4 ms·

A Math Geek's Ride to the High Court in Landmark Patent Fight

15 points by grellas 17y ago

timwiseman 17y ago
This very much makes me think about the line: "One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general. " from http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html . While it sounds like this dispute is more about the mathematical algorithm, that is very little different from software, and while the article never explicitly stated it I very much suspect they put their algorithm into machine code. Things like this make me almost think I should be going into law. This will truly matter to a large number of companies, and probably more so to start ups than to larger more established companies that already have market share.
- tomjen2 17y ago
  PG is wrong on the subject of patents though: the problem with software patents is that if you are building a car the price of having a lawyer work out if you are violating a couple patents is a lot less than 1%, but it would properly make it many thousand times more expensive for a startup to develop a piece of software (assuming that we don't count the founders time). And unlike physical patents it costs nothing to produce the software once the innovation has been made, so there is no need for a small guy to have something to sell to a big company to ensure the innovator is getting something for his efforts.
  - camccann 17y ago
    pg is completely correct regarding "principled" arguments against software patents. There's no consistent way to assert "temporary property rights to ideas about physical devices are fine, but owning ideas about math is morally wrong". If you (quite sensibly) throw out the obfuscating language about morality and property rights, however, it's certainly possible to assert "temporary, government-enforced monopolies on ideas of this type will encourage innovation, but government-granted monopolies on ideas of that other type will hinder progress and encourage misuse". This is a statement of factual nature, that may be correct or incorrect, but is not logically inconsistent. It also makes it more obvious that patents, despite being called "IP", are not actually about property at all--they're a regulatory hack, the government deliberately distorting the market with the goal of subsidizing particular behaviors, namely innovation and invention.
  - timwiseman 17y ago
    PG is wrong on the subject of patents though: the problem with software patents is that if you are building a car the price of having a lawyer work out if you are violating a couple patents is a lot less than 1%, but it would properly make it many thousand times more expensive for a startup to develop a piece of software (assuming that we don't count the founders time). PG has said in other essays that it often makes sense for a startup to not worry about whether what they are trying to do until they are sued. If they are still tiny it is unlikely they will be sued even if they are infinging, and if they are large then they will have the resources to either defend against the suit or make a reasonable settlement. But that is a practical matter. None of that changes the fact that it borders on logically inconsistent to argue for patents of machines while against the patenting of algorithms (and a program is nothing but an algorithm that has been properly formatted).
- DannoHung 17y ago
  I'm against patents in general. I think they were a great idea for a time when a product could be easily taken apart and reimplemented based on looking at its physical components. Now that many patents are based on protecting the right of someone who expresses a simple concept with or without any effort in implementation, I think they've lost any meaningful value they had.
  - camccann 17y ago
    I think they were a great idea for a time when a product could be easily taken apart and reimplemented based on looking at its physical components. You've actually got it somewhat backwards--patents were in large part originally motivated by inventions where reverse engineering was not possible--metalworking techniques, for instance. By granting a temporary monopoly, patents would encourage inventors to publish their ideas. Otherwise, to protect their advantage, inventors would keep their methods secret, preventing others from improving on them and eventually taking the secret to the grave with them. In that situation, I think anyone would be hard-pressed to argue that patents were a bad idea.
anonjon 17y ago
This whole debate kind of seems like a livelock with no obvious solution. If you make patents too powerful, you get people 'patent trolling' and producing a lot of vague patents with no intentions of implementing/putting to use/selling the IP involved; instead hoping to be able to sue someone for violating it. If you make patents too weak, people invest heavily in reverse engineering instead of innovation/invention and take other people's ideas and make money off of them. I find this to be a very frustrating and disheartening position to be in. I almost think that there is something wrong with the idea of patents (not the idea of intellectual property) because it seems that they fail at both ends of the spectrum with regards to protecting people who actually produce useful things for our society and continue to push us forward.
- sp332 17y ago
  Isn't reverse engineering also protected against by patents?
  - anonjon 17y ago
    Sure, of course. I guess my point is: Think of the patent debate as a continuum where at one end you have 'strong patents' and at the other end you have 'weak patents'. At the strong patents end you have a prevalence of IP trolling. At the weak/no patents end you have a prevalence of reverse engineering and heavily reduced incentive to innovate (might as well just copy and produce/market cheaper/better). IP trolling and reverse engineering are kind of edge-case exploits. It isn't clear to me that anything in the middle of the continuum (defends against both edge cases) is really consistent with what we think of as a patent, or that there is anything in the middle that is actually possible enforce in a fair and consistent matter.
  - grellas 17y ago
    Yes, it is. The patent system is predicated on the idea of disclosure (indeed, the very word "patent" derives from a Latin word meaning "open"). The idea is that inventors will add their innovative knowledge to the public domain, for which they will receive a temporary monopoly on its commercial exploitation. Most proprietary software is protected by trade secret laws, which are vulnerable to reverse engineering. Patented software is not, since it has already been disclosed in the public record and is nonetheless protected during the term of the patent by virtue of its monopoly status.
modeless 17y ago
"Our revenues are down millions of dollars because we don't have the patent" and the royalty stream that would have resulted, he said. "We have no market power. That's the essence of it. You can't protect your interests." He said competitors have entered the market, and utilities themselves have "reverse-engineered" WeatherWise processes You mean you can't get a government-backed monopoly on your product, so you actually have to compete?! With competitors who charge lower prices?! Cry me a river.
- ovi256 17y ago
  With competitors that do not have their liability of having funded years of research to advance the field, but have simply copied the idea after, often by reverse-engineering, as the TFA states.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Which is proof positive that it does not warrant a patent, since apparently having access to the input and the output data is enough to re-create the box in the middle. Besides that, such a big fuss over being able to 'bill a constant amount' month-to-month, it really is nothing but a business method, no matter how intricate the computations behind the scenes. It's a convenience at best, and one that I would assume would be re-creatable by any number of mathematicians given the assignment.
    - timwiseman 17y ago
      It's a convenience at best, and one that I would assume would be re-creatable by any number of mathematicians given the assignment. But just about any patentable idea is recreatable by experts in that field if they are given that assignment. I do not claim to know whether or not this particular patent should have been granted, but I do not see why the fact that it can reverse engineered should be relevant.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        Reverse-engineering and writing a spec is one of the ways you can legally get around trade secrets and copyright infringement claims, so if the patent does not stand it is very relevant indeed. Clean room development is usually (but not always) not enough to get around a patent though.

15 points by grellas 17y ago

This very much makes me think about the line: "One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general. " from http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html . While it sounds like this dispute is more about the mathematical algorithm, that is very little different from software, and while the article never explicitly stated it I very much suspect they put their algorithm into machine code. Things like this make me almost think I should be going into law. This will truly matter to a large number of companies, and probably more so to start ups than to larger more established companies that already have market share.

tomjen2 17y ago
PG is wrong on the subject of patents though: the problem with software patents is that if you are building a car the price of having a lawyer work out if you are violating a couple patents is a lot less than 1%, but it would properly make it many thousand times more expensive for a startup to develop a piece of software (assuming that we don't count the founders time). And unlike physical patents it costs nothing to produce the software once the innovation has been made, so there is no need for a small guy to have something to sell to a big company to ensure the innovator is getting something for his efforts.
- camccann 17y ago
  pg is completely correct regarding "principled" arguments against software patents. There's no consistent way to assert "temporary property rights to ideas about physical devices are fine, but owning ideas about math is morally wrong". If you (quite sensibly) throw out the obfuscating language about morality and property rights, however, it's certainly possible to assert "temporary, government-enforced monopolies on ideas of this type will encourage innovation, but government-granted monopolies on ideas of that other type will hinder progress and encourage misuse". This is a statement of factual nature, that may be correct or incorrect, but is not logically inconsistent. It also makes it more obvious that patents, despite being called "IP", are not actually about property at all--they're a regulatory hack, the government deliberately distorting the market with the goal of subsidizing particular behaviors, namely innovation and invention.
- timwiseman 17y ago
  PG is wrong on the subject of patents though: the problem with software patents is that if you are building a car the price of having a lawyer work out if you are violating a couple patents is a lot less than 1%, but it would properly make it many thousand times more expensive for a startup to develop a piece of software (assuming that we don't count the founders time). PG has said in other essays that it often makes sense for a startup to not worry about whether what they are trying to do until they are sued. If they are still tiny it is unlikely they will be sued even if they are infinging, and if they are large then they will have the resources to either defend against the suit or make a reasonable settlement. But that is a practical matter. None of that changes the fact that it borders on logically inconsistent to argue for patents of machines while against the patenting of algorithms (and a program is nothing but an algorithm that has been properly formatted).
DannoHung 17y ago
I'm against patents in general. I think they were a great idea for a time when a product could be easily taken apart and reimplemented based on looking at its physical components. Now that many patents are based on protecting the right of someone who expresses a simple concept with or without any effort in implementation, I think they've lost any meaningful value they had.
- camccann 17y ago
  I think they were a great idea for a time when a product could be easily taken apart and reimplemented based on looking at its physical components. You've actually got it somewhat backwards--patents were in large part originally motivated by inventions where reverse engineering was not possible--metalworking techniques, for instance. By granting a temporary monopoly, patents would encourage inventors to publish their ideas. Otherwise, to protect their advantage, inventors would keep their methods secret, preventing others from improving on them and eventually taking the secret to the grave with them. In that situation, I think anyone would be hard-pressed to argue that patents were a bad idea.

anonjon 17y ago

This whole debate kind of seems like a livelock with no obvious solution. If you make patents too powerful, you get people 'patent trolling' and producing a lot of vague patents with no intentions of implementing/putting to use/selling the IP involved; instead hoping to be able to sue someone for violating it. If you make patents too weak, people invest heavily in reverse engineering instead of innovation/invention and take other people's ideas and make money off of them. I find this to be a very frustrating and disheartening position to be in. I almost think that there is something wrong with the idea of patents (not the idea of intellectual property) because it seems that they fail at both ends of the spectrum with regards to protecting people who actually produce useful things for our society and continue to push us forward.

sp332 17y ago
Isn't reverse engineering also protected against by patents?
- anonjon 17y ago
  Sure, of course. I guess my point is: Think of the patent debate as a continuum where at one end you have 'strong patents' and at the other end you have 'weak patents'. At the strong patents end you have a prevalence of IP trolling. At the weak/no patents end you have a prevalence of reverse engineering and heavily reduced incentive to innovate (might as well just copy and produce/market cheaper/better). IP trolling and reverse engineering are kind of edge-case exploits. It isn't clear to me that anything in the middle of the continuum (defends against both edge cases) is really consistent with what we think of as a patent, or that there is anything in the middle that is actually possible enforce in a fair and consistent matter.
- grellas 17y ago
  Yes, it is. The patent system is predicated on the idea of disclosure (indeed, the very word "patent" derives from a Latin word meaning "open"). The idea is that inventors will add their innovative knowledge to the public domain, for which they will receive a temporary monopoly on its commercial exploitation. Most proprietary software is protected by trade secret laws, which are vulnerable to reverse engineering. Patented software is not, since it has already been disclosed in the public record and is nonetheless protected during the term of the patent by virtue of its monopoly status.

modeless 17y ago

"Our revenues are down millions of dollars because we don't have the patent" and the royalty stream that would have resulted, he said. "We have no market power. That's the essence of it. You can't protect your interests." He said competitors have entered the market, and utilities themselves have "reverse-engineered" WeatherWise processes You mean you can't get a government-backed monopoly on your product, so you actually have to compete?! With competitors who charge lower prices?! Cry me a river.

ovi256 17y ago
With competitors that do not have their liability of having funded years of research to advance the field, but have simply copied the idea after, often by reverse-engineering, as the TFA states.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Which is proof positive that it does not warrant a patent, since apparently having access to the input and the output data is enough to re-create the box in the middle. Besides that, such a big fuss over being able to 'bill a constant amount' month-to-month, it really is nothing but a business method, no matter how intricate the computations behind the scenes. It's a convenience at best, and one that I would assume would be re-creatable by any number of mathematicians given the assignment.
  - timwiseman 17y ago
    It's a convenience at best, and one that I would assume would be re-creatable by any number of mathematicians given the assignment. But just about any patentable idea is recreatable by experts in that field if they are given that assignment. I do not claim to know whether or not this particular patent should have been granted, but I do not see why the fact that it can reverse engineered should be relevant.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      Reverse-engineering and writing a spec is one of the ways you can legally get around trade secrets and copyright infringement claims, so if the patent does not stand it is very relevant indeed. Clean room development is usually (but not always) not enough to get around a patent though.