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A Patent Lie - New York Times
- tx 19y agoI disagree. People who write about patents in software industry often fall into habit of calling everything a software. While in reality software is just a language to describe a computational formula (algorithm). I can easily see someone taking years of their time and personal money invested into (for instance) image recognition research and comimng up with a truly remarkable alrotithms capable (dreaming here) of automaticaly driving cars or instantly recogizing a criminal's face looking over thousands of people enter an airport terminal. And I can see some other company either reverse-engineering the code or just looking into it (if it's open source) or hiring a couple of your engineers and doing exact same thing without spending a dime on research. In fact, this happens all the time with universities. They get grants and other kinds of money to conduct research only to see their professors and grad students leaving and doing the same thing on their own. But frankly, I can't suggest anything. Patents shall not be granted for obvious things, but defining "obvious" will not be easy. I am guilty myself, the company I used to work for filed for two patents with my name on them. While in reality they were trivial (obvious) applications of XML to UI builders. Patent lawyers felt otherwise though.
- hello_moto 19y agoDefense is the best attack.