7 ms·

Can anyone here give (and defend) an example of a good patent? By that I mean one that is non-obvious, novel, and clear enough to be able to be used to build t

Can anyone here give (and defend) an example of a good patent? By that I mean one that is non-obvious, novel, and clear enough to be able to be used to build the claimed invention.

piokoch 14y ago
There are many. Think of safety-pin? When it comes to software it is much harder. The thing I can accept are cryptographic algorithms, since as an outcome we get a product - encoded text. All these one-clicks, etc. are pure bullshit.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  But math isn't patentable. You shouldn't be able to sprinkle "math implemented as a computer program" on top of your patent application and be able to skirt this.
- te_platt 14y ago
  I just looked up the safety pin patent and it does look pretty good. I hope my original question didn't come off as confrontational. I do think we would be better off eliminating patents altogether, but I want to make sure I'm not discounting any positive effects patents may have.
- betterunix 14y ago
  "The thing I can accept are cryptographic algorithms, since as an outcome we get a product" Of all the things... Cryptography is math in this day and age. Patents on crypto are patents on math, with only the measly "ON A COMPUTER!!!!" clause justifying their existence.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    See, for example, Clifford Cocks who invented RSA before RSA did, but was unable to patent it, and thus didn't get the profits that RSA did. He got a nice medal though.
    - spc476 14y ago
      If that's the case, then why wasn't the RSA patent revoked due to prior art?
      - jacques_chester 14y ago
        Prior art has to be published. For some strange reason, Her Majesty's cryptographers at GCHQ were loathe to give up all their classified goodies during the cold war. :)
rayiner 14y ago
It was the patent on the field effect transistor that lead Bell Labs to invent the bipolar transistor: http://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/events/patbat.html http://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/events/patbat.html. Also at Bell Labs, OFDM: http://www.google.com/patents?id=9ZFEAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false http://www.google.com/patents?id=9ZFEAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a... (based on a paper published that year). If you look at the implementation of something like LTE, there are a lot of non-obvious patented technologies in there: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/10/03/plan-to-pool-lte-patents-takes-shape http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/10/03/plan-to-pool-lte-pate.... Tesla has a boatload of patents and some of them are quite interesting: http://www.faqs.org/patents/assignee/tesla-motors-inc http://www.faqs.org/patents/assignee/tesla-motors-inc. SpaceshipOne (which won the Ansari X-Prize) is patented. http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=23871 http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=23871. It's owned by what is basically an NPE, which serves as the investment vehicle for commercialization of the technology. Fundamentally, you can't understand all sides of the patent debate unless you learn about how traditional engineering works. We're talking about fields where it takes $10 million to come up with a new idea, $100 million to do an MVP, and $1 billion or more to really put something complete on the market. E.g., here's a Rolls Royce gas turbine patent: http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20130078582 http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20130078582. I guarantee you they burned tens of millions of dollars figuring out what those numbers should be. This is not a space conducive to startups. Thus the need to avoid a few million here in there in defending frivolous litigation is less important than the need to be able to propertize the results of R&D, so it can be traded, bought sold, shared in structured ways. Without patents, a company like Scaled Composites or ARM wouldn't exist, because they don't sell products, they sell the results of R&D. Getting rid of patents (and IP protections generally), force every company to produce tangible products, because there is no way to monetize things that aren't tangible products.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  That's hardware. What about software? Can you provide a specific example (i.e. a patent number) of a "good" software patent?
  - 14y ago
josephlord 14y ago
I'll play: US20080002776. [http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220080002776%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20080002776&RS=DN/20080002776 http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...] Although I no longer work for the BBC and have already received my bonuses for the filing and granting (after I left the BBC) of this patent I have a personal curiosity as the core inventive step was (I believe) mine although it was greatly extended and improved by others with greater domain knowledge in MPEG encoding. As far as I know it was a novel idea and wasn't obvious in advance to experienced video encoding engineers. The original idea was to treat encoding losses as errors/defects that can be fixed or patched by additional data distributed separately. This was extended to arbitrary enhancements and changes and potential implementations, consequences and techniques. I believe that there was a real non-obvious inventive step in considering encoder losses as patchable bugs. Given that idea alone a (suboptimal) implementation is relatively easy to create but was not obvious if the task being discussed is using the early 2000's Internet to deliver better video quality than broadcast (SD) TV could. I am not aware of any current usage of the ideas in this patent or what licenses the BBC may or may not have granted. Edit: Time for me to sleep now, will check for any replies tomorrow.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  At a glance that sounds like the "supplemental enhancement information" that H.263 had circa 2000, but the patent appears to have been filed in 2004 and issued in 2008. Am I wrong?
  - josephlord 14y ago
    It is similar but not the same (I believe - I am not familiar with H.263). The patent itself describes the difference between this idea and other Multi stream encodings. This idea can be applied to MPEG2 or any lossy codec and it also covers sending the enhancement data at different times and by different routes to the main data unlike other multistream/pyramid encoding approaches which expect simultaneous generation and transmission of the streams.
- te_platt 14y ago
jsnell 14y ago
I don't read a lot of modern patents, for the obvious reasons: there are legal risks, and the patent texts are useless even if the invention isn't. But there used to be a time when a software patent wasn't necessarily an obfuscated hodgepodge of legalese with no apparent technical content. Consider for example the (expired, so should be safe to read) mostly-copying GC patent: http://www.google.com/patents/US4907151 http://www.google.com/patents/US4907151 A system description doesn't get much better than that. If somebody couldn't implement a GC based on that patent, they're not a competent systems programmer. (It was also definitely novel. Non-obviousness is harder to argue 25 years after the fact).
- poochie_the_dog 14y ago
  Why on earth would there be legal risks to reading a patent? Contrary to copyright, whether you're infringing on a patent because you read it or because you happened to have the same idea is completely irrelevant. I know some free software guys are pretty paranoid about reading proprietary code, but I see no reason why this should transpose to patents. (but IANAL, so perhaps I'm missing some subtle point)
  - eurleif 14y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_infringement_under_United_States_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_infringement_under_Unit... 'If an infringer is found to have deliberately infringed a patent (i.e. "willful" infringement), then punitive damages can be assessed up to three times the actual damages. Legal fees can also be assessed.'
    - jsnell 14y ago
      Right. It might be just a matter of legal departments cargo culting, but it's very common for companies to ask engineers not to read outside patents for this reason. One might think that it'd make sense to read through patents in order to avoid them, but that only works if the patents are actually even remotely understandable by a normal person. There are situations where patents need to be read, but it's not going to be done by a random engineer.
Zigurd 14y ago
This is a patent that covers something novel that was actually implemented and sold in a commercial product: http://www.google.com/patents/US7012997 http://www.google.com/patents/US7012997 The phone system this was implemented for had the unique property of tightly integrating the switch with what would normally be an "outboard" IVR system. It enabled a whole class of new features that could only be implemented on a switch of that nature, where the state of a call, or any interaction other than a call, like programming a feature button, could be interposed with arbitrary audio prompts. If you read the patent and are "skilled in the art" you could implement it. I'm pleased with this patent because it isn't obscure, it's easy to understand why it is novel, and it isn't trying to do anything underhanded, like making something obvious for a mobile device supposedly makes it novel and non-obvious. The patent system is being gamed in order to exploit it. If the price of ending that exploitation is to exclude software from patent protection, so be it.
linuxhansl 14y ago
The more pertinent question would be an example of a good software patent. IMHO there isn't any. At the very least there isn't any that benefited society as a whole. (Again, I am only talking about software patents). As I've written before, the point is not whether the patents covers a good idea, but rather whether the covered invention would not have seen the light of day without the promise of a legal monopoly (again, all in IMHO).
SilasX 14y ago
You mean software patents? Because if you meant any patent, there are loads of good examples in pharmaceuticals (and chemicals more generally), and they are pretty much textbook examples of being "hard to discover, easy to reproduce from description". Just off the top of my head: Viagra, Teflon, aspirin (the latter of which has long since expired or been seized as war reparations, depending on where you live).
- ZeroGravitas 14y ago
  Viagra was an ineffective drug that now gets sold based on a side-effect noted during testing for it's initial purpose. Maybe that's technically "hard to discover" but it's not really what initially leaps to mind when I hear that phrase.
  - SilasX 14y ago
    If a drug that does what Viagra does wasn't hard to discover, why wasn't it invented before? And why would they bother pursuing the ED applications in the first place if someone could copy the formulation the moment it was substantiated? Btw, Viagra is effective.
huhtenberg 14y ago
Pretty much any pharma patent is fronting a boatload of R&D expenses that went into developing the drug.

Can anyone here give (and defend) an example of a good patent? By that I mean one that is non-obvious, novel, and clear enough to be able to be used to build the claimed invention.

piokoch 14y ago

There are many. Think of safety-pin? When it comes to software it is much harder. The thing I can accept are cryptographic algorithms, since as an outcome we get a product - encoded text. All these one-clicks, etc. are pure bullshit.

unimpressive 14y ago
But math isn't patentable. You shouldn't be able to sprinkle "math implemented as a computer program" on top of your patent application and be able to skirt this.
te_platt 14y ago
I just looked up the safety pin patent and it does look pretty good. I hope my original question didn't come off as confrontational. I do think we would be better off eliminating patents altogether, but I want to make sure I'm not discounting any positive effects patents may have.
betterunix 14y ago
"The thing I can accept are cryptographic algorithms, since as an outcome we get a product" Of all the things... Cryptography is math in this day and age. Patents on crypto are patents on math, with only the measly "ON A COMPUTER!!!!" clause justifying their existence.
- DanBC 14y ago
  See, for example, Clifford Cocks who invented RSA before RSA did, but was unable to patent it, and thus didn't get the profits that RSA did. He got a nice medal though.
  - spc476 14y ago
    If that's the case, then why wasn't the RSA patent revoked due to prior art?
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      Prior art has to be published. For some strange reason, Her Majesty's cryptographers at GCHQ were loathe to give up all their classified goodies during the cold war. :)

rayiner 14y ago

It was the patent on the field effect transistor that lead Bell Labs to invent the bipolar transistor: http://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/events/patbat.html http://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/events/patbat.html. Also at Bell Labs, OFDM: http://www.google.com/patents?id=9ZFEAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false http://www.google.com/patents?id=9ZFEAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a... (based on a paper published that year). If you look at the implementation of something like LTE, there are a lot of non-obvious patented technologies in there: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/10/03/plan-to-pool-lte-patents-takes-shape http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/10/03/plan-to-pool-lte-pate.... Tesla has a boatload of patents and some of them are quite interesting: http://www.faqs.org/patents/assignee/tesla-motors-inc http://www.faqs.org/patents/assignee/tesla-motors-inc. SpaceshipOne (which won the Ansari X-Prize) is patented. http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=23871 http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=23871. It's owned by what is basically an NPE, which serves as the investment vehicle for commercialization of the technology. Fundamentally, you can't understand all sides of the patent debate unless you learn about how traditional engineering works. We're talking about fields where it takes $10 million to come up with a new idea, $100 million to do an MVP, and $1 billion or more to really put something complete on the market. E.g., here's a Rolls Royce gas turbine patent: http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20130078582 http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20130078582. I guarantee you they burned tens of millions of dollars figuring out what those numbers should be. This is not a space conducive to startups. Thus the need to avoid a few million here in there in defending frivolous litigation is less important than the need to be able to propertize the results of R&D, so it can be traded, bought sold, shared in structured ways. Without patents, a company like Scaled Composites or ARM wouldn't exist, because they don't sell products, they sell the results of R&D. Getting rid of patents (and IP protections generally), force every company to produce tangible products, because there is no way to monetize things that aren't tangible products.

AnthonyMouse 14y ago
That's hardware. What about software? Can you provide a specific example (i.e. a patent number) of a "good" software patent?
- 14y ago

josephlord 14y ago

I'll play: US20080002776. [http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220080002776%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20080002776&RS=DN/20080002776 http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...] Although I no longer work for the BBC and have already received my bonuses for the filing and granting (after I left the BBC) of this patent I have a personal curiosity as the core inventive step was (I believe) mine although it was greatly extended and improved by others with greater domain knowledge in MPEG encoding. As far as I know it was a novel idea and wasn't obvious in advance to experienced video encoding engineers. The original idea was to treat encoding losses as errors/defects that can be fixed or patched by additional data distributed separately. This was extended to arbitrary enhancements and changes and potential implementations, consequences and techniques. I believe that there was a real non-obvious inventive step in considering encoder losses as patchable bugs. Given that idea alone a (suboptimal) implementation is relatively easy to create but was not obvious if the task being discussed is using the early 2000's Internet to deliver better video quality than broadcast (SD) TV could. I am not aware of any current usage of the ideas in this patent or what licenses the BBC may or may not have granted. Edit: Time for me to sleep now, will check for any replies tomorrow.

AnthonyMouse 14y ago
At a glance that sounds like the "supplemental enhancement information" that H.263 had circa 2000, but the patent appears to have been filed in 2004 and issued in 2008. Am I wrong?
- josephlord 14y ago
  It is similar but not the same (I believe - I am not familiar with H.263). The patent itself describes the difference between this idea and other Multi stream encodings. This idea can be applied to MPEG2 or any lossy codec and it also covers sending the enhancement data at different times and by different routes to the main data unlike other multistream/pyramid encoding approaches which expect simultaneous generation and transmission of the streams.
te_platt 14y ago

jsnell 14y ago

I don't read a lot of modern patents, for the obvious reasons: there are legal risks, and the patent texts are useless even if the invention isn't. But there used to be a time when a software patent wasn't necessarily an obfuscated hodgepodge of legalese with no apparent technical content. Consider for example the (expired, so should be safe to read) mostly-copying GC patent: http://www.google.com/patents/US4907151 http://www.google.com/patents/US4907151 A system description doesn't get much better than that. If somebody couldn't implement a GC based on that patent, they're not a competent systems programmer. (It was also definitely novel. Non-obviousness is harder to argue 25 years after the fact).

poochie_the_dog 14y ago
Why on earth would there be legal risks to reading a patent? Contrary to copyright, whether you're infringing on a patent because you read it or because you happened to have the same idea is completely irrelevant. I know some free software guys are pretty paranoid about reading proprietary code, but I see no reason why this should transpose to patents. (but IANAL, so perhaps I'm missing some subtle point)
- eurleif 14y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_infringement_under_United_States_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_infringement_under_Unit... 'If an infringer is found to have deliberately infringed a patent (i.e. "willful" infringement), then punitive damages can be assessed up to three times the actual damages. Legal fees can also be assessed.'
  - jsnell 14y ago
    Right. It might be just a matter of legal departments cargo culting, but it's very common for companies to ask engineers not to read outside patents for this reason. One might think that it'd make sense to read through patents in order to avoid them, but that only works if the patents are actually even remotely understandable by a normal person. There are situations where patents need to be read, but it's not going to be done by a random engineer.

Zigurd 14y ago

This is a patent that covers something novel that was actually implemented and sold in a commercial product: http://www.google.com/patents/US7012997 http://www.google.com/patents/US7012997 The phone system this was implemented for had the unique property of tightly integrating the switch with what would normally be an "outboard" IVR system. It enabled a whole class of new features that could only be implemented on a switch of that nature, where the state of a call, or any interaction other than a call, like programming a feature button, could be interposed with arbitrary audio prompts. If you read the patent and are "skilled in the art" you could implement it. I'm pleased with this patent because it isn't obscure, it's easy to understand why it is novel, and it isn't trying to do anything underhanded, like making something obvious for a mobile device supposedly makes it novel and non-obvious. The patent system is being gamed in order to exploit it. If the price of ending that exploitation is to exclude software from patent protection, so be it.

linuxhansl 14y ago

The more pertinent question would be an example of a good software patent. IMHO there isn't any. At the very least there isn't any that benefited society as a whole. (Again, I am only talking about software patents). As I've written before, the point is not whether the patents covers a good idea, but rather whether the covered invention would not have seen the light of day without the promise of a legal monopoly (again, all in IMHO).

SilasX 14y ago

You mean software patents? Because if you meant any patent, there are loads of good examples in pharmaceuticals (and chemicals more generally), and they are pretty much textbook examples of being "hard to discover, easy to reproduce from description". Just off the top of my head: Viagra, Teflon, aspirin (the latter of which has long since expired or been seized as war reparations, depending on where you live).

ZeroGravitas 14y ago
Viagra was an ineffective drug that now gets sold based on a side-effect noted during testing for it's initial purpose. Maybe that's technically "hard to discover" but it's not really what initially leaps to mind when I hear that phrase.
- SilasX 14y ago
  If a drug that does what Viagra does wasn't hard to discover, why wasn't it invented before? And why would they bother pursuing the ED applications in the first place if someone could copy the formulation the moment it was substantiated? Btw, Viagra is effective.

huhtenberg 14y ago

Pretty much any pharma patent is fronting a boatload of R&D expenses that went into developing the drug.