6 ms·

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally use

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." -- John Carmack

rayiner 14y ago
That's one possible narrative. Another would be: The idea that I can be presented with a problem, hire a dozen experts and spend millions of dollars coming up with a solution to the problem, and have someone come along and just copy the solution and use it in their own product to compete with me is horrifying.
- manaskarekar 14y ago
  And here's another one: The idea that someone can come up with a solution: - prevent anyone else henceforth from using it without paying them, - enforce that by force and using taxpayer money, - stretching over political boundaries, - not even giving the remotest fair chance to the unborn to ever come up with that solution, - charge a price fixed by whatever whims tickle that person's fancy and deny others of a possibly cheaper solution - just to protect a possibly overvalued idea .. is extremely horrifying to me. Please refer this earlier post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591253 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591253
- dr_doom 14y ago
  Can you give me an example of how this would happen? If google spent millions solving a problem how would I copy the solution and integrate it into my product, considering I will never see google's codebase? Genuinely asking, a real world situation would be cool. It seems like this would happen most when ex-employees try to compete with the large company.
  - whatshisface 14y ago
    For software-as-a-service, trade secrets are easily kept. Not so much if google published a desktop version of their fancy product. And no, making saas the only viable platform is not a good outcome. (then we wouldn't have to worry about trusting the user, but we would have to worry about trusting the provider.)
    - danielweber 14y ago
      'jandrewrogers makes a very cogent point above when he points out that the patent system was put into place precisely to stop all information from being hidden. Without any legal protection, you have to create all sorts of ugly things (like guilds) in order to protect the things you develop. We may have lost some of Shakespeare's plays because he had to be so secretive with his work, since he had no other legal protection from people just copying the stuff and putting on their own plays.
      - chrisbennet 14y ago
        I just read how Shakespeare borrowed/stole heavily from other artists of his time.[1] Today he would have been sued for this and you wouldn't have those plays at all perhaps. [1] Last chapter of the recent book "Imagine" by Jonah Lehrer
  - rayiner 14y ago
    The fact that it's difficult to reverse-engineer Google's technology is an accident of the kind of products it makes: web services. You can access the product while the "secret sauce" remains safely tucked away in a data center. At the opposite end of the spectrum think of a company like Intel investing into WiMAX. Developing that standard was not cheap, but almost by definition it was something that required disclosure of the end result. Intel can try to recoup the initial investment by selling chips implementing the standard, but competitors can always undercut them on price because they didn't have to spend any money coming up with the initial design. There is a lot of technology that's much easier to reverse engineer than it is to develop. Especially with software, where it's often very easy to dig out a copy of the firmware from a competing product and decompile it. You might think this kind of stuff doesn't actually happen, but in the 1990's American companies hated working with the Chinese precisely for this reason. They'd take an American product and copy it right down to the silk screening on the PCB's, and sell the result for cut-rate prices.
    - angersock 14y ago
      You might think this kind of stuff doesn't actually happen, but in the 1990's American companies hated working with the Chinese precisely for this reason. They'd take an American product and copy it right down to the silk screening on the PCB's, and sell the result for cut-rate prices. And the world is arguably a better place now that the Chinese can make super-cheap parts and clones of American designs and sell them to people who couldn't afford them otherwise.
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  Looking at the roster of high-dollar patent lawsuits (both successful and unsuccessful) over the past few years, quite a lot of them are the Carmack type. Bounce scrolling, emoticon keyboard input, unified search across multiple apps, "placing internet information on a tv screen", etc. These are totally obvious ideas, not the type of thing that you spend millions of dollars on researching for years.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    I absolutely agree.
- powertower 14y ago
  Yes, if the solution takes "dozen experts and millions of dollars", it should be possibly patentable. But if the solution is reproducible by an average or good programmer leading by logical steps, then it shouldn't be patentable at all.
  - bhousel 14y ago
    The average programmer can't solve fizzbuzz. Therefore anything more complicated than fizzbuzz passes the nonobviousness test and is patentable.
    - powertower 14y ago
      Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I wasn't suggesting that the "Is a solution reproducible via logical steps?" rule to be a validating rule... It only invalidates patentability if found to be true. Otherwise, nothing.
    - CaveTech 14y ago
      Average programmer definitely could. Average applicant, maybe not.
    - wtallis 14y ago
      The hypothetical "person having ordinary skill in the art" is presumed to have some actual skill, to be more skilled than a layperson, to have have some actual creativity, and to have an educational background similar to that of active workers in the field. People who merely call themselves programmers without having any significant skill do not count toward determining what the level of "ordinary skill" is.
  - manaskarekar 14y ago
    The fallacy of this suggestion is in deciding where to draw the line.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- pekk 14y ago
  While we're demanding that the government give us artificial rents, why not just pay it directly to remove our competition, and skip all the bullshit.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    You know what's also artificial? This whole idea that I can file a claim with the county clerk to a particular area of the Earth, and from thenceforth I don't have to defend my territory like every other animal on the planet--other people will do it for me with government sanction and at taxpayer expense.
    - anonymoushn 14y ago
      In my state we cannot own land. We must rent it from a gang. I believe the rent is called "Property tax."
      - rayiner 14y ago
        Better than the state of nature, where you don't "own" land, just control it until another animal kills and eats you.
- neumann_alfred 14y ago
  No, that's not another way to describe the same situation; it's an entirely different situation. Was this a honest mistake or deliberate sophistry?
  - prodigal_erik 14y ago
    When "what's appalling about patents existing" is the emotional argument, "what would be appalling about patents not existing" is a good counter-argument. On the gripping hand, not having patents would only threaten big solutions that work as non-disclosed competitive advantages, where having patents currently threatens all solutions no matter how straightforward.
    - neumann_alfred 14y ago
      When "what's appalling about patents existing" is the emotional argument, I thought the argument is actually that they exist in the way they do, not in them existing at all.. ? "what would be appalling about patents not existing" is a good counter-argument. Then someone make that argument; the post I replied to didn't IMHO, and here is why: If patents didn't exist, you wouldn't do the same R&D in the same way as you would do in a world with patents. So that's just apples and oranges. "If this chair didn't exist, the person would fall on their butt!" No, actually in that case the person wouldn't even have gotten into a situation where they need a chair to not fall. Which is of course something that is often claimed, that we need patents to "encourage innovation". But consider all the inventions that are made at more or less the same time by people who never heard of each other. To me it's obvious that (large chunks of) invention are more inherent in the laws of physics and human society than in individual inventors. "I made this" actually means "everything up to and including me made this"... sounds less grand, is so much more true. But I guess taking credit for pre-existing things and squeezing money and power out of them is something we actually got used to. Doesn't make it true though. To me it's all bogus anyway, I don't even buy the claim that a bunch of molecules and the memories others have of them constitute an entity called "John Carmack", as if that was a real thing. But with that outlook it's very hard to influence the political process, or even to just make sense to the average person.
- eweise 14y ago
  The actual technology is only one part of running a successful software business and not the most important from my experience. Just copying someone else's solution does not necessarily mean that you can be as successful as the originator.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    The technology may not be the most important thing, but (excepting a few weird industries with significant legacy costs that newcomers can ignore) it's also the advantage the young start-up has against the established company.
- barrkel 14y ago
  That isn't horrifying at all; one person loses (you), but the consumer wins big time. On a utilitarian basis, this is great. What would be more horrifying is a dearth of innovation for fear of other people copying it. Is that realistic? Is first-mover advantage enough? What about prize funds (e.g. Netflix prize, X prize, etc.)? Would the inefficiency costs of those mechanisms be larger than the coordination, government regulation, litigation etc. costs that patents cause? Are there any kinds of innovation that definitely would not happen under alternate schemes, that we absolutely need patents for?
- JanneVee 14y ago
  Well that is an aspect of the issue. But the issue that Carmack points out is that: if somebody has patented it does not matter that the competition does not copy, they hire their own dozen of experts and spend their own millions they still can violate the patent. Someone else can come in and rob them of their investment because they came to the same logical conclusion.
loceng 14y ago
This is how electricity was developed though, too, no?

rayiner 14y ago

That's one possible narrative. Another would be: The idea that I can be presented with a problem, hire a dozen experts and spend millions of dollars coming up with a solution to the problem, and have someone come along and just copy the solution and use it in their own product to compete with me is horrifying.

manaskarekar 14y ago
And here's another one: The idea that someone can come up with a solution: - prevent anyone else henceforth from using it without paying them, - enforce that by force and using taxpayer money, - stretching over political boundaries, - not even giving the remotest fair chance to the unborn to ever come up with that solution, - charge a price fixed by whatever whims tickle that person's fancy and deny others of a possibly cheaper solution - just to protect a possibly overvalued idea .. is extremely horrifying to me. Please refer this earlier post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591253 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591253
dr_doom 14y ago
Can you give me an example of how this would happen? If google spent millions solving a problem how would I copy the solution and integrate it into my product, considering I will never see google's codebase? Genuinely asking, a real world situation would be cool. It seems like this would happen most when ex-employees try to compete with the large company.
- whatshisface 14y ago
  For software-as-a-service, trade secrets are easily kept. Not so much if google published a desktop version of their fancy product. And no, making saas the only viable platform is not a good outcome. (then we wouldn't have to worry about trusting the user, but we would have to worry about trusting the provider.)
  - danielweber 14y ago
    'jandrewrogers makes a very cogent point above when he points out that the patent system was put into place precisely to stop all information from being hidden. Without any legal protection, you have to create all sorts of ugly things (like guilds) in order to protect the things you develop. We may have lost some of Shakespeare's plays because he had to be so secretive with his work, since he had no other legal protection from people just copying the stuff and putting on their own plays.
    - chrisbennet 14y ago
      I just read how Shakespeare borrowed/stole heavily from other artists of his time.[1] Today he would have been sued for this and you wouldn't have those plays at all perhaps. [1] Last chapter of the recent book "Imagine" by Jonah Lehrer
- rayiner 14y ago
  The fact that it's difficult to reverse-engineer Google's technology is an accident of the kind of products it makes: web services. You can access the product while the "secret sauce" remains safely tucked away in a data center. At the opposite end of the spectrum think of a company like Intel investing into WiMAX. Developing that standard was not cheap, but almost by definition it was something that required disclosure of the end result. Intel can try to recoup the initial investment by selling chips implementing the standard, but competitors can always undercut them on price because they didn't have to spend any money coming up with the initial design. There is a lot of technology that's much easier to reverse engineer than it is to develop. Especially with software, where it's often very easy to dig out a copy of the firmware from a competing product and decompile it. You might think this kind of stuff doesn't actually happen, but in the 1990's American companies hated working with the Chinese precisely for this reason. They'd take an American product and copy it right down to the silk screening on the PCB's, and sell the result for cut-rate prices.
  - angersock 14y ago
    You might think this kind of stuff doesn't actually happen, but in the 1990's American companies hated working with the Chinese precisely for this reason. They'd take an American product and copy it right down to the silk screening on the PCB's, and sell the result for cut-rate prices. And the world is arguably a better place now that the Chinese can make super-cheap parts and clones of American designs and sell them to people who couldn't afford them otherwise.
georgemcbay 14y ago
Looking at the roster of high-dollar patent lawsuits (both successful and unsuccessful) over the past few years, quite a lot of them are the Carmack type. Bounce scrolling, emoticon keyboard input, unified search across multiple apps, "placing internet information on a tv screen", etc. These are totally obvious ideas, not the type of thing that you spend millions of dollars on researching for years.
- rayiner 14y ago
  I absolutely agree.
powertower 14y ago
Yes, if the solution takes "dozen experts and millions of dollars", it should be possibly patentable. But if the solution is reproducible by an average or good programmer leading by logical steps, then it shouldn't be patentable at all.
- bhousel 14y ago
  The average programmer can't solve fizzbuzz. Therefore anything more complicated than fizzbuzz passes the nonobviousness test and is patentable.
  - powertower 14y ago
    Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I wasn't suggesting that the "Is a solution reproducible via logical steps?" rule to be a validating rule... It only invalidates patentability if found to be true. Otherwise, nothing.
  - CaveTech 14y ago
    Average programmer definitely could. Average applicant, maybe not.
  - wtallis 14y ago
    The hypothetical "person having ordinary skill in the art" is presumed to have some actual skill, to be more skilled than a layperson, to have have some actual creativity, and to have an educational background similar to that of active workers in the field. People who merely call themselves programmers without having any significant skill do not count toward determining what the level of "ordinary skill" is.
- manaskarekar 14y ago
  The fallacy of this suggestion is in deciding where to draw the line.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
pekk 14y ago
While we're demanding that the government give us artificial rents, why not just pay it directly to remove our competition, and skip all the bullshit.
- rayiner 14y ago
  You know what's also artificial? This whole idea that I can file a claim with the county clerk to a particular area of the Earth, and from thenceforth I don't have to defend my territory like every other animal on the planet--other people will do it for me with government sanction and at taxpayer expense.
  - anonymoushn 14y ago
    In my state we cannot own land. We must rent it from a gang. I believe the rent is called "Property tax."
    - rayiner 14y ago
      Better than the state of nature, where you don't "own" land, just control it until another animal kills and eats you.
neumann_alfred 14y ago
No, that's not another way to describe the same situation; it's an entirely different situation. Was this a honest mistake or deliberate sophistry?
- prodigal_erik 14y ago
  When "what's appalling about patents existing" is the emotional argument, "what would be appalling about patents not existing" is a good counter-argument. On the gripping hand, not having patents would only threaten big solutions that work as non-disclosed competitive advantages, where having patents currently threatens all solutions no matter how straightforward.
  - neumann_alfred 14y ago
    When "what's appalling about patents existing" is the emotional argument, I thought the argument is actually that they exist in the way they do, not in them existing at all.. ? "what would be appalling about patents not existing" is a good counter-argument. Then someone make that argument; the post I replied to didn't IMHO, and here is why: If patents didn't exist, you wouldn't do the same R&D in the same way as you would do in a world with patents. So that's just apples and oranges. "If this chair didn't exist, the person would fall on their butt!" No, actually in that case the person wouldn't even have gotten into a situation where they need a chair to not fall. Which is of course something that is often claimed, that we need patents to "encourage innovation". But consider all the inventions that are made at more or less the same time by people who never heard of each other. To me it's obvious that (large chunks of) invention are more inherent in the laws of physics and human society than in individual inventors. "I made this" actually means "everything up to and including me made this"... sounds less grand, is so much more true. But I guess taking credit for pre-existing things and squeezing money and power out of them is something we actually got used to. Doesn't make it true though. To me it's all bogus anyway, I don't even buy the claim that a bunch of molecules and the memories others have of them constitute an entity called "John Carmack", as if that was a real thing. But with that outlook it's very hard to influence the political process, or even to just make sense to the average person.
eweise 14y ago
The actual technology is only one part of running a successful software business and not the most important from my experience. Just copying someone else's solution does not necessarily mean that you can be as successful as the originator.
- danielweber 14y ago
  The technology may not be the most important thing, but (excepting a few weird industries with significant legacy costs that newcomers can ignore) it's also the advantage the young start-up has against the established company.
barrkel 14y ago
That isn't horrifying at all; one person loses (you), but the consumer wins big time. On a utilitarian basis, this is great. What would be more horrifying is a dearth of innovation for fear of other people copying it. Is that realistic? Is first-mover advantage enough? What about prize funds (e.g. Netflix prize, X prize, etc.)? Would the inefficiency costs of those mechanisms be larger than the coordination, government regulation, litigation etc. costs that patents cause? Are there any kinds of innovation that definitely would not happen under alternate schemes, that we absolutely need patents for?
JanneVee 14y ago
Well that is an aspect of the issue. But the issue that Carmack points out is that: if somebody has patented it does not matter that the competition does not copy, they hire their own dozen of experts and spend their own millions they still can violate the patent. Someone else can come in and rob them of their investment because they came to the same logical conclusion.

loceng 14y ago

This is how electricity was developed though, too, no?