[AlbertCory]

Great article.

I was actually responsible for invalidating another maps-related patent from the 1990s, in Germany. I was in Patent Litigation and I also remember having a "ART+COM" folder in my email, but that's about all I can remember. I don't think the case was very active by 2014.

Anyhow, there's something Avi said that I have to comment on:

The test for patent-worthiness is: “would it be non-obvious to someone who is skilled in the art?” I’d been doing “stupid programmer tricks” like this since high school, as have many others in my field.

If only it were so simple! You would think that "hey, that's just a stupid programmer trick!" would be enough to render something obvious, but you'd be wrong. That's what my paper [1] is about.

No, to call "obvious" the combination of references A and B, there usually has to be some "teaching, suggestion, or motivation" in the literature that it would be a good idea to combine A and B. There are nuances to this statement, in case anyone's feeling pedantic.

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580

[jasonkester]

there usually has to be some "teaching, suggestion, or motivation" in the literature that it would be a good idea to combine A and B

There's the rub. Because patents get issued for things that are so obvious that you would never bother mentioning them in "the literature".

Take dragging a map with the mouse as an example. First, if you're doing online mapping, the first thing you think of is to just grab the map and drag it wit the mouse, so you implement that. (Even though some clown has a patent for the act of doing so).

But assuming you've gotten away with that somehow, now imagine the first day of implementing it, when you "drop" the map while your mouse is still moving. It'll stop in a jarring way and your first thought will be "That's ugly. What if it kept going with momentum and coasted to a stop." And that would get you sued out of existence.

Now, the patent system seems to suggest that the appropriate way to handle this would be to search the patent database for "dragging a map with a mouse", find the patent for "momentum", license that from whoever has it, read it and learn how to implement it, thus benefitting from some novel invention, saving yourself time and effort, and reimbursing the inventor for his effort.

But in actuality, you spend the time it takes to draw a breath thinking about the problem, then code it up in the next few minutes and carry on with your day. Because there are very few things in programming where describing the problem doesn't also describe how to solve it.

I've never seen an example of a software patent that covers an actual non-obvious "invention".

[michaelt]

> First, if you're doing online mapping, the first thing you think of is to just grab the map and drag it wit the mouse

When online mapping was first around the javascript slippy map hadn't been invented. The page would show you a given map tile, and provide left/right/up/down/zoom buttons that would load a tile one step in the direction you chose. Sometimes with a complete pageload for every step.

For example: https://web.archive.org/web/20040805053745/http://getamap.or...

[jasonkester]

I mentioned it because I was doing online mapping in 1999, when things were as you describe. In my spare time, I built the obvious thing that occurred to everybody, and came up with a draggable map with momentum. (In the browser, just like gmaps)

Google maps was still years away. And tile server tech wasn’t quite there to ship it yet. But it was the obvious thing to build, and not in any way a mystery as to how you’d do it.

[jackcviers3]

It's not obvious. It's just smart. And decades of momentum based apis have caused you to think of something you'd probably never actually seen in a ui at the time as non-novel.

Inventions are often that way -- think of the mousetrap. People knew springs pinched the crap out of you when released. But nobody had made a device to kill mice, yet untilthat was invented.

I don't know what the cognitive bias for thinking that because you thought of an idea it must be obvious is, but it exists. I say that as a patent inventor.

[buran77]

The "what" is obvious, it's similar to the way you'd use a real map (and not only): by folding or rolling it and sliding the region or tile you want to see with your hands until it comes into your view. So the concept of sliding something into view is obvious. On a computer you have to use the input methods available, keyboard or mouse to achieve the same with relatively few obvious options.

The technical "how" of the implementation is not really obvious, you could implement the same result in many possible ways, some better than others.

[jackcviers3]

I'm speaking of the inertial scrolling tween that causes the coast to stop pre-Google Maps era, and makes the interface feel like handling an actual physical object, not the sliding of things into a viewport. Viewports and tiling had been done long before that time period.

That physics combination with drag and drop interaction was not obvious in the time period we are discussing. The closest thing I can remember to that sort of thing were side scrolling games that accelerated with the character centered on the screen according to the game's physics, and possibly paddle-based game physics dating to the Atari era.

Slowly increasing scroll was present in some interfaces. But not tweened stop.

My main point is that clever people often dismiss what they find trivial to be obvious to others, and while that's often the case once many examples have been observed, it isn't prior to the exposure to many examples.

[helij]

It is obvious because that is how you move a big physical map. You pull it towards or away from yourself to view specific area, just like with a mouse. That's how it was done since first maps. It's just obvious to move a big piece of paper on the table that way.

[jackcviers3]

It's not that - it's the inertial glide to a stop that makes it feel like a big piece of paper that was innovative at the time. See my other comment.

[matthewdgreen]

Yes seriously. Does nobody remember MapQuest? Even that was revolutionary compared to what came before, but had no ability to move the map dynamically, and this was the state of the art until Google Maps launched. I remember sitting in an office with two other students and my graduate advisor the first time we used Google Maps, and our mouths were literally agape. My advisor said “the people who can make this work are going to run the world,” which was sort of accurate. Same feeling the first time I used a good capacitive-touch display with snapback and inertial scrolling: ideas that may seem obvious when you’ve used them for a lifetime, but sure aren’t obvious beforehand.

[defaultname]

"Does nobody remember MapQuest?"

Technical and business limitations drove the design of MapQuest. That client computers had little computing power, bandwidth (on both sides of the pipe) was limited and expensive, and processing power on the server for a very low value user (per interaction) had to be meted. No one who used MapQuest didn't wish they could just smoothly scroll the map, but we were fine given many of us were on a terrible connection, ran on systems with limited graphics power (where even smoothly blitting a high resolution raster graphic was taxing), etc.

Every improvement (more computing power, memory, storage, bandwidth, or even business model, etc) in the industry invariably leads to many people all independently seeing the same obvious next step, many groups building the same eventual thing, and then the losers (from a market perspective) claiming that their ideas were stolen. It is the story of this industry.

[matthewdgreen]

Well of course technical and business limitations drove the design: that's what made it impressive. Building a client-side scrolling map would have been relatively easy in the 90s. Google's advance was getting there efficiently on a 2005-era web browser.

[MisterTea]

This is a good point because I remember using mapquest before google maps existed. I did want real time map movement but how that mechanism was to be implemented is the key point. The inertial grab and drag seems obvious today but before that, I envisioned it working like an RTS game such as warcraft2. You'd move the mouse cursor to the edge of the map box/screen and the map would then scroll.

[quietbritishjim]

That doesn't change the fact that the concept was obvious. In fact that's how offline desktop mapping programs worked before online mapping of any time existed. (Remember those? Microsoft AutoRoute for example!)

Perhaps you could interpret the parent comment as "if you're doing online mapping [and mouse drag/drop is possible in the browser], the first thing you think of ..."

[aardvark179]

While that may be true there were definitely various slippy maps in GIS and CAD applications.

There were also other interesting navigation schemes that relied on multi button mice or tablets.

I still like the model where you hold down a button and the navigation speed and direction is controlled by the distance and angle from that click point to the mouse cursor.

[dirtyid]

Grab to move viewports with middle clicks has been around in CAD / vector drawing software long before that. I'm not sure about geospatial software which had less market. I'm pretty sure there was grab to move in various level editors when game modding was huge. Those are all ostensibly "mapping" softwares that made the notion obvious.

[shultays]

is that because "grab to move stuff" was something so innovative or because browsers/PCs/javascripts was just not good enough?

I think "grab to move" is as old as our opposable thumbs. There is nothing innovative about it

[simonh]

I think a good example might be PageRank. There were loads of engineers and researchers at multiple companies working day and night on search engine technology at the time, and it wasn't obvious to any of them. Basically it seems to have occurred to two people in 1996, Sergey Brin and Robin Li (who went on to found Baidu).

[clusterfish]

Although PageRank isn't obvious, it was inevitable. Without taking away from its usefulness, it's the kind of thing that would have been invented very soon anyway. It was basically invented as soon as the internet had enough information to make such approach superior.

Such innovation does not need the protection of the patent system any more than the obvious inventions do, it happens on its own.

[intrasight]

I do like the "inevitable" test. It ties in with my belief that there are many "inventions" that are universal amongst sentient beings.

[lincolnq]

Off topic, but I am very interested in the topic of what other inventions are universal (I've thought about this myself a bit). Do you have a list or writeup?

[intrasight]

I've not maintained a list over the years. But some that I can name off the top of my head are: Wheel Battery Electric motor Glass LED Laser Book Lens Ballpoint pen Mirror

- you get the idea

[simonh]

My dad claims to have “invented” the brushless electric motor as a physics student, only to discover it had been invented many dozens of times already.

[DaiPlusPlus]

Mathematics

[simonh]

I think I agree, the PageRank parent and software patents in general are not genuinely in the public interest. I just think it’s one of the strongest examples that might pass any patentability test. That doesn’t mean the patent is a good thing.

[psyc]

Perlin noise comes to mind. I’ve implemented noise “off the cuff” using general math knowledge, which appears visually quite similar. But Perlin’s algorithm doesn’t seem to me to bear any resemblance to the one I settled on. And at least for me, it’s non-obvious and takes quite a bit more study to understand.

[jacobolus]

This software patent was for a pretty non-obvious invention, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transf...

[jandrewrogers]

I think there are two different cases that often look similar in practice. The first is when the invention is obvious to everyone but no effort is spent on development because it would have no value until adjacent technologies reach a certain level of maturity. The second is when the adjacent technologies have been mature for some time but there is a critical problem that needs a key insight to bring it all together. To an outsider these cases often look identical, the difference is that the former case was obvious in foresight and the latter case has a tendency to look obvious only in hindsight, but only a reasonably objective subject matter expert can make this distinction.

The latter case is a litmus test of non-obviousness -- all the pieces were there for some time but no one had put them together. It is distinct from when everyone puts the pieces together the second the pieces are available.

Patent clerks can't tell the difference.

I will say that the state-of-the-art for geospatial computing in the 1990s was pretty damn primitive, many useful things had not been invented yet. It isn't great today but it has come a long way.

[dboreham]

Based on my experience working as a consultant to patent litigators, it's worse than that. I dove pretty deep over a few beers with these guys on this subject. What they told me is that in the US patent system, you can pretty much forget about using obviousness as a defense. Yes it exists as a concept but if you intend to use it, you'll probably lose so they never try to use it.

Hence the focus on prior art.

[jandrewrogers]

Obviousness is not obvious. It requires an incredibly deep level of subject matter expertise to even make that determination.

[touisteur]

And. Some solutions that seem very obvious in retrospect can be the result of years of shaking down kinks, letting expert intuition crystalize, until something almost 'dumb' fixes into an invention.

Obviousness is the wrong caliper here, I think.

[heavenlyblue]

I don't have any experience working as a consultant, but how do you define obviousness?

IF there's plenty of prior art, then it's easy to define why something is "obvious" - it had been done may times before.

[dboreham]

The lawyers define it as: the constant "false". There is never any such thing as obvious as far as the rules of their game are concerned.

[AlbertCory]

My paper was an attempt to cast our "native common sense as practitioners of the art" into a legal framework that already exists. If a technique is "obvious to try" then you're not entitled to a patent for trying it.

You can laugh at "native common sense" as being meaningless when the law is involved, but actually it's not. In the right circumstances, the fact that most practitioners of the software art see things a certain way would be "dispositive" (as the lawyers like to put it). We haven't seen anyone create those circumstances.

I had a senior attorney review this paper for me, and he had a lot of interest in the concept. He called it a "toolkit" and found it intriguing that software engineers had a toolkit they applied to any problem. You know that we do.

The forces arrayed against this concept are formidable. Even Computer Science departments in universities aren't unified against software patents. I actually talked to some profs at Illinois, and one of them said "you're assuming that I agree with you!" He didn't. He had a startup company and the VCs had told him he had to have patents.

[neatze]

To me context of software patents; is like patenting a how to use hummer, and not novel innovation of hummer design. More simpler analogy can be applied to wheels, imagine patent where wheels cannot be turned left on any vehicle, because of patent. In context of wheel, I have no issue if someone invents and patents better rubber type and production technology, but patenting how rubber generally can be used on the wheel is simply wrong, it has not benefit to society/humanity.

[Gigachad]

I personally think patents should only apply to significant investments. Anything that could be mostly explained in an elevator trip should not be patentable.

Rounded corners should not be patentable. The latest ARM core design should be.

[touisteur]

But what if what you invent is deeply simple, after you've worked out everything and spent years simplifying? What if it is 10 lines of code but it solves a big industry-wise prod or exploitation problem? The concept might be simple but might necessitate years of effort to find and validate?

After reading constant praise about simplicity here on HN it always sound like cognitive dissonance to then read when patents are mentioned that something 'simple' should not be protected.

[ootsootsoots]

Patents, trademark, and copyright pretty clearly serve to empower the aristocrats.

A good idea will win on its merits or fail.

Legal ownership of ideas just tether us to paying Disney and Google’s of the world in perpetuity as they buy everything up.

We basically live in a state sanctioned system of quota and expropriation of effort. It’s not violent like the USSR, so we look beyond it.

And we spend a lot of energy policing it all.

[aidenn0]

If someone were to patent an analogue circuit, would the software implementation of the same circuit on a DSP be patentable?

[orangepurple]

Hold my beer for a minute while I patent the idea of reproducing analogue circuits with a software implementation of the same circuit on a DSP.

[avibarzeev]

Yeah, I was trying to keep it simple, but you convinced me to edit that line out for correctness. Thanks!

Their patent was invalidated in 2017. Here's why:

https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/10/25/cafc-affirms-invalidit...

[lbriner]

No-one has mentioned the Egg of Columbus yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus

A tale of something that is "very obvious" only after it has been done. I mean MP3 is about reducing information for frequencies hidden by other frequencies right (I think that is roughly correct!) and that is a really obvious way to reduce bandwidth....once someone worked it out.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"The test for patent-worthiness is ..."

Novelty is also a requirement, in addition to nonobviousness.

The OP suggests there are more important issues for programers to focus on:

"I'm openly critical of their ad-driven business model, especially since the damage is clearer. That's broached in the show, but only to point out how much money Google would theoretically owe these guys if they'd agreed or been forced to license at 10 cents per use (which was very unlikely IMO).

Invading people's privacy for profit is not something to yearn for. It's one of the reasons I sold all my Google stock. I respect Google's engineering work and the great "free" information they provide. There are a lot of smart and dedicated people working there. But the biz model is not ok, IMO."

Sad that Google appropriated this guy's work for a "business model" that he does not approve of.

Perhaps there are many more folks like him, who have done solid, valuable work in some area that has nothing to do with invading people's privacy or online ads, only to have the product of that work usurped and given away for "free" in the interests of furthering Google's prime directive: selling online ad services.

[seb1204]

I can offer this link to a podcast about this exact subject. Unfortunately it's in German DE https://twitter.com/timpritlove/status/1450041042930122754?t...

But Tim is surely up to clarify any questions.

[pacman2]

"The test for patent-worthiness is: “would it be non-obvious to someone who is skilled in the art?” "

Well, nothing is harder to say than if something is "obvious". Locking backward, basically most things are "obvious".

"someone who is skilled in the art?"

This is another questions. What is "skilled"? Most patent courts assume an average person from the field of the invention and not an extraordinary specialist.

[pmarreck]

Interesting paper!

I've also noticed that many insights also seem "obvious" in hindsight (the proverbial "egg of Columbus" thing). In fact, the better the insight, the more "obvious" it seems!! Thus, "hindsight obviousness" is not an argument against an innovation