[econgeeker]

I posit that android would not be on the market in the touch-screen form it is now, if Apple hadn't made its inventions public due to the patent process.

If you consider android innovative, then the patent process saved google the 7+ years Apple spent developing the iPhone and allowed them to get to the market much quicker with a touch screen phone (they'd been previously working on a blackberry style OS for android.)

I am the inventor of two software patents. One of which involved solving the visual glitches that appear in online games due to the high latency of playing over a modem. This patent involved a lot of timing issues, and was pretty narrow.

However it was claimed on slashdot that we "patented the idea of online gaming!!!!"

Later, in a discussion list, they claimed we'd patented the idea of IRC!

People seem to presume that patents are on ideas, and that people are patenting really obvious ideas.

In the case of the patents I've been involved in, that is not what has happened. In fact, the portrayal of what was covered by the patent didn't match the patent at all, and it is clear that the people putting forward those patents as examples of bad patents were, frankly misrepresenting them.

Every time I've seen a bogus patent claim and actually read the patent, I've found this to be the case as well. (I don't remember the linked-list example, so haven't read that particular one.)

I'm not saying that bogus patents don't exist. I'm sure you can get things by the examiner.

But the system has a solution for this-- if your patent is bogus then it won't stand up in court. If prior art exists, then you run the risk of spending a lot of money, only to have the patent nullified when someone presents prior art. (And I mean real prior art, not the kind of stuff that people claim is prior art, like the claim that IRC is prior art for solving clock jitter in 3D online games)

The patent system, as with anything else that relies on the meager US court system, is expensive... but there is no need for reform, that I can see, as all these allegedly bogus patents would be quickly thrown out if they really were as obvious as is claimed and if there really was the abundance of prior art, as is claimed.

Google is certainly capable, both financially and intellectually, of getting a bogus patent thrown out. There's no reason they should be calling on the federal government to intervene with a political "solution" on their behalf... unless they know that there isn't actually prior art and the patents are, in fact, legitimate.

In fact, I think googles call for reform is an admission that the patents aren't bogus after all.

Edit: I didn't change the text above, but want to clarify- I'm responsible for some claims on one of these patents, though not named as an inventor (I didn't realize the significance at the time.) For the other I am the sole inventor, but it hasn't been brought forth as "bogus" in a public forum yet, though, for those who don't read it carefully, they could easily make the claim. This is why I'm being vague about the specific patents. Previous experience on Hacker News tells me that if I wasn't vague the topic would turn to how those patents are so obviously "bogus" (to people who haven't read more than the headline)... and well, frankly my name is on them. I really don't to be discriminated against in business for having a pr-intellectual property position. The current climate makes that fear seem pretty legitimate.

[VanL]

I haven't looked at the patents that you mention, so I can't comment on your patent(s) specifically. I can comment on patents generally, though.

I am a patent lawyer specializing in patent reexamination - i.e., my day-to-day job is evaluating and invalidating patents.

There is a lot of truth to what you say that what a patent "covers" is grossly misrepresented in the technical press. There is some justification for the popular misinterpretation of claim scope, though; I can't tell you how many people discover, years later, that they have "invented" wifi - or VPNs - or any other successful standard you might care to name.

One good example of this is the RIM v. NTP case. The NTP patents were about pagers. It was later that they realized that they had "invented" email (i.e. sending electronic messages to a hand-held device). When you read the original disclosure, though, it is obvious they had no such thing in mind.

Further, you are right that most patents have more complexity than the high level summary would indicate. Does that mean that the patents are valid? No way. I personally have seen 30-40 patents that I would consider to have any valid claims after a full prior art search is done-and that is after having looked at many thousand patents. My personal kill rate on patents that I have dealt with is in the high 90th percentile.

Bonus tip: as an uncredited inventor, you have a very valuable asset-particularly if that patent is being asserted.

[gruseom]

My personal kill rate on patents that I have dealt with is in the high 90th percentile.

Perhaps add contact info to your HN profile? The community here includes people who might eventually need your services.

A question: how prominent, really, is that region of East Texas where we hear that most of these suits get filed? Does it make it significantly more difficult to do your work? I'm always shocked when I hear about that. It seems an outright corruption of the system, like the hanging judges of the past.

Edit: I see you already mentioned this (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2845398) but I would like to hear anything more that you have to say. Oh, and please keep posting here. You clearly know what you're talking about..

[nl]

I posit that android would not be on the market in the touch-screen form it is now, if Apple hadn't made its inventions public due to the patent process.

Seriously?

I can see you might say Android would not have shipped a touch-screen version if the iPhone hadn't first, but I can't see the argument that public patents helped with that much at all.

Once you've seen a multi-touch touchscreen work, it isn't hard to work out how to make a capacitive touchscreen do it.

[gjm11]

> Once you've seen a multi-touch touchscreen work, it isn't hard to work out how to make a capacitive touchscreen do it.

I can't comment on whatever patents Apple may have, because I haven't read them, but the above is surely an oversimplification.

Let me describe how a typical capacitive touch sensor works. It's basically a grid of wires, one set running horizontally and the other vertically. (They aren't really wires, and the difference matters a lot for multiple reasons, but we can ignore it here.) For each wire, you can measure (kinda) whether a user's finger is near to it, and how near if so. (Because the finger will couple to it capacitively, which changes how the wire responds when you wiggle its voltage up and down.) So you use the horizontal wires to measure where the finger is vertically, and the vertical wires to measure where it is horizontally.

So far, so good. Now you want to make it work with multiple fingers. Problem 1: if you have a finger at position (3,3) and another at (10,10), what you see is (crudely) lots of coupling to wires 3 and 10 on each axis. But that is also what you'd see from a finger at (3,10) and another at (10,3). How do you tell the difference? Problem 2: if you have a finger at (3,3) and another at (3.5,10) then you can see the y-coordinates clearly enough but the signals on the x-measuring wires are going to be hard to disentangle.

These are not trivial problems to solve. (I know of a few approaches. I don't know what Apple actually do. I have worked for a company that makes capacitive position sensors, but not for Apple. Nothing I've said here is anyone's trade secret.) The more-obvious things you might do to try to solve them all have substantial difficulties. And of course these aren't the only difficulties in making a multi-touch capacitive touchscreen. (Making a decent capacitive touchscreen at all isn't trivial, though it's pretty much a solved problem nowadays.)

So this is exactly the sort of situation in which, in an ideal world with a sensible patent system, patents might be the Right Thing: there's a tricky technical problem, it's solvable but you can't just Do The Obvious Thing and have it work, so having someone find a good solution, publish it, but still be able to get commercial advantage from it seems like a pretty good outcome for everyone. (Note: this does not constitute an endorsement of how patents currently are in the real world.)

[pbhjpbhj]

You speak a lot of sense. One of my great frustrations with the likes of Slashdot was how people would only read the title and say "they're patenting computer games", etc., like you said. However, couple of clarifications ...

>People seem to presume that patents are on ideas, and that people are patenting really obvious ideas.

Patents _are_ on ideas. Sure you need to demonstrate an implementation but the patent, assuming it's been drafted at all well, will cover more than one implementation. It covers an area of implementations that fit in with the idea being protected. This is why patent claims have "fixing means" instead of "screws"/"nails"/"glue"/....

>I'm responsible for some claims on one of these patents

Do you mean responsible for the invention that the claims cover or for drafting the claims? If you're responsible for the invention then you have a legal right in most jurisdictions to be named as inventor on the patent.

Finally, probably the most important point. As you say, you can sneak things past the examiner. This is in one way a bad idea because getting an invalid patent should be worthless. But here's the rub: invalid patents are worth a lot against people who don't have millions to spend on negotiations/court or don't have huge patent portfolios to bargain with.

An invalid patent could prevent a startup from entering a field unless they have funds up front to challenge the company/inventor holding the patent.

Ensuring that patents have a very high degree of validity out of the gate is vital to avoid negatively impacting innovation IMO.

[nate_meurer]

> "People seem to presume that patents are on ideas..."

Pure software patents are, by definition, exactly equivalent to patents on ideas, expressions, really large numbers, etc. Good for you for getting a couple of patents, seriously. But if they really do cover just software, then you just patented bits of speech, literally. The patent system was never intended to cover that stuff, and you only got away it with because of insufficient guidance from the courts over the past couple decades. I believe this situation will be rectified eventually, and patents like yours will once again not be allowed.

> "... and that people are patenting really obvious ideas."

This is exactly the case in the lodsys hubub, as just one timely example. You don't have to look to hard to find many others.

> "there is no need for reform, that I can see, as all these allegedly bogus patents would be quickly thrown out if they really were as obvious as is claimed and if there really was the abundance of prior art, as is claimed."

You're joking right? In all the discussions swirling around this issue, rarely do even the most intransigent defenders of the status-quo say that there is absolutely no need for reform. Even the most obviously bogus software patents require millions of dollars to invalidate; combined with the patent office's utter inability to properly evaluate software patents, the system is ripe for racketeering.

[icebraining]

>I posit that android would not be on the market in the touch-screen form it is now, if Apple hadn't made its inventions public due to the patent process.

How is that a result of software patents?

[nitrogen]

I don't want to discount the hard work you and your fellow programmers put into solving latency and jitter issues in games, but (without searching for and reading your patent) there may actually exist prior art from other fields like audio/video transmission, realtime control and monitoring networks (i.e. SCADA), NTP, etc.

[hn_decay]

>I posit that android would not be on the market in the touch-screen form it is now, if Apple hadn't made its inventions public due to the patent process.

You made this claim yesterday as well. It is so ridiculous that I find it hard to take the rest of your comment seriously.

The iPhone most certainly showed consumer acceptance of a touchscreen. It was a consumer test that demonstrated that the lack of a physical keyboard and minimal physical buttons is acceptable if not preferable by customers. Did any patent application teach anything technical, though? That is laughable.

>People seem to presume that patents are on ideas, and that people are patenting really obvious ideas.

Most patents are on ideas.

There have been a tremendous number of misunderstandings or outright lies about patents on here-

-patents are not some great mystery only known by a few, and are overwhelmingly boilerplate. Every single independent claim stands on its own and can be infringed.

-some have posited that patents are highly specific and no one is qualified to comment on them save super experts. Any criticism of a patent will yield a "you have to look at the specific claims!". Yet here's Apple's own patent lawyers description of why HTC Android handsets violate their patent-

"the Nexus One includes Android's "Linkify" functionality, which "take[s] a piece of text and a regular expression and turns all of the regex matches in the text into clickable links. This is particularly useful for matching things like email addresses, web urls, etc. and making them actionable". That is the meat of it. The rest of the text is boilerplate expanding on the concept of "on a computer".

-patents do not need a working implementation. As others have pointed out, people have patented perpetual motion motions, among other hilarious patents.