed to be able to defend algorithm-based patents in court. Software is protected by copyright. The patent office doesn't do much background checking. Enforcement happens in the court system. And, some courts such as those in Texas have handed cases to patent trolls. Patents, by design, reward innovators and contribute to the public good by exchanging information for protection. When you see a big company owning a lot of patents, that's the system at work. IP rights allow the company to defend their interests and pay larger salaries. Without IP rights, individual creators really have little chance to move up because wealthy individuals or businesses will just copy and mass-produce the concept. In order to remain involved you would have to play by their rules, like what happened to Jack Ma. Everyone answers to the government there because there's no delegation of power to courts to sort out IP rights.

jfrunyon 5y ago
> Patents, by design, reward innovators and contribute to the public good by exchanging information for protection. Design and practice are two different things. Patents, in practice, are hopelessly broken when you can buy a fairly general patent from someone else, sit on it without ever actually using it, and then sue someone else who had no way of knowing the patent even existed. And that's not just in software.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  AFAIK it's primarily abused in software because software is so easy to "create". Again that's why algorithmic patents weren't supposed to be defendable in court. Outside of software patents which I don't think should exist, I don't see a problem with buying and sitting on a patent for something truly innovative. The original creator was rewarded, the knowledge becomes public, and the buyer can sit on it as they like for ~15 years. If it's a profitable concept they are wasting money by not developing it. The problem comes when courts uphold illegitimate patents. Fortunately there are companies who will stand up to this, such as Newegg and Cloudflare.
  - fao_ 5y ago
    > and the buyer can sit on it as they like for ~15 years. If it's a profitable concept they are wasting money by not developing it. How so? Any competition is unable to proceed because of the patent, and all you need to do is put some money towards renewing it every X years. Now, if there was competition, of course you would lose out from developing it. But there can be no competition because of the patent, so at the time you hold it nobody can develop the patent.
    - unityByFreedom 5y ago
      I invent the toaster and sell the patent to Cuisinart. They decide not to produce it and sit on it for 15 years. Then the patent expires and anyone can make toasters. Now Cuisinart has lost out on growing a reputation for making toasters. That's their loss and the public benefits because they have toaster technology. And, the original inventor was rewarded and can go on to invent more things or inspire others to invest time in inventing because it pays off.
      - ric2b 5y ago
        You're not thinking widely enough. The following is not the real story, just an hypothetical example: You're Codake, a company that sells chemical photography materials. Some person invents digital photography, you find out and buy the patent from them for 500K. Digital photography would hurt your profits so you just sit on it for the 15 years, maybe start designing some products around it in the last 3 years of the patent to be ready for when it expires. You made more money and society lost out for 15 years, all because the inventor probably wasn't used to seeing large checks and didn't shop around when the largest photography company offered them more money than they ever saw in their life. Even the inventor got screwed, by selling the patent they got a nice house even though it was probably worth hundreds of millions.
        lobocinza 5y ago
        I dislike patents but there's also the element of risk. Most inventions flop.
eru 5y ago
> Patents, by design, reward innovators and contribute to the public good by exchanging information for protection. Patents are politics. Politics is always a murky morass of compromises, and it's hard to say what is by design. (And, no, you can't trust the name of an act or even its formulation to tease out the real and differing intentions of the lawmakers who proposed or voted for it.) > IP rights allow the company to defend their interests and pay larger salaries. I can believe the first part. But I don't see how IP rights translate into higher salaries? (Yes, in the trivial sense of _allowing_ them, perhaps. But not in the implied sense of making it more likely.)
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  > I don't see how IP rights translate into higher salaries? When a company can defend its IP, it earns more profit and can invest in itself more. One way to invest in itself is to pay higher salaries to attract talent.
  - harles 5y ago
    Other than small bumps to bonus multipliers, big companies don’t share higher profits with employees.
    - unityByFreedom 5y ago
      Of course they do. Google pays some of the highest salaries in tech because they managed to become so profitable. I'm saying long term, profitable companies who want to reinvest in themselves will pass profits on to employees because they need talent to make their products. There are certainly companies who decide not to reinvest, and simply extract profit. They become the dinosaurs.
      - r4w8173 5y ago
        Do you say that at Google salaries increase with profits and are not capped by "fair amount for your location"?
croes 5y ago
Algorithm-based are bad for inovations. Just imagine patents on sorting algorithms or algorithms like th sieve of Eratosthenes.
fulafel 5y ago
I think this is redefining some important words. how about > Patents, by design, reward people churning out patent applications and extract rents by monetizing monopolies for technical concepts at expense of the public. The set of patent applicants and actual innovators overlaps a little but not much. You can try to defend many different kinds of monopolies using the jobs argument. A lot of things, like eg shoes, would be more expensive, and have higher paid positions for the employees, if their production was artificially constrained.
dctoedt 5y ago
> The patent office doesn't do much background checking. That's not correct. By law, for every patent application, the patent examiner is supposed to conduct a thorough search of the prior art; some patent examiners have long experience in their "art units." [0] Also by law: Inventors must disclose, to the patent examiner, all information of which they are aware that is "material to patentability." [1] Well-trained patent attorneys take the view that it's far better to tell the patent examiner about everything you can think of that might be significant. Doing so helps to strengthen any resulting patent against infringers' claims that the invention would have been obvious. Think about how an infringement lawsuit will often go down: The accused infringer will generally try to claim that the patent is invalid because of one or more particular prior-art references. When that happens, one of the best possible responses, by the patent owner's trial counsel, is, in effect, Oh yeah? Well, ladies and gentlemen [of the jury], the patent examiner already considered those references, and s/he concluded that the invention was indeed patentable, so whom are you going to believe — the patent examiner, or the infringer who stole my client's invention?) As a more-or-less random example, see a 2017 patent issued to IBM, where the cited prior art included 32 prior patents and 3 non-patent publications — all cited by the inventors. [2] [0] https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2103.html https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2103.html [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/37/1.56 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/37/1.56 [2] Dixit et al., "Performing sequence analysis as a relational join," U.S. Patent No. 9,589,018, https://patents.google.com/patent/US9589018B2/en?oq=9%2c589%2c018#patentCitations https://patents.google.com/patent/US9589018B2/en?oq=9%2c589%...
- dleslie 5y ago
  That's what the law states, in practice, ridiculous patents are granted as a matter of course. And, in practice, most patent infringement lawsuits go down like this: "We own this patent and have a team of well-funded lawyers to defend it, we've assessed that you and your company are not financially capable of defending yourself and so we are willing to offer you a substantial licensing agreement as settlement. We suggest you take it." [0] Sideways Swinging: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6368227B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6368227B1/en [1] Vacation Auto-responding: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9547842 https://patents.google.com/patent/US9547842 [2] A rounded-bezel display: https://patents.google.com/patent/USD670286 https://patents.google.com/patent/USD670286 [3] A tree branch: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6360693 https://patents.google.com/patent/US6360693 [4] Hierarchical folders to organize files on a computer: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8473532 https://patents.google.com/patent/US8473532 [5] A car windshield: https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=D0786157&IDKey=&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpdfpiw.uspto.gov%2F https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=D0786157&IDKey... [6] Bilateral and multilateral decision making: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8069073B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8069073B2/en The EFF even has a monthly "stupid patent" post: https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month

jfrunyon 5y ago

> Patents, by design, reward innovators and contribute to the public good by exchanging information for protection. Design and practice are two different things. Patents, in practice, are hopelessly broken when you can buy a fairly general patent from someone else, sit on it without ever actually using it, and then sue someone else who had no way of knowing the patent even existed. And that's not just in software.

unityByFreedom 5y ago
AFAIK it's primarily abused in software because software is so easy to "create". Again that's why algorithmic patents weren't supposed to be defendable in court. Outside of software patents which I don't think should exist, I don't see a problem with buying and sitting on a patent for something truly innovative. The original creator was rewarded, the knowledge becomes public, and the buyer can sit on it as they like for ~15 years. If it's a profitable concept they are wasting money by not developing it. The problem comes when courts uphold illegitimate patents. Fortunately there are companies who will stand up to this, such as Newegg and Cloudflare.
- fao_ 5y ago
  > and the buyer can sit on it as they like for ~15 years. If it's a profitable concept they are wasting money by not developing it. How so? Any competition is unable to proceed because of the patent, and all you need to do is put some money towards renewing it every X years. Now, if there was competition, of course you would lose out from developing it. But there can be no competition because of the patent, so at the time you hold it nobody can develop the patent.
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    I invent the toaster and sell the patent to Cuisinart. They decide not to produce it and sit on it for 15 years. Then the patent expires and anyone can make toasters. Now Cuisinart has lost out on growing a reputation for making toasters. That's their loss and the public benefits because they have toaster technology. And, the original inventor was rewarded and can go on to invent more things or inspire others to invest time in inventing because it pays off.
    - ric2b 5y ago
      You're not thinking widely enough. The following is not the real story, just an hypothetical example: You're Codake, a company that sells chemical photography materials. Some person invents digital photography, you find out and buy the patent from them for 500K. Digital photography would hurt your profits so you just sit on it for the 15 years, maybe start designing some products around it in the last 3 years of the patent to be ready for when it expires. You made more money and society lost out for 15 years, all because the inventor probably wasn't used to seeing large checks and didn't shop around when the largest photography company offered them more money than they ever saw in their life. Even the inventor got screwed, by selling the patent they got a nice house even though it was probably worth hundreds of millions.
      - lobocinza 5y ago
        I dislike patents but there's also the element of risk. Most inventions flop.

eru 5y ago

> Patents, by design, reward innovators and contribute to the public good by exchanging information for protection. Patents are politics. Politics is always a murky morass of compromises, and it's hard to say what is by design. (And, no, you can't trust the name of an act or even its formulation to tease out the real and differing intentions of the lawmakers who proposed or voted for it.) > IP rights allow the company to defend their interests and pay larger salaries. I can believe the first part. But I don't see how IP rights translate into higher salaries? (Yes, in the trivial sense of _allowing_ them, perhaps. But not in the implied sense of making it more likely.)

unityByFreedom 5y ago
> I don't see how IP rights translate into higher salaries? When a company can defend its IP, it earns more profit and can invest in itself more. One way to invest in itself is to pay higher salaries to attract talent.
- harles 5y ago
  Other than small bumps to bonus multipliers, big companies don’t share higher profits with employees.
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    Of course they do. Google pays some of the highest salaries in tech because they managed to become so profitable. I'm saying long term, profitable companies who want to reinvest in themselves will pass profits on to employees because they need talent to make their products. There are certainly companies who decide not to reinvest, and simply extract profit. They become the dinosaurs.
    - r4w8173 5y ago
      Do you say that at Google salaries increase with profits and are not capped by "fair amount for your location"?

croes 5y ago

Algorithm-based are bad for inovations. Just imagine patents on sorting algorithms or algorithms like th sieve of Eratosthenes.

fulafel 5y ago

I think this is redefining some important words. how about > Patents, by design, reward people churning out patent applications and extract rents by monetizing monopolies for technical concepts at expense of the public. The set of patent applicants and actual innovators overlaps a little but not much. You can try to defend many different kinds of monopolies using the jobs argument. A lot of things, like eg shoes, would be more expensive, and have higher paid positions for the employees, if their production was artificially constrained.

dctoedt 5y ago

> The patent office doesn't do much background checking. That's not correct. By law, for every patent application, the patent examiner is supposed to conduct a thorough search of the prior art; some patent examiners have long experience in their "art units." [0] Also by law: Inventors must disclose, to the patent examiner, all information of which they are aware that is "material to patentability." [1] Well-trained patent attorneys take the view that it's far better to tell the patent examiner about everything you can think of that might be significant. Doing so helps to strengthen any resulting patent against infringers' claims that the invention would have been obvious. Think about how an infringement lawsuit will often go down: The accused infringer will generally try to claim that the patent is invalid because of one or more particular prior-art references. When that happens, one of the best possible responses, by the patent owner's trial counsel, is, in effect, Oh yeah? Well, ladies and gentlemen [of the jury], the patent examiner already considered those references, and s/he concluded that the invention was indeed patentable, so whom are you going to believe — the patent examiner, or the infringer who stole my client's invention?) As a more-or-less random example, see a 2017 patent issued to IBM, where the cited prior art included 32 prior patents and 3 non-patent publications — all cited by the inventors. [2] [0] https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2103.html https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2103.html [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/37/1.56 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/37/1.56 [2] Dixit et al., "Performing sequence analysis as a relational join," U.S. Patent No. 9,589,018, https://patents.google.com/patent/US9589018B2/en?oq=9%2c589%2c018#patentCitations https://patents.google.com/patent/US9589018B2/en?oq=9%2c589%...

dleslie 5y ago
That's what the law states, in practice, ridiculous patents are granted as a matter of course. And, in practice, most patent infringement lawsuits go down like this: "We own this patent and have a team of well-funded lawyers to defend it, we've assessed that you and your company are not financially capable of defending yourself and so we are willing to offer you a substantial licensing agreement as settlement. We suggest you take it." [0] Sideways Swinging: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6368227B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6368227B1/en [1] Vacation Auto-responding: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9547842 https://patents.google.com/patent/US9547842 [2] A rounded-bezel display: https://patents.google.com/patent/USD670286 https://patents.google.com/patent/USD670286 [3] A tree branch: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6360693 https://patents.google.com/patent/US6360693 [4] Hierarchical folders to organize files on a computer: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8473532 https://patents.google.com/patent/US8473532 [5] A car windshield: https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=D0786157&IDKey=&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpdfpiw.uspto.gov%2F https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=D0786157&IDKey... [6] Bilateral and multilateral decision making: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8069073B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8069073B2/en The EFF even has a monthly "stupid patent" post: https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month