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Oh, I see binarybits is at it again! Just a few corrections: 1. Android makers don't necessarily pay Microsoft for patents on things that were invented in Wind

Oh, I see binarybits is at it again! Just a few corrections: 1. Android makers don't necessarily pay Microsoft for patents on things that were invented in Windows Phone. They pay licenses for patents that relate to either a) computers in general, or b) that you could do on mobile devices in general. Examples include the infamous FAT patent, patents on low-level concurrency primitives, and patents on synchronizing calendar clients. "Good" patents? I don't know. But it's disingenuous to compare Android to Windows Phone because a) it implies Android is licensing stuff that came later, and b) from a product that is inferior, insinuating these patents are low quality. If I were uncharitable, I'd say Google ordered a hit piece after all the love Microsoft has been getting the past couple of days! 2. The "billions of dollars spent on patents instead of hiring engineers" argument is a red herring. Firstly, these companies cannot find enough "good" engineers to hire, which is why they're lobbying for more H1s. Is their bar too high? Maybe. Or they may justly be concerned about allowing a "bozo explosion". And even if they did hire more engineers, they still have billions of dollars left over. Patents are designed to be a risk to those that would not reward inventions they practice, and reducing risk to the company is a fine way of spending that money, 3. Using these patents to crush future competition? These companies can more easily crush competition by buying them up rather than suing them. A 2009 study found only a small fraction of lawsuits involve large companies suing smaller ones: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1396319 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1396319 - and I would bet none of the large tech companies would risk the PR fallout. 4. There is no "patent litigation crisis", just increased media coverage of litigation that is more or less in line with historical rates. Less than 2% of active patents are ever asserted and only a fraction of a percent ever make it to trial. See studies by Mark Lemley, for instance. The "smartphone wars" were just a drop in the bucket of all other patent litigation that happens. In fact there were higher rates of litigation in history when major technical developments happened: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id= http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=

chrisbennet 11y ago
Good info. I have a different take on #2. "2. The "billions of dollars spent on patents instead of hiring engineers" argument is a red herring. Firstly, these companies cannot find enough "good" engineers to hire, which is why they're lobbying for more H1s. " They can't find enough good engineers at below market price. If you could find a good engineer if you paid 1 million dollars, than the "market price" lies somewhere between what you are offering and 1 millions dollars i.e. the price at which you can purchase a commodity on the market. If I can't find enough gold at $1000 an ounce I wouldn't be correct in saying that "I can't find gold". (The market now is ~$1200 oz.)
- the_why_of_y 11y ago
  It is particularly interesting if you compare the average salaries between software engineers and patent attorneys in the US. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-software-engineer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,2_IN1_KO3,20.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-software-engineer-salar... http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-patent-attorney-salary-SRCH_IL.0,2_IN1_KO3,18.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-patent-attorney-salary-... How many more "good engineers" would suddenly be found if they were offered 58 % higher compensation?
msl09 11y ago
>...I'd say Google ordered a hit piece after all the love Microsoft has been getting the past couple of days! Considering that EEF have been hitting that same note for quite a while, I would find that unlikely >These companies can more easily crush competition by buying them up rather than suing them. The fear that is being currently generated is that small companies will start choosing to not deal with the problems of running a tech business by themselves since the risk and cost of dealing with litigations is so high. That scenario would ensure that the small companies can never grow to be become the future large corporations. > I would bet none of the large tech companies would risk the PR fallout. There is not a single week that Microsoft does no do that. The reason that they are able to get away with it without a massive media backslash is that no data about what actual patents that are being infringed is released to the public. >http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id= http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id= Your last paper links to nothing. Also please avoid overusing slangs as it makes your posts hard to read.
- throwawaykf05 11y ago
  The EFF is not an unbiased source of information. They have an agenda and they are not afraid to embellish their stories to support it. They're have been quite a few posts on HN calling out this behavior over the past few months on EFF threads. 2. Sorry about the link... Must have copied it wrong. This should be the right link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2503140 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2503140 3. I'm not sure what you mean by "slang" - could you give an example in my post.
schnable 11y ago
Vox getting it wrong, shocking.
sbov 11y ago
4.There is no "patent litigation crisis", just increased media coverage of litigation that is more or less in line with historical rates. From reading that paper, the raw numbers look bleak to me - pretty much all of them doubling over the last 10 years. My only hope is that the AIA is actually causing the inflation in patent lawsuits the paper claims. There does seem to be some evidence in it that it is. I also don't find looking at percent of patents in force very useful. Even if that number remains flat, the number of patents in force increases. What I'm interested in is how many businesses are getting screwed over. If that percent remains flat but we had a huge upswing in patents granted it would be tragic, and it would be hidden behind the 2% number that doesn't really matter. Also, "historic rates" goes back to 1923. The software sector has not existed for nearly that long, and making comparisons to a very different economy doesn't seem that useful.
- throwawaykf05 11y ago
  The numbers may be bleak when viewed in isolation, but taken as a percentage of all active patents, the number of patents asserted in lawsuits have been remarkably constant. The more recent spike, as you surmised, can be attributed to the AIA joinder rules. You may worry that the spike in number of active patents is unhealthy, but again, there are studies that indicate that this is due to increased innovation than just over-patenting: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=556630 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=556630 As for number of patents getting "screwed over", that is a very difficult metric to measure, simply because "screwed over" is ill-defined. If you can define "screwed over" I might be able to find a paper that tries to measure that. (Seriously, SSRN appears to a number of papers on all kinds of crazy topics.) The Katznelson paper is not about just software and patents. By "historic" rates, the paper means revolutions in technology similar to those wrought by the computer revolution. Similar litigation rates have been observed in the past when major new technologies were introduced, such as radio and microelectronics. They are not the same thing technically, but the potential for new applications that these new technologies introduced is similar.
Animats 11y ago
"Examples include the infamous FAT patent, patents on low-level concurrency primitives, and patents on synchronizing calendar clients." What "patents on low-level concurrency primitives"? Those go back to the 1970s. The Microsoft FAT file system patents have expired. The Microsoft calendar synchronization patent is getting close to expiration.
- throwawaykf05 11y ago
  I was surprised to find this one too, but it was used in a recent lawsuit against Kyocera [1]: http://www.google.com/patents/USRE40989 http://www.google.com/patents/USRE40989 That, to me, looks like a solution to one of Bloomberg's interview questions, so it's surprising to me that with a 1999 priority date, Microsoft's lawyers did not find enough prior art to keep it from being asserted. (Generally when you assert a patent, if you're smart, you'll conduct another prior art search to make sure it sticks.) But in general, independent of the quality of the patents themselves, the article [1] indicates that none of those are specific to Windows Phone specifically. 1. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/09/microsoft-drops-patent-hammer-on-kyocera/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/09/microsoft-drop...

chrisbennet 11y ago

Good info. I have a different take on #2. "2. The "billions of dollars spent on patents instead of hiring engineers" argument is a red herring. Firstly, these companies cannot find enough "good" engineers to hire, which is why they're lobbying for more H1s. " They can't find enough good engineers at below market price. If you could find a good engineer if you paid 1 million dollars, than the "market price" lies somewhere between what you are offering and 1 millions dollars i.e. the price at which you can purchase a commodity on the market. If I can't find enough gold at $1000 an ounce I wouldn't be correct in saying that "I can't find gold". (The market now is ~$1200 oz.)

the_why_of_y 11y ago
It is particularly interesting if you compare the average salaries between software engineers and patent attorneys in the US. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-software-engineer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,2_IN1_KO3,20.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-software-engineer-salar... http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-patent-attorney-salary-SRCH_IL.0,2_IN1_KO3,18.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-patent-attorney-salary-... How many more "good engineers" would suddenly be found if they were offered 58 % higher compensation?

msl09 11y ago

>...I'd say Google ordered a hit piece after all the love Microsoft has been getting the past couple of days! Considering that EEF have been hitting that same note for quite a while, I would find that unlikely >These companies can more easily crush competition by buying them up rather than suing them. The fear that is being currently generated is that small companies will start choosing to not deal with the problems of running a tech business by themselves since the risk and cost of dealing with litigations is so high. That scenario would ensure that the small companies can never grow to be become the future large corporations. > I would bet none of the large tech companies would risk the PR fallout. There is not a single week that Microsoft does no do that. The reason that they are able to get away with it without a massive media backslash is that no data about what actual patents that are being infringed is released to the public. >http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id= http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id= Your last paper links to nothing. Also please avoid overusing slangs as it makes your posts hard to read.

throwawaykf05 11y ago
The EFF is not an unbiased source of information. They have an agenda and they are not afraid to embellish their stories to support it. They're have been quite a few posts on HN calling out this behavior over the past few months on EFF threads. 2. Sorry about the link... Must have copied it wrong. This should be the right link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2503140 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2503140 3. I'm not sure what you mean by "slang" - could you give an example in my post.

schnable 11y ago

Vox getting it wrong, shocking.

sbov 11y ago

4.There is no "patent litigation crisis", just increased media coverage of litigation that is more or less in line with historical rates. From reading that paper, the raw numbers look bleak to me - pretty much all of them doubling over the last 10 years. My only hope is that the AIA is actually causing the inflation in patent lawsuits the paper claims. There does seem to be some evidence in it that it is. I also don't find looking at percent of patents in force very useful. Even if that number remains flat, the number of patents in force increases. What I'm interested in is how many businesses are getting screwed over. If that percent remains flat but we had a huge upswing in patents granted it would be tragic, and it would be hidden behind the 2% number that doesn't really matter. Also, "historic rates" goes back to 1923. The software sector has not existed for nearly that long, and making comparisons to a very different economy doesn't seem that useful.

throwawaykf05 11y ago
The numbers may be bleak when viewed in isolation, but taken as a percentage of all active patents, the number of patents asserted in lawsuits have been remarkably constant. The more recent spike, as you surmised, can be attributed to the AIA joinder rules. You may worry that the spike in number of active patents is unhealthy, but again, there are studies that indicate that this is due to increased innovation than just over-patenting: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=556630 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=556630 As for number of patents getting "screwed over", that is a very difficult metric to measure, simply because "screwed over" is ill-defined. If you can define "screwed over" I might be able to find a paper that tries to measure that. (Seriously, SSRN appears to a number of papers on all kinds of crazy topics.) The Katznelson paper is not about just software and patents. By "historic" rates, the paper means revolutions in technology similar to those wrought by the computer revolution. Similar litigation rates have been observed in the past when major new technologies were introduced, such as radio and microelectronics. They are not the same thing technically, but the potential for new applications that these new technologies introduced is similar.

Animats 11y ago

"Examples include the infamous FAT patent, patents on low-level concurrency primitives, and patents on synchronizing calendar clients." What "patents on low-level concurrency primitives"? Those go back to the 1970s. The Microsoft FAT file system patents have expired. The Microsoft calendar synchronization patent is getting close to expiration.

throwawaykf05 11y ago
I was surprised to find this one too, but it was used in a recent lawsuit against Kyocera [1]: http://www.google.com/patents/USRE40989 http://www.google.com/patents/USRE40989 That, to me, looks like a solution to one of Bloomberg's interview questions, so it's surprising to me that with a 1999 priority date, Microsoft's lawyers did not find enough prior art to keep it from being asserted. (Generally when you assert a patent, if you're smart, you'll conduct another prior art search to make sure it sticks.) But in general, independent of the quality of the patents themselves, the article [1] indicates that none of those are specific to Windows Phone specifically. 1. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/09/microsoft-drops-patent-hammer-on-kyocera/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/09/microsoft-drop...