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In case any engineer reading the linked patent is confused about what the patent is saying ... that is a feature of the patent ... not a bug. Patents are writt
by TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
In case any engineer reading the linked patent is confused about what the patent is saying ... that is a feature of the patent ... not a bug.
Patents are written to be vague. They don't need to teach anything. They just need to look "sophisticated" so a jury of yokels in rural Texas thinks that it's very "smart". Then you get an award of Billions of dollars for something you cook up on a whiteboard over lunch with your lawyer.
After seeing the breakneck pace of innovation in Shanghai and Shenzhen I'm convinced that a free for all is a better state for an economy then what we have in California with patents. Patents create a system where you need to get a thousand permissions from people ... spend millions on lawyers ... all for what? All because we are worried that someone somewhere might have done the thing you are trying to do first. I say so what? Yes its sad if someone makes something and they don't get paid for it because everyone else does the same thing. But is that a bigger tragedy then what we have now where trolls shut down whole industries and approaches? Where lawyers live parasitically on the backs of engineers, doing nothing but causing friction in the system and adding no value.
I know formerly good engineers that no longer do engineering. They just spit out endless amounts of bullshit papers for lawyers to turn into patents, which will then be used to harass those of us that are actually trying to build useful products.
A society that incentivizes parasitism instead of productive work will end up falling behind a society that incentivizes useful work.
Between the policies of the Fed that have pushed so many smart people into unproductive speculative jobs (like flipping houses) and stupid laws like software patents, I've become very bearish about America's future prospects after visiting China. Everyone in China actually seems to be working at a breakneck pace making useful stuff. Everyone in America seems to just have their hand in someone else's pocket, or they are buying some asset in the hope they can sell it for more tomorrow.
How can we continue to make progress like this? This is so insane.
- josaka 5y agoThat's not a patent. It's a published application, which was abandoned after being rejected by the USPTO. This can be verified on the USPTO's public PAIR system. The broader point about yokels from rural TX is less true than it used to be. Post 2012, as a practical matter, to assert a patent, you have to survive an IPR challenge, where a group of more experienced technical staff at the USPTO decide whether the invalidate your patent in an adversarial proceeding.
- josaka 5y agoI should add that the abandoned patent application is a continuation-in-part of two issued patents, if folks are curious: 8,433,617 and 8,346,624, both of which issued before the bar for software patents was raised (and blurred, to mix metaphors) in 2014 by the Supreme Court in Alice v. CLS Bank. Software patents issued before that case tend to not fare well under the current case law and are often thrown out in the first months of a suit (with a few exceptions in certain fora).
- lotsofpulp 5y agoThe yokels from rural TX problem got somewhat fixed in May 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TC_Heartland_LLC_v._Kraft_Foods_Group_Brands_LLC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TC_Heartland_LLC_v._Kraft_Food...