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This is literally what's wrong with the patent system. Discouraging people from exploring ideas and building things 'because its patented' is fundamentally wro
by shadowmint 11y ago
This is literally what's wrong with the patent system.
Discouraging people from exploring ideas and building things 'because its patented' is fundamentally wrong.
I bet there are a million patents out there for 'automated face replacement'. I just hope very very much, that somewhere there is some prior art that makes them all completely worthless and bankrupts whomever is making any money from them.
- JonFish85 11y ago>> Discouraging people from exploring ideas and building things 'because its patented' is fundamentally wrong. Who's discouraging? Being aware that it's highly patented doesn't mean you shouldn't play around with it, it just means that you probably shouldn't be trying to make money off of someone else's work.
- Joeri 11y agoThe thing with software patents though is that most of the time they've preventing you from making money off of your own work, just because someone at one point did that same work first. Patents are needed in industries where r&d is expensive enough to warrant protecting inventors for a sizeable time so they can recoup their investment. Software r&d is too cheap for patents on software to do anything but harm. As a quick rule of thumb, whenever people are being advised never to look at patents, as they are in software, that's when those patents do more harm than good.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agohttp://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Galambosianism http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Galambosianism
- jlarocco 11y agoI agree with the first part, and disagree with the second part of your statement. Just because there are patents doesn't mean a person can't play around and even try to make money off of their work. It just means they need to do a little bit of investigation before trying to monetize their work.
- bsenftner 11y agoThe automated face replacement patents begin in the late 70's. By '05 the process had to be entire in-motion actor replacement to be patentable. To some degree, I'd say patents force people to work in uncharted areas.
- daveloyall 11y agoYou won't believe this one weird trick to save money on a network of local nightly news stations!
- rasz_pl 11y agoface is just a particular pattern, pattern matching and replacing was all done since the sixties.
- bsenftner 11y agoTrue that the face is just a pattern, but matching and replacing in a manner that a human viewer is not aware of the manipulation is an entirely different matter. Integrated lighting, media grain, obscuring elements, including any reflections of your subject in the replacement, matching motion blur aliasing and so forth form the realistic problem to solve.
- pyre 11y agoPatents are for particular methods of doing this. You can't reduce all patents to "moving atoms and molecules around in different configurations" claim prior art, and invalidate all past, present and future patents. To illustrate this, a patent (as originally intended at least) wouldn't be for something broad like "walking down the street" but maybe for something more like "walking down the street with a particular gait." While I don't necessarily agree with the patent system, it detracts from the conversation with it's not an informed discussion.
- god_bless_texas 11y agoWhat you said was a little strong, but I do fundamentally agree with you that patent clerks do not perhaps have the benefit of 5-year technology trajectory to make informed decisions. When you look at the patents that Newegg fights (and wins), clearly something has gone wrong at USPTO.