[econgeeker]

I'm a software developer and have been working at startups for 20 years. I am pro-patent because I've seen it successfully used to protect a startup from an evil corporation-- in this case Microsoft.

I know the anti-patent people like to pretend that all programmers are anti-patent. I find it shameful to see how shoddy the thinking is when anti-patent people are confronted with pro-patent arguments.

I'm an HN member and have been participating in this website since 2006 or 2007 (though I got the boot for having a minority opinion.)

Patents are not anti-competitive. They actually force competition-- and they give a leg up to all of your competitors by quickly bringing them up to speed on the state of the art.

If the patent system didn't exist, and Apple didn't reveal its inventions, android would be 7 years behind the iPhone. In fact, android phones wouldn't exist. They'd still be at the drawing board trying to figure out how to make multi-touch work.

Its not like Apple just had this idea and then 7 months later introduced the iPhone!

I think people who are anti-patent don't actually understand what it takes to be innovative. It isn't easy, and it is silly to think that android would exist if Apple hadn't revealed its secrets as part of the patent process.

The thing is, in exchange for this revelation, google is required to come up with something new using this knowledge, not just copy it and sell it.

[kelnos]

I am pro-patent because I've seen it successfully used to protect a startup from an evil corporation-- in this case Microsoft.

Wait... what? No, seriously... what? Somehow you've bought into this patent-everything nonsense so deeply that you think patents are good because having patents protects you from other companies with patents? I'd be hard pressed to find a pro-patent argument that makes less sense.

For the record, I'm not anti-patent. I'm anti-stupid-dumbshit-patent. Patents were designed to provide an incentive to invent when the cost of invention is high, and others "freeloading" off your sunk cost could severely hurt you.

When your "cost" of invention is simply "I sat around for 5 hours and thought of this cool idea to patent", you've come up with a stupid-dumbshit patent. Unfortunately it just seems that most of the patents that fall into this category are software patents.

If, however, you spent millions of dollars developing something that, after being specified and documented, can be reproduced at a fraction of the cost, sure, by all means, get yourself a patent on that and enjoy it.

Obviously it's hard to draw the line: at what dollar amount or length of development time should we consider something patentable? It's a hard question, but surely we can answer it better than we are now. At the very least, limit damages or licensing fees to be gained off a patent to some multiple of the difficulty in developing the patent. That's a hard thing to measure too, but again, it'd be much better than what we have now.

[MikeCapone]

Can we settle for "anti bogus patents" and say that the vast majority of the software patents out there, and especially of the cases going to the courts, are about "bogus patents"?

[econgeeker]

I was part of a team that developed a distributed realtime database. That is to say, a record could exist on a dozen servers, and these servers could be handling transactions from hundreds of thousands or millions of simultaneous users. This was back in the day of high latency due to modems, so we worked out how to deal with the fact that by the time a client might get some information it might be out of date. We did this to allow for massively multiplayer online games... this was not a bogus patent because we really did advance the state of the art, and for a couple years there only about a dozen people in the world were capable of producing this kind of software.

However, on slashdot, people claimed that this patent was a patent on "the idea of online games!!!!!!". Later there was a big discussion claiming we'd patented IRC and oh, how bogus that was, because IRC was around for YEARS before we filed our patent!

Nothing in the IRC protocol, or any of the online games at the time (or most of them sense) solved the problems we were solving in our patent.

The thing is, the anti-patent people never read the patent. The Amazon "one click patent "is not a patent on putting a "Buy now" button on a website. Our patent didn't cover IRC, etc.

I haven't done a survey of patents, and so I can't say what percentage of them are bogus, and what aren't. I can believe a bogus patent could exist, and there is a remedy for that-- present prior art and the patent gets thrown out. This is a pretty functional solution, and anyone pressing their case better be prepared because the possibility of prior art always exists.

So, I doubt there are many bogus patents, at least, not many that ever make it to court. I do think there are a lot of patents that are presented as "bogus" that aren't. My other patent has a headline that makes it sound totally bogus... but it isn't. I just can imagine what people will say about it-- because they never bother to read the patent.

They already believe patents are bogus and whenever they see yet another claim that a patent is bogus they are ready to believe it.

[notatoad]

i'm pro-patent in the same way you are: i support the theory behind patents, and would be a supporter of a patent system that followed that theory. unfortunately, the modern patent system is so far removed from the theory you are arguing for that it is unrecognizable.

[hn_decay]

"They actually force competition-- and they give a leg up to all of your competitors by quickly bringing them up to speed on the state of the art."

Are you seriously arguing that competition uses software patent applications to get up to speed?

"If the patent system didn't exist, and Apple didn't reveal its inventions, android would be 7 years behind the iPhone."

Incredible.

"They'd still be at the drawing board trying to figure out how to make multi-touch work."

This is so wrong on so many levels that your argument is precisely what I criticized in my other post (that is, perhaps rightly, being moderated down to oblivion). Do you really think Apple invented multitouch? They neither invented the phsycial mechanism (they have nothing whatsoever to do with capacitive sensors), nor the concept itself. Aside from obvious examples like the movie Minority Report (and many that came before), which Apple apparently shamelessly ripped off, it has existed on industrial touchscreen for well over a decade.

The single and only reason Android avoided multitouch, despite the software and the hardware being capable, was that Apple won the race to the patent office. No one learned anything from their patent, nor did Apple invent anything beyond adding "on a mobile device" on their application.

That example alone demolishes your position on software patents.

[MrScruff]

This is extremely revisionist.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/12/27/rim.thought.ap...

http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/12/a-visual-tour-of-androids...

Nobody is arguing that Apple invented every piece of technology that went into the iPhone, but it certainly wasn't the case that all their competitors were moving to multitouch based phones at the time.

[hn_decay]

The RIM thing was a giant lie. Remarkable that anyone ever thought it was true, much less would be referencing it now. The random message board commentator, seeking aggrandizement among their fellow fanboys, quickly disappeared and erased their history from the net, worried that their fiction would hold legal consequences.

As to Android, it is entirely possible that it went from being a Blackberry clone to instead being an iPaq clone. You know, the iPaq circa 2000 or even earlier. The one that was all screen. Sure it used a stylus, but that was courtesy of the limits of the resistive touchscreen technology.

[MrScruff]

But Android OS doesn't resemble an iPaq, it resembles iOS. You keep inferring that everything presented in the original iPhone was an obvious extension of what we'd seen before, but it simply wasn't.

[fpgeek]

Perhaps, you've heard of the obscure little Taiwanese company that built the O2 XDA (the first device to merge a Pocket PC PDA (e.g. iPaq) and a mobile phone with Internet access)?

I believe they're called HTC. They've built tons of phones that resemble an iPaq, plenty of them before the iPhone was launched.

[MrScruff]

I'm not sure what point you're making. There were plenty of smartphones that existed before the iPhone. Many of them had icons and some had touch screens. None of them resembled the iPhone in 2007 any more than they resembled the Newton or Palm OS though.

[hn_decay]

>But Android OS doesn't resemble an iPaq, it resembles iOS.

Both have significant similarity to a year 2000 iPaq. Full screen mobile device using a touchscreen against an icon grid, onscreen keyboard, etc. The iPaq was a "PDA", however, which somehow differentiates it. I owned one. I know how they are similar.

>You keep inferring that everything presented in the original iPhone was an obvious extension of what we'd seen before, but it simply wasn't.

No, I'm not inferring that whatsoever. I am arguing whether its uniqueness is patentable. We've seen with various iterations of iOS that it is borrowing from its competitors as well. That's how the world works.

[mendocino]

> Both have significant similarity to a year 2000 iPaq. Full screen mobile device using a touchscreen against an icon grid, onscreen keyboard, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)

[econgeeker]

You illustrate the root of the problem. You are not aware of what the multi-touch patents cover, what the inventions are, and you are not aware of what patents are and so you think the movie "minority report" and non-multi-touch touch screens are "prior art". (And FWIW, the stuff in minority report was conceptualized based on the research that was being done by what is now Apple.)

I've learned that you cannot argue facts with ideologues-- you will just make up your own facts, as you have done.

You can have the last word. I'm not going to debate this. I really, actually, don't care that you're anti-patent. I believe the anti-patent position is an ideological one that doesn't care about the facts... it is purely political. It is also anti-startup and anti-capitalist.

[drats]

Minority report was released in 2002. What about interfaces in Lawnmower Man (1992) or Johnny Mnemonic (1995)? Or endless other sci-fi?

Sit a UI designer and an engineer down for a couple of sessions to talk about a touch screen (x,y coordinates coming into software from human hands) anytime in the last fifty years and they will come up with the concept of gestures in at most a few hours. What about Douglas Engelbart's work or the work at Xerox in relation to Apple's later ridiculous attempts to claim the windowed GUI as their own?

You accuse others of making up facts but you are ignorant of quite a few.

[hackinthebochs]

The point he's making is that showing a rendered clip of some UI is not prior art, as far as patents go. You have to actually be able to demonstrate how it works.

If someone develops warp drive or the transporter, does star trek count as "prior art"? That would be ludicrous.

(trying to figure out what comment you're replying to is exactly why whitespace-as-blocks is a brain-dead idea in python/coffeescript)

[hn_decay]

>The point he's making is that showing a rendered clip of some UI is not prior art, as far as patents go

While the discussion was targeted more at the actual value of software patents (i.e. what specifically Apple 'invented' with their multitouch patents), in actual practice yes such a movie is prior art if the novelty of the patent is the application of multifinger gestures. The idea that you need to show a working implementation is nonsense, and has never been a requirement of the patent system.

Regarding warp drive, the novelty of multitouch is the mere concept of using multifinger gestures on an interface. The novelty of a warp drive is the mechanism of achieving warp drive, not the concept of it.

To put it another way, if you patent a method (or system) of making a car fly, maybe that's an invention. Patenting the concept of flying cars, however, is not.

[hn_decay]

>You are not aware of what the multi-touch patents cover, what the inventions are, and you are not aware of what patents are and so you think the movie "minority report" and non-multi-touch touch screens are "prior art".

I know exactly what the multitouch patent covers, and yes the basic principals are almost entirely demonstrated in the movie Minority Report. Apple did not invent or have anything to do with multitouch sensors, nor were they close to the first to implement such a sensor.

But you're sure that Android "stole it" (or apparently that they learned great insights from Apple's patent application), which is PERVERSELY wrong on so many levels.

When people say "I'm not going to debate this", it's because they have nothing to debate. You've said nothing of value beyond alluding to a laughable patent example while making absurd claims about the insights gained from patents.

[econgeeker]

In order to patent something, you have to reduce it to practice. That is to say, you have to actually make it work, in the real world.

That Stephen Spielburg was able to do it with computer graphics has no bearing on the validity of someone making it exist in the real world.

The reason I am hesitant to debate this issue is because, as you have amply demonstrated, the anti-patent people often don't even understand what a patent IS, let alone what is relevant as "prior art", and are so exceedingly hostile, and often, quite frankly dishonest (e.g.: you'd have to understand what a patent is in order to understand the multi-touch patents.) that it is just a waste of time.

Literally, I am tired offending the trolls. There is nothing to debate, because I've made my case, and you're just going to object and object and object and find another movie to reference and be proud (rather than humiliated!) at doing so!

[newhouseb]

> In order to patent something, you have to reduce it to practice. That is to say, you have to actually make it work, in the real world.

This is false. I could patent the idea of using, say, a camera's sensor to recognize the species of a plant based on a leaf without any idea of how I would actually build such a thing (what algorithms would be required, etc). I could similarly patent the idea of tracking a user's eye movement to control a user interface, without the slightest clue of how to track a user's eye movement in realtime.

To take one small example - if you were to pull up patents related to virtual reality, the claims (which tend to be written in the mid-1980s) are all ridiculous, the dreamy technology simply didn't exist to build the proposed ideas (i.e. computers small enough to stick on people's heads), but they were still patented anyway.

[davorak]

My understanding is that there are several perpetual motion machines patented so while ideally you do have to fulfill your requirement:

"In order to patent something, you have to reduce it to practice. That is to say, you have to actually make it work, in the real world."

In reality you do not, otherwise there would be not patents for perpetual motion.

"Literally, I am tired offending the trolls."

I do not think you are dealing with trolls in this thread. Believing so will probably only block you from understanding and possibly convincing your the person on the other side.

[hn_decay]

>Literally, I am tired offending the trolls.

You spend a good 90% of each of your posts saying nothing of value but instead offending me and pandering to the crowd, desperately trying to drag yourself to some higher ground where your complete lack of facts is overlooked. I hope no one falls for it.

>That Stephen Spielburg was able to do it with computer graphics has no bearing on the validity of someone making it exist in the real world.

Again, what did Apple invent? The concept of multitouch? No, not at all. The screen itself? No, not at all. The interface rudiments? I will say it again that most of them were demonstrated in Minority Report. Specific algorithms to detect movement?

You are the one claiming that Android stole this grand invention, so I ask again - what did Android steal? We know it wasn't the idea, or the physical sensor...and I highly doubt they stole the algorithm...so what?

[Steko]

Maybe go look at the actual patent lawsuits against HTC, Samsung et al., they aren't hard to find.

Maybe you can submit a copy of Minority Report on DVD as an amicus brief and the judges in those cases will say "oh shit, hn_decay's brilliance hath shone a light where before therewith was only shadow" and declare Android "free and open forever[1]"

[1] exceptions apply

[Bungholio]

Prior art for multi touch:

http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/projects/mpx/

http://gizmodo.com/278613/linux-mpx-multi+touch-table-may-be...

fwiw

[econgeeker]

Neither of those are prior art. I suggest you read the foundational patents, and if you're not familiar with the terms of art, get up to speed on it, and then look into whatever you think might be "prior art" very carefully.

If you do, you'll find that there is no prior art, otherwise Apple wouldn't have had to invent something new.

I've learned that I cannot stop people from constantly making these kinds of claims. You don't actually make a claim-- you just give me links and then assert there is prior art. This is not an argument, because you have failed to address the issue of what the patent actually says.

You can produce links to other websites all day long and then make it beholden on me to prove that they are not prior art. I'm not going to play that game.

[Bungholio]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art

Prior ... constitutes all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent's claims of originality

OK, so you're saying the links above don't have any bearing on the originality or otherwise of iOs multi touch? That's absurd. If what you're getting at is that there's some legalese-technical argument as to why a seemingly obvious prior occurrence of the "invention" then this indicates to me that the system is broken.

[Steko]

Fingerworks patents cover work done from 1999-2005. Everyone thinks they have smoking guns on this but you dig two inches in and nothing is clear.