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I never saw this one the first time around, but the judge's ruling sounds crazy to me. It basically boils down to "I don't understand this, so it must be patent

by codeka 14y ago

I never saw this one the first time around, but the judge's ruling sounds crazy to me. It basically boils down to "I don't understand this, so it must be patentable." I'm really staring to rethink my opinion on those "learn to program"/"don't learn to program" arguments. Certainly for anyone making descisions that affect software development - a first year computer science student could see that showing an ad before showing a video is trivial.

antidoh 14y ago
Why would this take any sort of CS education? They've patented when to show a commercial.
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  If you dress any action up with enough fancy technical terms, you can easily confuse the non-technical into thinking what you are doing must be pretty advanced and thus worthy of some sort of protection.
MBlume 14y ago
Or, y'know, find someone who can program and ask them.
- codeka 14y ago
  Yes, that's one option. But the question is then "who do I ask?" If you don't understand the field yourself (at least to some degree) it's just as easy to get suckered into asking the wrong person for an opinion. It's hard to say, though, what "to some degree" should be. How much do we expect judges to know about automobiles, or construction, or medicine or whatever other fields they need to make judgments on? It seems to me you can't expect a judge to be completely ignorant of a field and still make valuable judgments on it.
  - cube13 14y ago
    This is exactly what expert witnesses are for. They're accredited "experts" in their field who are called to explain technical issues to the judge and jury. The problem here is that there isn't a "Professional Engineer" license for software/computer engineering(whether or not there should be is a totally different discussion). That makes it really difficult to get expert witnesses who can explain the terminology and give commentary. CS professors often are called for this role, but there aren't that many of them for all of the cases.

by codeka 14y ago

antidoh 14y ago

Why would this take any sort of CS education? They've patented when to show a commercial.

georgemcbay 14y ago
If you dress any action up with enough fancy technical terms, you can easily confuse the non-technical into thinking what you are doing must be pretty advanced and thus worthy of some sort of protection.

MBlume 14y ago

Or, y'know, find someone who can program and ask them.

codeka 14y ago
Yes, that's one option. But the question is then "who do I ask?" If you don't understand the field yourself (at least to some degree) it's just as easy to get suckered into asking the wrong person for an opinion. It's hard to say, though, what "to some degree" should be. How much do we expect judges to know about automobiles, or construction, or medicine or whatever other fields they need to make judgments on? It seems to me you can't expect a judge to be completely ignorant of a field and still make valuable judgments on it.
- cube13 14y ago
  This is exactly what expert witnesses are for. They're accredited "experts" in their field who are called to explain technical issues to the judge and jury. The problem here is that there isn't a "Professional Engineer" license for software/computer engineering(whether or not there should be is a totally different discussion). That makes it really difficult to get expert witnesses who can explain the terminology and give commentary. CS professors often are called for this role, but there aren't that many of them for all of the cases.