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Abstract Ideas Don’t Deserve Patents
- thomasahle 13y agoDoes anyone have a link around the paywall?
- ithkuil 13y agoWhat deserves a patent is a, possibly large, investment needed to show that an abstract idea can be a practical. The magnitude of the investment is one of the reasons people tend to accept the concept of patents more in some field than in others.
- TillE 13y agoI'd be pretty happy with a system that gives only short-term (two-year?) patents on the current criteria, with a 5-10 year extension awarded only after presenting evidence of significant investment or extraordinary novelty to an independent panel of experts.
- Ilmesnkie_Jones 13y agoYou can already get a patent on processes that turn an abstract idea into a practical application. That leaves open the door for other applications of the abstract idea to still be used.
- Jare 13y agoExactly. Note that opposing patents on certain inventions doesn't mean you think the inventors don't deserve to get insanely rich by commercially exploiting them; it just means you don't think they deserve a government-backed protection to do so. So, what inventions should deserve such protection? For example, ideas which by their nature must be disclosed after a large investment in their development, but before having a chance to be placed in the market. Regulated industries like drugs come to mind. Even then, the extent of the protection should be limited to a (short) period to prepare and launch commercial exploitation of the idea. Therefore, the patent should include proof and plan for such commercialization of the idea.
- netcan 13y agoI think this is true from an economic engineering perspective. If a patent doesn't require investment, it doesn't need a patent to ensure that investment can be recovered. From an enforcement perspective it could get pretty ugly. Also, the law is at its best when it deals in definable concepts. Large is relative. For Google, an investment to large to be pursued on a whim has 4 or 5 more zeros than it does for me.
- bo1024 13y agoI disagree. Why does that deserve a patent? If a particular invention is created that realizes the idea, I agree that the invention should be patentable, but it sounds like your post advocates patents on scientific research.
- ithkuil 13y agoTo be honest I'm not advocating anything. I'd like very much to live in a more enlightened age than this, but it's a good idea to understand how things work. If you need money to do something you will get it from someone who wants to get back something (modulo risk), and the patent system is one way to transform ideas in value that can be traded. It's not the only way, and not all the alternatives are better. My point was that as long as there is a real work behind a patent, people tend to show more understanding of the need of a patenting system, while being rightfully outraged in cases of patent trolls and/or plain bullshit.
- MCarusi 13y agoThe patent situation has become a circus. There's a company claiming a patent on video advertisements preceding video content, and they're suing every online media company in existence hoping for shakedowns. I once jokingly suggested a patent about paying online, but lo and behold, someone has that too.
- ithinkso 13y agoHas someone already patented earning money by patenting everything and then suing everyone else?
- cheese1756 13y agoYes: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/08/01/157743897/can-you-get-a-patent-on-being-a-patent-troll http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/08/01/157743897/can-you-... I wish I were joking.
- md2be 13y agoThe Court should provide machine (processor) level protection and rule that high level programming is obvious, in that it requires only routine experimentation. The challenge for the court is how to make room for machines whose novelty is a software control. I would argue that there should be a moving element test. Is there a software/hardware interface.
- mindvirus 13y agoFor software patents, I'm a fan of Richard Stallman's idea that software patents should require working, annotated source code be attached. I think that this would make it easier to compare ideas to those in previous patents. If patent filers chose to obfuscate their code, ideally their patent would be rejected for being unclear, or at least, they'd have a hard time defending their patent, as the difference between it and an alleged infringer would be quite large.
- harshreality 13y agoHow would you measure the size of the difference between the source code in the patent an the source code in an alleged patent-violating piece of code? If you were to require that the patent code and the alleged patent-violating source code were defined functionally and represented the exact same function (prove f(x) = g(x)), that would cut down the space of potential patent violations, but patent holders would scream that such a limitation is unfair. There would still be plenty of silly patents that would be patentable, and the same problems would exist as with the existing system: if you read patents to see whether your code violates one of them, you're on the hook for more damages. In any case where exact behavior is not critical, someone might be able to get around patents simply by changing the mechanism/computation slightly. I'm thinking of things like mpeg patents, where encoding and decoding techniques are constantly being tweaked, improved, and getting new settings. Would allowing an additional input to a function f(a, b, c, ..., m), i.e. f(a, b, c, ..., m, n) render it immune to a patent that hardcodes n as "5" in the function?
- Renaud 13y agoBut in that case the patent would probably offer little more protection than what copyright already provide? Why do we need software patents in the first place?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- vinceguidry 13y agoCopyrights and patents solve problems that look similar on the surface, but underneath are completely different. Copyright fixes the ease of theft of creative works, patents fix ease of theft of innovation. What constitutes theft of creativity? Stealing Mickey Mouse is an extremely concerted act, you have to present a character that is intended to fool people into thinking it's Mickey. But stealing innovation is much broader. Accompanying a software patent application with illustrative source code will not limit the scope of the patent to copying the code. It covers use of the method, not just the code. If someone, for instance, applied for a patent by describing an electronic game in which a player controlled character collects tokens inside a maze while computer-controlled characters tried to capture him, and accompanied his application with a full working copy of Pac-Man, then the patent would protect him against clones as well as direct copies. The point is not protecting against copies, that's the job of copyright. The point is the clones. Patent law is intended to safeguard innovation that one could say would not have happened otherwise. As to why we need software patents, recent articles have described the legal situation better than I can in a HN comment. Basically there's no legal distinction that has been drawn yet between software patents and other types of patents, one needs to be properly described and that's the job of the Supreme Court. At one point they were banned because they were insufficiently distinguishable from mathematical formulas, which definitely are unpatentable. Over the years, Congress decided that patents were getting too complex for the court system to properly adjudicate, so they created a separate court to hear patent cases. This court turned out to be friendly to big business and gradually opened the doors to software patents while the Supreme Court chose not to get involved.
- joelgrus 13y agoFor me, the ad at the bottom of the page is "How To Patent Your Idea".
- josaka 13y agoAn important distinction here is why the alleged invention should not be patentable: 1) because it is obvious in view of what was done before; or 2) solely because it is software, regardless of whether those in the field would regard it as a significant advance. The latter is a much bigger change from the status quo, but the article sort of conflates the two.
- codeoclock 13y agoCan we talk about paywall links on HN?
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoI think that's a good idea, but as a separate story.
- alisnic 13y agook.
- danford 13y agoAs someone who is currently residing in the year 2055 and has a neuro-prosthetic, I believe corporations and governments need access to our brain machine interfaces so that when we copy a patented or copy-righted idea to our memory they can safely delete it. How could people make money in my time if I can just remember their data? Support the Data Control Agency!
- RexRollman 13y agoI'm against software patents, but if we must have them, can't we at least make them shorter? The software world moves too fast for these kinds of patents to have the term lengths that they do.
- rayiner 13y agoThere's not a lot of debate about whether abstract ideas deserve patents. The consensus is that they don't. The debate is about how to figure out what is an abstract idea and what isn't. On one side, you have an abstract idea like "hedging settlement risk by using shadow accounts" (the patent at issue in CLS Bank v. Alice Corp). Almost everyone on the Fed. Cir. thought this shouldn't be patentable. On the other side, you have something like whatever algorithm is the subject of the gbatteries patent: http://www.gbatteries.com/technology/ http://www.gbatteries.com/technology/ ("Our patent-pending process maintains the lithium ion diffusion at optimal levels and eliminates concentration polarization and thus allows the Li-ions to be more uniformly extracted from or reinserted into the cathode materials."). That probably should be patentable, because while the charging algorithm might be simple to describe and could easily be reimplemented, it probably took a lot of R&D to design it in the first place. The question is, how do you draw the line between the two?
- HarryHirsch 13y agoThe question is, how do you draw the line between the two? This is what has traditionally been protected by trade secrets - the problem is that software is easier to reverse-engineer than real-life problems. The integrated circuit community has dealt with the issue ever since they were invented. My feeling is that the possibility of reverse-engineering has in fact spurred innovation in that field, and it's another reason why the no-poaching agreement between Apple and Google is so abhorrent, it did not only depress wages, it also slowed progress in the field. On the other hand, there is the issue of "gene patents". A pharmco takes out a patent on a gene, because you cannot patent abstract ideas, but what they are really doing is protecting the relationship between a gene and a medical condition. This is early discovery, and the price tag and timeline is that of a small space mission, several hundred millions and the better part of a decade. Once something is admitted to market the project is comparable to a flagship space mission, several billions and two decades of work. Patents are the wrong tool for that kind of job.
- ScottBurson 13y agoI persist in thinking that the problem is not with the subject matter test. A computer program is obviously a machine, just as the Federal Circuit and lots of other people intuitively assume. The problem is with the obviousness bar, which is far, far, far too low. I haven't studied the Alice patent, but let's take what the NYT says about it here: The issue in this case, Alice Corporation Pty. v. CLS Bank International, is whether using a computer to implement a well-established economic concept can be patented. [...] Alice Corporation obtained four American patents that cover a method of settling trades between investors in currency and other financial markets. The approach depends on a neutral middleman to make sure traders complete the transactions they have agreed to. [...] Alice Corporation has argued that its patents cover a specific computer-enabled system and method, not the fundamental idea of using intermediaries in financial settlements. But CLS Bank, which first sued Alice in an attempt to have its patents invalidated, says that Alice’s system does not add anything meaningful to a basic idea. The NYT Editorial Board is using this argument to urge the Supreme Court to rule that this patent's subject matter is inappropriate. But I think this can just as easily, if not more easily, be read as an argument that the invention in question is obvious. Taking some process that was previously done by hand and computerizing it, or some part of it, is, in this day and age, a paradigmatic example of something obvious. Again: I haven't studied the actual patent. I just think it's unfortunate that everyone is talking about this as a subject matter problem, when we have a screaming obviousness problem that the Federal Circuit is right at the center of. I want the Supreme Court to tell the Federal Circuit that mere novelty does not entail nonobviousness. In such a highly generative field as software, which has an uncountable number of applications, simply coming up with another one contributes little or nothing to the state of the art. If someone else who encountered the same requirements could implement a system to satisfy them just as easily before reading a putative patent as after reading it, there was no intellectual contribution and the patent should not be valid. This was clearly the intent behind the patent system at its inception. It should be restored.
- kenster07 13y agoThere is clearly no reason for software patents. To look at this issue from another angle, consider the following. What was the reason for creating the patent system in the first place? To give people an incentive to invent new things: if someone invests the time in coming up with something novel, the legal system would give a temporary monopoly in return. But in today's world, clearly one would imagine the vast majority, if not all software would have been invented as is, without the incentives that patent protection provides. When one contrasts this with the well-known downsides of software patents, the outcome should be clear: abolish them.
- jordigh 13y ago> What was the reason for creating the patent system in the first place? To give people an incentive to invent new things: No, the point of the patent system is not to incentivise invention. The point of patents is to destroy trade secrets. The word "patent" means "open". The whole point of patents is increase society's knowledge of how to do things. People invent with or without patents. What they don't always do without patents is to say how those inventions work. The bargain inventors make with patents is, tell us how you did it, and in exchange we promise to not compete with you for a while. This is an awesome patent: http://www.google.com/patents/US5255452 http://www.google.com/patents/US5255452 This is what patents are supposed to be about: a magician revealing his tricks. Without the patent system, Michael Jackson may have taken his idea to the grave. The problem is that almost none of the people patenting software are magicians.
- cookingrobot 13y agoThat sounds good in theory - but do you see this actually happening in practice? I've filed dozens of patents, but haven't ever looked into a competitor's software patent to see how they do things. Many companies instruct their engineers not to ever read patents because it can work against you in a lawsuit.
- cdash 13y agoThis is not an argument for software patents but it is not necessary to actually read the patents yourself for you to benefit from the knowledge they provide. You could read about an patented algorithm in a wikipedia article, a blog, or in an academic paper.
- diminoten 13y agoAnd they don't get them. Business methods get patents. Why is this basic, fundamental concept not understood by people who purport to know about "software" patents?
- grifpete 13y agoI can't read the original article because it is behind a paywall...BUT...abstract ideas do not get patents. This is not my opinion, it is fact. Look it up.
- chrismcb 13y agoYou do understand what the current lawsuit is over, right? It boils down to someone has patented an idea, the other guy says "you can't do that." The original pantentee is saying "but it is an implementation running on a computer"
- grifpete 13y agoAs I made plain - I couldn't read the original article. But let me see if I understand you correctly. a) person A has a patent (which incidentally as a matter of law cannot be for just an abstract idea) b) person B challenges the patent - I am not sure what the grounds for this challenge are because you don't specify them. Is it because B is claiming that the patent was falsely awarded because it was no more than an abstract idea? c) person A disputes the challenge by pointing out that it isn't abstract. If this interpretation of your comment is correct then I don't see how it is in conflict with my observation that abstract ideas can't be patented.
- mikegioia 13y agoI'm not sure what you're talking about, but you really shouldn't comment without reading the article. Both comments you made here aren't really relevant mainly because you could only read the headline.
- JosephHatfield 13y agoAnyone care to conjecture the practical effects of invalidating software patents beyond saving everyone involved time and money to litigate those patents? It may be valuable for that reason alone, but I'm trying to imagine a world where suddenly, overnight, all software patents are eliminated.
- netcan 13y agoPatent systems are bad because they deal with concepts which are too vague. I don't think we can fix that. Lets leave aside economic implications for a moment. What is an invention? Is it really different to a discovery. There is no good way to distinguish between invention and discovery because they're not distinct concepts. Distinctions are semantic, even in an archetypical example of patentable invention like Edison's lightbulb. Inventing a lightbulb is discovering that electricity can heat a filament, it emits light when hot and can be prevented from burning by placing it in a vacuum. These are exactly the types of problems the law chokes on.
- badman_ting 13y agoExcept for the patents that huge organizations already own, right? So they can go on using those to beat the crap out of each other and crush threatening offerings from smaller firms. Pick up the ladder after you climb it. Sweet.
- sushirain 13y agoWhat are you saying, that the judges should allow this patent? The solution is to make laws that forbid software patents. And if the old patents can be abolished, the better.
- sushirain 13y agoAbolish software patents. A world without software patents is a world of free and faster innovation, of equal opportunity, and of open and cheap access to technology. Firms that have patentable knowledge are strong enough to not need governmental protection. Inventing something before others gives one technical advantage and time to make profit ahead of others. Too much effort is spent on the patent process, that could be spent directly on innovation. In today's software world, 20 years of monopoly is like 100 years of monopoly when the constitution was signed. The solution should probably come from the legislative branch.
- javindo 13y agoOne of the main arguments for patents is just the fact that some things require a bit of capital to get going and what is to stop some venture capitalist from taking pitches, telling the person it's a rubbish idea then going off and funding the idea himself?
- sushirain 13y agoPatents won't help the engineer anyway, patents are made to protect the venture capitalist who invests the significant amount of money required to file the patent. That's the difference between the "inventor" and the "owner" as in patent law.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoWith all due respect, I don't think you actually understand what patents do. Every year we hear of companies where people have invested much of their time and energy in giving life to an inventive idea or process, which at some point is acquired by another company in exchange for cash, stock, or both. And those negotiations would often not even start if the engineers building their idea were not able to protect their work using a patent. That single process is the difference between an acquirer taking all of their work and just re-implmenting, now that its clear what the issues are, and giving them nothing. And that company having to negotiate with the engineers about their work and pay them fairly for it if they want it. Patents have not always existed, and it is useful to see what it was like when they didn't exist to understand what it is they protect. That said, patent administration has not kept up with technology, although if you've been involved with the patent office as long as I have you will know it has gotten much better at figuring out what should and what should not be patentable. Further, the judiciary is getting much more in tune to the abusive nature that people wielding bad patents can have on an industry. It is getting better, and the people who need to make it better (the Supreme court in the US and the 'patent' court) are motivated to make it better and have been making changes along those lines. Not a quickly as some might like but being quick in complex areas of law is often dangerous so some caution is advised.
- argumentum 13y agoAbolish Intellectual Property. Period. IP's time (if there ever was one) is over. There is no benefit for real inventors and artists anymore, merely for mega corporations to use the levers of government to maximize their profits at the expense of humanity and freedom. Nothing "intellectual" should be property. I'm not against corporations or even mega corporations. I think they'd do better for themselves (and their users, more importantly) if they didn't waste years and $billions battling each other and bullying startups and individuals over IP. Instead, they should just focus of making better things. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. - Thomas Jefferson
- Snail_Commando 13y ago> Abolish Intellectual Property. Period. > IP's time (if there ever was one) is over. There is no benefit for real inventors and artists anymore, merely for mega corporations to use the levers of government to maximize their profits at the expense of humanity and freedom. Nothing "intellectual" should be property. > I'm not against corporations or even mega corporations. I think they'd do better for themselves (and their users, more importantly) if they didn't waste years and $billions battling each other and bullying startups and individuals over IP. Instead, they should just focus of making better things. > [Quotation] This sounds like a noble rallying cry but is ultimately misguided. How does this system reconcile with the incentive structures inherent in pharmaceutical research and drug design?
- linuxhansl 13y agoAmen. The most important part about patents to remember why they exist. Why would congress grant a legal monopoly to anybody? The reason is (or should be) to protect any investment that went into the invention; for the benefit of society as a whole - to make sure expensive research is still going to happen. An idea does not cost anything. It might have some value if nobody had that idea before, but the idea would have been had anyway regardless of any legal protection. It might suck for the individual having the idea, but society is not served by protecting ideas that came without cost. Copyright on the other hand is useful and needed, it protects a specific expression of an idea. If you translated software patents to books, a patent would be like a legal monopoly on "science fiction stories", or "crime stories". Whereas copyright protects a specific store - as it should. Other folks are free to write other science fiction or crime stories. Anyway... I am not holding my breath. Also there are so many patents already out there, these will likely not be invalidated retroactively.
- grandinj 13y agoPatents were not there to protect investment. That is a post-hoc reason. The original justification was to encourage inventors to share their ideas instead of hiding them. This was at a time when reverse engineering something was a to harder, so it actually made sense.
- alexqgb 13y agoUm, right. And how did the law intend to "encourage inventors to share their ideas"? That's right, by protecting the investments made in their origination. That's it.
- Hermel 13y agoIn that case, one should require working source code to be filed along with software patents.
- axman6 13y agoWhy? A patent lacks full disclosure if it doesn't have enough information for a person skilled in the art to reproduce the invention; it must be enabling. Patents are not about specific implementations of an idea, they are about the idea itself. IMO, patents are much more accessable when they are written in plain language than in a specific source language because the ideas may be understood at the higher level that the patent protects and allows for implementation in any language. Do you think that pharma companies should have to provide working versions of their drugs along with their applications? They usually do not have a fully working implementation at the time of application, and won't have anything they can prove works for many years after the necessary regulatory testing is finished. The same for huge mining equipment, it might take years to actually manufacture something that works, but the invention exists once it has been invented, not produced. Why should software be any different? We've grown used to a world where many people freely share their software, but that is their choice, not a moral obligation, just like any field of science. Lastly, one thing that really irks me about the software patents debate is the constant dissing of patents because the idea is obvious. Of course it's obvious once you know the solution, but that's ex post facto analysis. Invention comes from discovering the solution, not from the complexity of the solution itself. I personally feel that things like the slide to unlock patent are more deserving of an innovation patent than a full patent, so there are definitely cases where things have gone wrong. But I do not believe the majority of cases fall into this category.
- yummyfajitas 13y agoI have a BS patent. It's a patent on the "conceptual system" (note: not a software patent) of using a Mechwarrior/Sims/Diablo style character builder interface plus standard search engine techniques to build a fashion search engine. I refused to sign it but somehow the patent was granted anyway. Also included in the patent is the concept of paying humans to use the system to do searches for you (i.e., email a photo of shoes you like, someone will google it for you). http://www.google.com/patents/US20130166591 http://www.google.com/patents/US20130166591 If a patent is granted in spite of being obviously derivative to the point that the inventor refuses to sign it, something is broken.
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- novaleaf 13y agoCome on, if you went through the process, you should know that patents (for right or wrong) can be derivative, as long as they apply the existing ideas to new/novel situations. The granting of your patent doesn't mean you'd be able to successfully sue someone for paid searches, however you would have stronger grounds if they were executing paid searches on a fashion search engine with a character builder interface.
- pwg 13y agoActually, what you have is a "patent application". It is not yet a patent, although according to the Patent Offices public pair system (http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair) it has had a "Non Final Action Mailed" on 2014-01-14. So it is being examined. Looking at the rejection on the pair system, all the claims of the application have been rejected during this go-round.
- fiatmoney 13y ago"Deserve" is a framing that wraps together a moral claim with what is intended to be a purely utilitarian calculus (whether a class of patent "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts"). As soon as you start framing things in terms of who "deserves" what, the side who can generate greater pathos wins.
- matthewsinclair 13y agoAs a holder of a number of patents (pending and granted), I'm obviously conflicted here. My early patents came from my days at Nokia Research Centre where there was a "patent quota". Yep, we had to come up with a set number of patents per year, regardless of the quality. My views on patents were (subsequently) very strongly influenced by this paper: "Against Intellectual Property" by Brian Martin: http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/95psa.html http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/95psa.html I would encourage anyone with an opinion on the topic to take a look at it. I'm not sure I agree 100% with everything in there, but the reasoning is very good. These days, I'm much more in the "abolish software patents" camp than I used to be. The only valid reason I can think to have one now is for "freedom to operate", but I can attest from bitter experience, that simply doing a defensive publication of the core idea is significantly cheaper than obtaining a patent on the pretext of freedom to operate. In any case, a system that necessitates spending upwards of US$100k to obtain freedom to operate, has something diabolically wrong with it.
- EGreg 13y agoMake it easier to find prior art and make the loser of a patent suit pay for the suit. That will prevent the most egregious practice of patent trolls bullying small companies into settling befofe the case goes to trial. If the cost of losing a patent litigation was higher, trolling would become economically riskier.
- axman6 13y ago> Make it easier to find prior art How, exactly?
- EGreg 13y agoUSPTO has partnered with askpatents.com of StackExchange fame I was at the roundtable where they announced it: http://www.uspto.gov/patents/init_events/sw_partnership_20130227_nyc.jsp http://www.uspto.gov/patents/init_events/sw_partnership_2013...