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by kj12345
5548 days ago
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To me these patents seem less transparently silly than many of those often at issue in high-profile cases, and yet they end up providing an even harsher argument against software patents. With the silly patents a couple tweaks to the system might get them thrown out, but I don't think any patent system that accepts software patents could find a basis for rejecting these. From that starker viewpoint its as crazy an idea as ever that the person who typed these abstract descriptions and made these shoddy diagrams deserves more ownership than Apple, who actually made the concepts real. |
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To be fair, Gelernter wrote several books about these ideas, founded a software company based on them, and tried to market several different desktop software packages using the ideas in the mid/late 90s. He's also a professor of computer science at Yale, and invented a bunch of concepts (in the same books) that were inspirations for JavaSpaces and Jini. He's not a wackadoo in some garage in Texas.
My point is, it's terrifically unfair to characterize Gelernter as a patent troll. He's been a prolific contributor to computer science, and (speaking as someone who was a fan of the books that first popularized the ideas in question), a lot of Apple's UI designs today really are fantastically similar to what Gelernter was dreaming up 20+ years ago. The Time Machine UI, in particular, was so much like the lifestreams concept that I originally thought that Apple had hired him to do the design.
There are situations where ideas seem obvious in retrospect, but completely out of left-field at the time of their conception. These ideas weren't even in the ballpark when Gelernter first started publishing them.