throwawaykf05

10 ms·

31.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
This raises an interesting question: Oracle licensing horror stories apart, how many times has Oracle actually sued a customer?
32.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
IANAL but as I see it, the interface between hardware components is a binary interface, and this is where the difference lies between this case and others like Sony and Sega. The API here is not a binary interface but rather a textual descr
33.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
>Sadly, some of them profit (immensely) from putting up that huge barrier for smaller companies to compete with them. Patents go both ways. Studies that while patent thickets may discourage entry [1], this effect is limited, and smalle
34.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
> The point is that monopolies on ideas are fundamentally unfair ... I could just as easily say "free-riding off somebody else's ingenuity is fundamentally unfair". > ... but it is provably false in Software. Citatio
35.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
Just to maintain attribution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6816261 ;-)
36.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
> ... filing a provisional patent starts a 1-year clock where, if you don't find the money and time to file a real patent, your IP irrevocably enters the public domain. IANAL, but I believe this is incorrect. My understanding is t
37.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
It's a fallacy that you cannot support both open source and software patents. Religious opinions aside, they are both simply different forms of IP, each effective for different things.
38.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
Throughout all the patent wars and all the rhetoric Google produced about competitors abusing patents, it was Google , as the owner of Motorola, that was the only company penalized in court for actually abusing patents: http:/&#x2F
39.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
That is a rather misleading and incomplete TL;DR. The paper actually references a number of other papers from the author (Petra Moser) and presents a number of salient conclusions. Here's one important point: Patents encourage innovati
40.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
That has been shown to be a myth as well: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1589712
41.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
> The Wrights had earlier demanded and gotten 20% royalties, and had a history of liberally and repeatedly suing other aircraft manufacturers. Because all the manufacturers were using the technology they had invented, the very technolo
42.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
Pretty sure this is the 3rd time we've had this exchange :-) but... it is a myth that the Wright patent held back the US airplane industry, as demonstrated by industrial data from the period: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol
43.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
That is the exact sentence to which I refer. Note that it says nothing about "disclosure" or "recouping investments in R&D" or "protecting the little guy" or any of the rationalizations people typically ass
44.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
Yup, a huge step up from SOAP APIs serving XML and RMI serving serialized Java objects ;-)
45.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
> India is saying software patents are not novel enough to protect, and directing its patent examiners not to grant them Or it may be saying Indian firms are not producing sufficiently novel software, so there is no net benefit to Indi
46.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
Trade secrets don't protect against reverse engineering or simply copying behavior. Historically, one of the rationalizations of patents was to encourage disclosure, but the exact wording, at least in the US constitution, gives no spec
47.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
> Neither ideas or disclosure of ideas are in short supply in the computer world today. Personally, I don't see much innovation in the software industry, mostly just reinvention of the same wheels over and over and over in slightl
48.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
> Counting web ads served to users as revenue generated by the computer's operating system is ludicrous. Why? Isn't that precisely why Google invested so much in Android?
49.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
Just because it's in some ToS doesn't mean people were "100% aware of its privacy". A large percentage of people still don't know about it.
50.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
See this comment for a link to start with for patents in general: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962996 To my knowledge, empirical evidence that incumbent patent holders in the software industry are suppressing inno
51.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
Curious, how innovative would you say were the open source projects you worked on? How much was it doing entirely new stuff (to the best of your knowledge), as opposed to re-inventing stuff that some project somewhere else already did? I as
52.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
Not really, when you consider that the vast majority of will take the path of least resistance, and that innovation is often a risky and expensive effort most would rather eschew. There are many examples of innovation-by-forced-workaround h
53.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
There are tons of studies around patents and the economics thereof, but you will not find such a convenient answer to your question. The reason is that it's very hard to measure the costs and benefits to quantify these incentives and d
54.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
> To rephrase, what exactly do we lose out if patents didn't exist? There is a lot of empirical evidence showing patents incentivize investment of resources into innovative efforts, such as R&D expenses in large corporations a
55.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
Recent reports suggest the threat of treble damages is, statistically speaking, largely theoretical. Only about 0.6% of cases ever get enhanced damages, and even then the amounts are typically pretty low. Source: http://www.law36
56.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
You'll note Schwartz's quote sounds like any other corporate PR-speak when companies partner up and in no way constitutes the grant of a license. The thing then was that Sun still had hopes of getting Google to license Java with
57.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
While I think your understanding of the business situation is accurate, I don't think your distinction about language vs. web APIs stands. My (non-lawyer) take on the situation is this: The interoperability exception for copyright appl
58.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
HN is a strange forum, where ostensibly intelligent people will post uninformed, sensationalistic comments despite the presence of multiple earlier comments in the same thread by better-informed people explaining things clearly. To wit:
59.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
Apologies for the late response: > Writings contemporary with that exact clause explicitly state its justification... However, the clause wisely did not include any of that and just specified the intended ends ("progress...")
60.
by throwawaykf05 11y ago
> As a meta-item on this discussion, it appears that we have a disagreement of value systems. I agree :-) > I'd recommend "Sequential Innovation, Patents, and Imitation" ( http://www.researchoninnovation.o

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