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>>> There’s a reason patents are in place, to protect decades of hard work and research that go into our devices. To take someone’s life work and market it as y

>>> There’s a reason patents are in place, to protect decades of hard work and research that go into our devices. To take someone’s life work and market it as your own is simply wrong. This appears to be the crux of it: is the technology that SfY 'copied' actually the direct results of decades of effort, or could it have been created by a few designers and developers looking at the problem of assisting disabled children over a few months? If the approach that is used is trivial to think of and/or implement, then maybe it's not really "marketing someone else's life's work", but just re-implementing a simple-enough idea. If patents are granted for ideas as simple as that, then clearly patents are broken. >>> We intend to participate in this space (new consumer technology / tablet apps) but will only do so in a way that supports the best possible language outcomes for those clients with severe communications disorders. I hope that includes pricing a product well within range of most potential customers, and not at $2,500+ prices. If the entire approach of an app is easily copied, it hardly has the right to expect to not be copied (except when patent protected). It's funny, we get much more complicated algorithms and systems implemented for free in free/open software, while these families have to pay the economic rent imposed by a patent-holder for a relatively simple design that IMO could be easily re-invented by a few product designers focusing on the problem.

noonespecial 14y ago
The problem is that software is such an odd field that one man's "life's work" can easily be another's "weekend project". Whenever I start feeling a bit full of myself after battling a week or so on some particularly difficult problem, I try to remember that there are people out there who could kick my ass in the time it takes to air an episode of The Simpsons. In the end, this is why the whole notion of "software" patents is probably doomed from the start.
gaius 14y ago
the technology that SfY 'copied' actually the direct results of decades of effort, or could it have been created by a few designers and developers looking at the problem of assisting disabled children over a few months? You are making the classical developer mistake of thinking that programming is the hard part. Generally programming is the easy part. Domain knowledge is the hard part. Let me give you an example, anyone could write an app to calculate e=mc^2. It took Einstein years to come up with that formula in the first place. Do you think because you could write that app in 5 minutes, you're as smart as Einstein?
- creamyhorror 14y ago
  And you make the classic mistake of faulty analogizing. I totally acknowledge that it takes domain knowledge to come up with a good solution. However, I specifically ask this question because it looks likely to me that that doesn't apply in this particular case. An app that uses a hierarchical display of symbols to allow input of language seems to me like a natural, intuitive approach to allowing a user to generate speech. I believe if a few people were to iterate on an app for this purpose, they'd probably have come across this approach pretty quickly. In other words, I'm saying this is more an archetypal case of a broken software patent, rather than of a specialized domain invention that just happens to use computer hardware. I could not have come up with the equation e = mc^2, but I believe I could have come up with the basic idea of a hierarchical icon display used to input language without years/decades of research. It would have been even easier for a speech pathologist to achieve that in this era of software and programmer abundance, even if PRC had never developed their system and gotten their patents. (Of course, if I've misunderstood the scope of the patents involved, I apologize.)

noonespecial 14y ago

The problem is that software is such an odd field that one man's "life's work" can easily be another's "weekend project". Whenever I start feeling a bit full of myself after battling a week or so on some particularly difficult problem, I try to remember that there are people out there who could kick my ass in the time it takes to air an episode of The Simpsons. In the end, this is why the whole notion of "software" patents is probably doomed from the start.

gaius 14y ago

the technology that SfY 'copied' actually the direct results of decades of effort, or could it have been created by a few designers and developers looking at the problem of assisting disabled children over a few months? You are making the classical developer mistake of thinking that programming is the hard part. Generally programming is the easy part. Domain knowledge is the hard part. Let me give you an example, anyone could write an app to calculate e=mc^2. It took Einstein years to come up with that formula in the first place. Do you think because you could write that app in 5 minutes, you're as smart as Einstein?

creamyhorror 14y ago
And you make the classic mistake of faulty analogizing. I totally acknowledge that it takes domain knowledge to come up with a good solution. However, I specifically ask this question because it looks likely to me that that doesn't apply in this particular case. An app that uses a hierarchical display of symbols to allow input of language seems to me like a natural, intuitive approach to allowing a user to generate speech. I believe if a few people were to iterate on an app for this purpose, they'd probably have come across this approach pretty quickly. In other words, I'm saying this is more an archetypal case of a broken software patent, rather than of a specialized domain invention that just happens to use computer hardware. I could not have come up with the equation e = mc^2, but I believe I could have come up with the basic idea of a hierarchical icon display used to input language without years/decades of research. It would have been even easier for a speech pathologist to achieve that in this era of software and programmer abundance, even if PRC had never developed their system and gotten their patents. (Of course, if I've misunderstood the scope of the patents involved, I apologize.)