5 ms·

Most good inventions are "obvious" in hindsight.

ljsprague 2y ago
Like the Blonsky birthing table for instance.
drannex 2y ago
This is why patents are Regressive and should be done away with. They no longer protect small-time inventors, only corporations. They stifle all innovation.
- DecentShoes 2y ago
  If they exist, they should be 3 - 5 years. Not 20. That's insane and creates monopolies.
  - tombert 2y ago
    At least it’s not as terrible as the US copyright system, which is more than 90 years.
    - mcny 2y ago
      That should also be three to five years.
      - LadyCailin 2y ago
        No, copyrights make sense to be longer. But not “century” long. But something like 15 years for a copyright, renewable each year after for a growing cost, up to 30 years total, seems reasonable to me. The main point being, if you’re still making money hand over fist from your book you wrote, or film you made, you can keep the copyright. But at some point, you have to prove it has value by paying for it, with a fast growing price each year after, and still a finite time where the copyright goes away entirely. This prevents dead copyrights where you can’t even find the copyright holder, because they died 50 years ago, and the work is obscure, but you want to license it. But if you create some original song or story or whatever, it’s totally fair that only you get to make money from that for a very long while.
        lotsofpulp 2y ago
        > The main point being, if you’re still making money hand over fist from your book you wrote, or film you made, you can keep the copyright. > But if you create some original song or story or whatever, it’s totally fair that only you get to make money from that for a very long while. Why is this “very long while” based on how much money you are making, and why would it be different from creating anything else? The point of taxpayer funded legal and police protection for owners of patents and copyright terms is to incentivize creating something, not to maximize rent seeking abilities for the creator.
        LadyCailin 2y ago
        I don’t think preventing you from diluting the brand I created is rent seeking. Creating a work is an investment, which, almost never pays off (think of how many unknown musicians, authors, and artists there are). So when you find something that people like en masse, you should be allowed to reap those benefits. I hardly consider that rent seeking. But the escalating cost prevents actual rent seeking - if your work stops producing value, squatting on it IS rent seeking, and so you have to pay escalating amounts, or relinquish it, and let someone else have a stab at it. You are also allowed to continue to create new derivative works, and you have a huge head start on any future competition, since you have that time limited window. So if you continue to create new value, your timer “restarts” on those new works, so I think that’s sufficient incentive to continue creating.
        lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Trademarks protect brands, not copyright and patents. That is a different discussion, but trademarks already work that way, where if the trademark owner keeps using the trademark, then they get to keep it. A creative work is not a brand, the name of the person or company that produced it is a brand. > if your work stops producing value, squatting on it IS rent seeking “Producing value” is far too nebulous of a parameter to legally enforce. Again, the point of a copyright and patent is to incentivize creation. At a certain point, it moves from incentivizing to rewarding those that sit on previous accomplishments. That is why old movies, music, and games are locked away or only accessible via pirating, why TV shows from the 1990s and 2000s have different soundtracks if streamed legally today, and why patent trolls exist.
    - michaelt 2y ago
      Copyright should be shorter, but IMHO it's a lot less bad than patents. If copyright worked like patents, Disney wouldn't have a monopoly on the Star Wars franchise Patents tend to be super-broad, so instead they'd have a monopoly on all space-related fictional media.
    - toasterlovin 2y ago
      There's a pretty fundamental difference between patents and copyright that I think justifies copyright being longer: a copyrighted work could not exist without its creator. IE, the Beatles catalog would not exist without the 4 Beatles, specifically. However patents are discoveries and can be discovered by other people.
      - tombert 2y ago
        I don't disagree, though I would argue that bullshit like "design patents" blur that line somewhat. Even within patents, you're not supposed to be able to patent a "fact", which is why most math is non-patentable, and it gets into kind of weird territory when you get into stuff like algorithms: is an algorithm part of mathematics and therefore a fact and therefore non-patentable? or is it closer to an invention and engineering, and therefore should be patented? Or is coding "creative" enough to where we should actually be copyrighting algorithms? I have no idea the answer to that question, or where the line should be drawn (though I gravitate towards the "math" side). I don't know where I'm going with this; intellectual property law is weird.
        toasterlovin 2y ago
        Yeah, as in all things, the categories start to blur at the edges. Most algorithms seem like mathematical discoveries to me, whereas the source code for a piece of software has pretty clear corollaries to copyrighted works like novels (including passing the test that I propose: it could not exist without it's creator). I kind of think that patents should not exist. I'm not a scholar in the area, but I am not aware of good evidence that, without patents, we would be bereft of the many inventions of human history and especially the last 200 years. And actually, the open source movement demonstrates that there is a very strong human impulse that will create and invent things without material recompense. My reading of patent history is that people who were inventing things anyway wanted a way to profit from it, not that there was a lack of invention and patents were arrived at as a solution to that problem. Perhaps someone could object that companies are responsible for a lot of invention and they need to be incentivized in a way that individual inventors do not. But I'm not convinced that making a better mousetrap isn't enough of an incentive. After all, companies spend an incredible amount of money on sales and marketing (usually a larger line item than R&D on a company's income statement) and neither of those gives you a legally enforced competitive advantage. I think the best argument for patents is to encourage drug discovery, since the costs are enormous due to the testing requirements. But if the main cost is in testing, then perhaps the solution is to require that copycat medications also go through the testing process, at least for some period of time. Or just have patents for drugs but not for other things. Or just have the government engage in drug discovery and validation directly (normally I'm against the government doing stuff, but I'm not convinced that the lack of a profit motive would be worse than the presence of a profit motive when it comes to drug discover).
  - varjag 2y ago
    An R&D cycle itself can be 5 years, a 1-2 year patent approval time is typical. Industrializing research for production is at least a year, not to mention finding a market fit. And you are supposed to recoup all that in 3-5 years? Just tooling amortization can take that much.
- brookst 2y ago
  Lots of small companies only get funding because investors believe the IP will be worth something even if the company fails. I’m not wild about our current patent situation, but we have to recognize that a less restrictive recision would impact small business pretty hard.
  - mplewis 2y ago
    I don't care about the impact on small business. I care about the impact on real people being able to access life-saving technology.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - bawolff 2y ago
    Shoe goes on both feet though. Lots of companies are not viable due to the legal burden of one small neccesary part being patented.
    - brookst 2y ago
      For sure. It’s complicated, and it’s different people and companies when you get to the specifics.
      - survirtual 2y ago
        It is not complicated. Patents are regressive instruments of the rich to shackle minds and generate artificial scarcity over abundant goods. It is a mechanism of slavers and connected lineages, and completely puts of a boot on the neck of unconnected innovators, which are abundant in today's age. They must be abolished.
        brookst 2y ago
        So if you invent something you’re cool with a giant company just stealing it and marketing it?
- procaryote 2y ago
  The original point of a patent is a good one: document your work publicly and in return get a window of time to profit from said work. It was intended to improve innovation by making people not hide their work. It wasn't really designed for people patenting vague concepts, math or ideas. If you build a better mousetrap, a patent is pretty good. If you have a vague idea you might show ads in elevators, you should A: just be shot, and B: not get a patent
  - codedokode 2y ago
    But today with software you can publish just a generic description and do not disclose actual algorithms and formulas, so there is no value for everyone else. For example, you could patent a program that "chooses the best investment options using AI" without describing any details even if you don't know how to actually implement this. (Well after I posted this comment you can't anymore)
    - matsemann 2y ago
      "Add something to a digital shopping cart", "Minigames on a loading screen". If I can replicate it without reading any details in your patent, it's not patent worthy.
    - xienze 2y ago
      > For example, you could patent a program that "chooses the best investment options using AI" without describing any details even if you don't know how to actually implement this. That’s not true. I have several issued US patents and while you don’t publish the code, you certainly have to disclose enough high level details that another person versed in the art would be able to implement it.
  - pembrook 2y ago
    Patents come from a quaint time when startup capital was non-existent. Today, they are simply a giant anchor on the speed of innovation. The software world has flourished with effectively very little patent protection and very lax IP enforcement. And in the hardware world China quickly commoditizes and copies everything, regardless of US patents anyways. The only real moats in modern capitalism come from talent, marketing, distribution, and regulation. Patents are now just a weaponized form of regulation useful for kneecapping domestic competitors. They hurt the local economy more than helping it.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Well, you can live in that world by observing China. IP doesn’t exist. All things are open source. You have to be careful doing things but people still do them and a cheaper product shows up on Aliexpress the next day.
ikekkdcjkfke 2y ago
I believe apple is struggling to implement the 5g spec due to patents, how do you square that? Just confuses me
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- g_p 2y ago
  A lot of the patents needed to implement mobile standards are designated as "standards essential patents", meaning that the party bringing them up the table in the standards committees needs to disclose them and agree to licence them on a FRAND basis to anyone who asks (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory). In many cases there are patent pools you can license that cover large areas of the standards, without needing to negotiate each one individually. Many very fundamental parts of 4G/ 5G are patented and you'll not be able to get your device to work on the network without those patents, so Apple will have licensed those patents under FRAND for their new C1 modem.
bawolff 2y ago
Some are more obvious than others. I think that is a major problem with patents - all inventions are treated the same. However there is a big difference between something reasonably new that took a decade of r&d work to get right and a tiny change to an existing invention which took a day and is an obvious logical progession from what came before which everyone would have came up with.
renewiltord 2y ago
Indeed, therefore if an invention is “obvious” in hindsight it must be good ;)
tzs 2y ago
I once attended a patent trial and it was interesting. The defendant claimed the patent was obvious. The plaintiff had some pretty good evidence that it was in fact not obvious: • The defendant was one of the largest companies in the field with a very accomplished and impressive R&D department. The plaintiff introduced documents they got from the defendant during discovery where the CEO had called solving the specific problem that the patent solved to be vital to the future existence of their company and made solving it a top priority. Yet they failed to make any progress on it. • Two of the other largest companies in the field, also with impressive R&D departments, had also been working on this and failed to come up with anything. The jury found that the patent was obvious. What I think happened is that both plaintiff and defendant had presentations that explained to the jury what the patent did. Both presentations did a great job of finding a problem from everyday life that was kind of analogous to the problem the patent involved, and translating the patent's solution to that everyday life problem. The presentations made it easy to understand the gist of what the patent did. There's a natural tendency to mistake easy to understand for obviousness, and I think that by explaining the invention in a way that made it easy to understand it also made the jury think it was obvious. But if you don't explain the invention in a way that the jury can understand how are they supposed to be able to make decisions? This reminds me of college. Many a time I'd read some theorem named after a mathematician and think "how the heck does this obvious theorem get named after someone?". The answer is that it wasn't at all obvious when that mathematician proved it 400 years ago. I'm seeing it after 400 years of people figuring out how to present the subject in a way that makes that theorem obvious. That reminds me of a classic math joke: A professor says "It is obvious that" and writes an equation. Then he pauses, and says "...wait, is that obvious?". He goes to another board and starts deriving the equation, not saying anything while doing this. After 20 minutes he had gotten it, says "I was right! It is obvious!" and goes back and resumes his lecture.
- potamic 2y ago
  Could you elaborate on what the patent was or share the patent number?
jjk166 2y ago
The patent law definition of obvious is different from the common understanding. Specifically, it only counts if it was obvious before the patent filing to a person of ordinary skill. It's actually really hard for a patent claim to be rejected for obviousness. A poking stick for pressing buttons on a TV without getting up counts as a non-obvious invention.

Like the Blonsky birthing table for instance.

This is why patents are Regressive and should be done away with. They no longer protect small-time inventors, only corporations. They stifle all innovation.

DecentShoes 2y ago
If they exist, they should be 3 - 5 years. Not 20. That's insane and creates monopolies.
- tombert 2y ago
  At least it’s not as terrible as the US copyright system, which is more than 90 years.
  - mcny 2y ago
    That should also be three to five years.
    - LadyCailin 2y ago
      No, copyrights make sense to be longer. But not “century” long. But something like 15 years for a copyright, renewable each year after for a growing cost, up to 30 years total, seems reasonable to me. The main point being, if you’re still making money hand over fist from your book you wrote, or film you made, you can keep the copyright. But at some point, you have to prove it has value by paying for it, with a fast growing price each year after, and still a finite time where the copyright goes away entirely. This prevents dead copyrights where you can’t even find the copyright holder, because they died 50 years ago, and the work is obscure, but you want to license it. But if you create some original song or story or whatever, it’s totally fair that only you get to make money from that for a very long while.
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        > The main point being, if you’re still making money hand over fist from your book you wrote, or film you made, you can keep the copyright. > But if you create some original song or story or whatever, it’s totally fair that only you get to make money from that for a very long while. Why is this “very long while” based on how much money you are making, and why would it be different from creating anything else? The point of taxpayer funded legal and police protection for owners of patents and copyright terms is to incentivize creating something, not to maximize rent seeking abilities for the creator.
        LadyCailin 2y ago
        I don’t think preventing you from diluting the brand I created is rent seeking. Creating a work is an investment, which, almost never pays off (think of how many unknown musicians, authors, and artists there are). So when you find something that people like en masse, you should be allowed to reap those benefits. I hardly consider that rent seeking. But the escalating cost prevents actual rent seeking - if your work stops producing value, squatting on it IS rent seeking, and so you have to pay escalating amounts, or relinquish it, and let someone else have a stab at it. You are also allowed to continue to create new derivative works, and you have a huge head start on any future competition, since you have that time limited window. So if you continue to create new value, your timer “restarts” on those new works, so I think that’s sufficient incentive to continue creating.
        lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Trademarks protect brands, not copyright and patents. That is a different discussion, but trademarks already work that way, where if the trademark owner keeps using the trademark, then they get to keep it. A creative work is not a brand, the name of the person or company that produced it is a brand. > if your work stops producing value, squatting on it IS rent seeking “Producing value” is far too nebulous of a parameter to legally enforce. Again, the point of a copyright and patent is to incentivize creation. At a certain point, it moves from incentivizing to rewarding those that sit on previous accomplishments. That is why old movies, music, and games are locked away or only accessible via pirating, why TV shows from the 1990s and 2000s have different soundtracks if streamed legally today, and why patent trolls exist.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    Copyright should be shorter, but IMHO it's a lot less bad than patents. If copyright worked like patents, Disney wouldn't have a monopoly on the Star Wars franchise Patents tend to be super-broad, so instead they'd have a monopoly on all space-related fictional media.
  - toasterlovin 2y ago
    There's a pretty fundamental difference between patents and copyright that I think justifies copyright being longer: a copyrighted work could not exist without its creator. IE, the Beatles catalog would not exist without the 4 Beatles, specifically. However patents are discoveries and can be discovered by other people.
    - tombert 2y ago
      I don't disagree, though I would argue that bullshit like "design patents" blur that line somewhat. Even within patents, you're not supposed to be able to patent a "fact", which is why most math is non-patentable, and it gets into kind of weird territory when you get into stuff like algorithms: is an algorithm part of mathematics and therefore a fact and therefore non-patentable? or is it closer to an invention and engineering, and therefore should be patented? Or is coding "creative" enough to where we should actually be copyrighting algorithms? I have no idea the answer to that question, or where the line should be drawn (though I gravitate towards the "math" side). I don't know where I'm going with this; intellectual property law is weird.
      - toasterlovin 2y ago
        Yeah, as in all things, the categories start to blur at the edges. Most algorithms seem like mathematical discoveries to me, whereas the source code for a piece of software has pretty clear corollaries to copyrighted works like novels (including passing the test that I propose: it could not exist without it's creator). I kind of think that patents should not exist. I'm not a scholar in the area, but I am not aware of good evidence that, without patents, we would be bereft of the many inventions of human history and especially the last 200 years. And actually, the open source movement demonstrates that there is a very strong human impulse that will create and invent things without material recompense. My reading of patent history is that people who were inventing things anyway wanted a way to profit from it, not that there was a lack of invention and patents were arrived at as a solution to that problem. Perhaps someone could object that companies are responsible for a lot of invention and they need to be incentivized in a way that individual inventors do not. But I'm not convinced that making a better mousetrap isn't enough of an incentive. After all, companies spend an incredible amount of money on sales and marketing (usually a larger line item than R&D on a company's income statement) and neither of those gives you a legally enforced competitive advantage. I think the best argument for patents is to encourage drug discovery, since the costs are enormous due to the testing requirements. But if the main cost is in testing, then perhaps the solution is to require that copycat medications also go through the testing process, at least for some period of time. Or just have patents for drugs but not for other things. Or just have the government engage in drug discovery and validation directly (normally I'm against the government doing stuff, but I'm not convinced that the lack of a profit motive would be worse than the presence of a profit motive when it comes to drug discover).
- varjag 2y ago
  An R&D cycle itself can be 5 years, a 1-2 year patent approval time is typical. Industrializing research for production is at least a year, not to mention finding a market fit. And you are supposed to recoup all that in 3-5 years? Just tooling amortization can take that much.
brookst 2y ago
Lots of small companies only get funding because investors believe the IP will be worth something even if the company fails. I’m not wild about our current patent situation, but we have to recognize that a less restrictive recision would impact small business pretty hard.
- mplewis 2y ago
  I don't care about the impact on small business. I care about the impact on real people being able to access life-saving technology.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- bawolff 2y ago
  Shoe goes on both feet though. Lots of companies are not viable due to the legal burden of one small neccesary part being patented.
  - brookst 2y ago
    For sure. It’s complicated, and it’s different people and companies when you get to the specifics.
    - survirtual 2y ago
      It is not complicated. Patents are regressive instruments of the rich to shackle minds and generate artificial scarcity over abundant goods. It is a mechanism of slavers and connected lineages, and completely puts of a boot on the neck of unconnected innovators, which are abundant in today's age. They must be abolished.
      - brookst 2y ago
        So if you invent something you’re cool with a giant company just stealing it and marketing it?
procaryote 2y ago
The original point of a patent is a good one: document your work publicly and in return get a window of time to profit from said work. It was intended to improve innovation by making people not hide their work. It wasn't really designed for people patenting vague concepts, math or ideas. If you build a better mousetrap, a patent is pretty good. If you have a vague idea you might show ads in elevators, you should A: just be shot, and B: not get a patent
- codedokode 2y ago
  But today with software you can publish just a generic description and do not disclose actual algorithms and formulas, so there is no value for everyone else. For example, you could patent a program that "chooses the best investment options using AI" without describing any details even if you don't know how to actually implement this. (Well after I posted this comment you can't anymore)
  - matsemann 2y ago
    "Add something to a digital shopping cart", "Minigames on a loading screen". If I can replicate it without reading any details in your patent, it's not patent worthy.
  - xienze 2y ago
    > For example, you could patent a program that "chooses the best investment options using AI" without describing any details even if you don't know how to actually implement this. That’s not true. I have several issued US patents and while you don’t publish the code, you certainly have to disclose enough high level details that another person versed in the art would be able to implement it.
- pembrook 2y ago
  Patents come from a quaint time when startup capital was non-existent. Today, they are simply a giant anchor on the speed of innovation. The software world has flourished with effectively very little patent protection and very lax IP enforcement. And in the hardware world China quickly commoditizes and copies everything, regardless of US patents anyways. The only real moats in modern capitalism come from talent, marketing, distribution, and regulation. Patents are now just a weaponized form of regulation useful for kneecapping domestic competitors. They hurt the local economy more than helping it.
renewiltord 2y ago
Well, you can live in that world by observing China. IP doesn’t exist. All things are open source. You have to be careful doing things but people still do them and a cheaper product shows up on Aliexpress the next day.

ikekkdcjkfke 2y ago

I believe apple is struggling to implement the 5g spec due to patents, how do you square that? Just confuses me

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
g_p 2y ago
A lot of the patents needed to implement mobile standards are designated as "standards essential patents", meaning that the party bringing them up the table in the standards committees needs to disclose them and agree to licence them on a FRAND basis to anyone who asks (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory). In many cases there are patent pools you can license that cover large areas of the standards, without needing to negotiate each one individually. Many very fundamental parts of 4G/ 5G are patented and you'll not be able to get your device to work on the network without those patents, so Apple will have licensed those patents under FRAND for their new C1 modem.

bawolff 2y ago

Some are more obvious than others. I think that is a major problem with patents - all inventions are treated the same. However there is a big difference between something reasonably new that took a decade of r&d work to get right and a tiny change to an existing invention which took a day and is an obvious logical progession from what came before which everyone would have came up with.

renewiltord 2y ago

Indeed, therefore if an invention is “obvious” in hindsight it must be good ;)

tzs 2y ago

I once attended a patent trial and it was interesting. The defendant claimed the patent was obvious. The plaintiff had some pretty good evidence that it was in fact not obvious: • The defendant was one of the largest companies in the field with a very accomplished and impressive R&D department. The plaintiff introduced documents they got from the defendant during discovery where the CEO had called solving the specific problem that the patent solved to be vital to the future existence of their company and made solving it a top priority. Yet they failed to make any progress on it. • Two of the other largest companies in the field, also with impressive R&D departments, had also been working on this and failed to come up with anything. The jury found that the patent was obvious. What I think happened is that both plaintiff and defendant had presentations that explained to the jury what the patent did. Both presentations did a great job of finding a problem from everyday life that was kind of analogous to the problem the patent involved, and translating the patent's solution to that everyday life problem. The presentations made it easy to understand the gist of what the patent did. There's a natural tendency to mistake easy to understand for obviousness, and I think that by explaining the invention in a way that made it easy to understand it also made the jury think it was obvious. But if you don't explain the invention in a way that the jury can understand how are they supposed to be able to make decisions? This reminds me of college. Many a time I'd read some theorem named after a mathematician and think "how the heck does this obvious theorem get named after someone?". The answer is that it wasn't at all obvious when that mathematician proved it 400 years ago. I'm seeing it after 400 years of people figuring out how to present the subject in a way that makes that theorem obvious. That reminds me of a classic math joke: A professor says "It is obvious that" and writes an equation. Then he pauses, and says "...wait, is that obvious?". He goes to another board and starts deriving the equation, not saying anything while doing this. After 20 minutes he had gotten it, says "I was right! It is obvious!" and goes back and resumes his lecture.

potamic 2y ago
Could you elaborate on what the patent was or share the patent number?

jjk166 2y ago

The patent law definition of obvious is different from the common understanding. Specifically, it only counts if it was obvious before the patent filing to a person of ordinary skill. It's actually really hard for a patent claim to be rejected for obviousness. A poking stick for pressing buttons on a TV without getting up counts as a non-obvious invention.