[nness]

The first patent was issued in the 1400's — it is exactly how humans have progressed technologically and sociality. Let's stop being so absolutist about these topics.

The problem here isn't that patents exist, intellectual property protection is critical to investment and research. The issue here is two fold:

1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cover. Tech patents, however, are so broad and require so little actual material science that the "protect the investment" part doesn't add up.

2. Patent offices couldn't keep up with the rapid rate of technical advancement and may have granted overly-broad patents for what we would now consider rather general topics. The only effective way to invalidate these patents is expensive and lengthy court proceedings — which is fair, if you think about it, you wouldn't want your rights taken away without a defence. But when weaponised, it can count-intuitively stifle the innovation it was trying to protect.

What we need is a better criteria and definition of IP which better suits modern industry.

[cycomanic]

The first patents were not about innovation at all but essentially government guaranteed monopolies similar to guilds.

> 1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cover. Tech patents, however, are so broad and require so little actual material science that the "protect the investment" part doesn't add up.

Citation needed. I know of many patents that are side discoveries of R&D that was done anyway. It's a myth that others could easily undercut a company doing the research, the inertia of expertise of employees, processes etc. is typically much better at holding of the competition. None of the successful technology companies made their business by patenting. The example of pharma is often brought up, but it's actually a very good counter-example, when pharma companies first developed, it was the Swiss and German companies which dominated and there was very little (Germany) or no (Switzerland) patent protection for pharmaceuticals.

Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering.

[marcinzm]

> Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering.

That's pretty false. The requirement for a patent in the US is that it is detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the patent. Doing so efficiently and at scale is a different issues. Having dealt with patents personally, lawyers very much stress this point as a requirement for a patent that is not easy to overturn.

You're confusing a patent being broad with it not being detailed. They are both. A patent is a detailed reproducible description that includes a ton of language to also cover other similar things. For example, "in one embodiment of this invention a silver coated aluminum substrate is used for part N." This is very specific in that it says what was used to make the invention (a silver coated aluminum substrate) but also broad enough to cover other substrates (one embodiment).

[michaelt]

Patents are in principle supposed to be non-obvious, and detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the description.

I can assure you that in practice they are neither.

There are merely a lot of people in the legal profession whose jobs depend on ignoring that fact.

[marcinzm]

> I can assure you that in practice they are neither.

Having written some patents that has not been my experience.

For example, this is one of the patents in the lawsuit:

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/67/67/7c/1299b0c...

This patent includes network diagrams, actual C data structure, technical terminology galore, etc, etc. It's got a ton more implementation details versus, for example, a scientific publication on this topic.

Like, seriously, it's got 20+ page of this technical implementation details and not bland lawyer jargon:

>The second redirection mechanism, which is specified as a future extension of NDTP is having the server return an NDTP RDR RSP message in response to an NDTP request for which the NDTP server has no ownership of the supplied identifier string. Those skilled in the art will note that unlike the embedded redirection links mechanism, the NDTP RDR RSP mechanism applies to all NDTP requests, not just NDTP GET.

[pclmulqdq]

I didn't read this patent before making a sister comment, but looking through it, this one is actually really clear on exactly what is happening (which makes sense with everyone here saying "it's just DNS for data" - everything is obvious in hindsight) and relatively low on patent jargon.

A lot of patents give you a bunch of alternative implementations and component definitions, which can muddy the waters a bit. On the other hand, the figures can help you a lot.

[everforward]

Eh, this is like "first draft of a design document" level detailed.

The big issue is that it's a protocol, not a system. I.e. it's detailed only because it specifically _does not specify how to build anything_. Were they required to actually specify how to build something, i.e. a server that implements this protocol rather than the protocol itself, this would be woefully insufficient.

How are the mappings stored on disk? Does this entire protocol genuinely lack authentication? How is this meant to fail over when a server dies? If it's distributed, how do the nodes reach consensus?

You can't just jam stuff like this into a doc:

> Also, each update is preferably performed atomically > to avoid creating an inconsistent state in the string Store.

They're just handwaving away how the data gets stored. Y'know, the part of the patent that's actually useful and does something.

What's left over after you discount the parts they don't specify is basically just a wire protocol for a KV store that doesn't exist. They might as well try to patent a method for making imaginary mittens for imaginary friends, because that's basically what this is.

[pclmulqdq]

Patents are usually narrowly tailored to a specific part of a design document of a complex system, not the entire thing. The idea is that a "person of ordinary skill in the art" can implement the normal stuff (ie the current state of the art) around the new innovation, and the new thing gives that system a non-obvious benefit.

A lot of research papers are written the same way. They will go into great detail on a specific thing like a protocol or a storage format and then say something along the lines of "bolt this onto Redis" before presenting their data.

[michaelt]

> it's got 20+ page of this technical implementation details

Yeah fantastic, like an entire page devoted to showing requests that have numerical identifiers. Groundbreaking stuff.

And it's all completely irrelevant noise because you can infringe on the patent even if your implementation in no way depends on any of those details

The only thing that matters is the claims, and they're written so broadly and interpreted by the courts so creatively that a subject matter expert cannot read the document and determine if something does or does not infringe on it.

Seriously, how does Claim 1 not cover 99% of HTTP requests ever made given that people were using reverse proxies and passing requests between backend servers for decades before this patent was filed?

[marcinzm]

You claimed:

>...and detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the description. I can assure you that in practice they are neither.

I provided a counter-example. I'm going to take the the fact you're not responding to the counter-example but rather changing the argument as acceptable that you were wrong.

[pclmulqdq]

In my past experience, this is only true because many people's eyes glaze over when they try to read patent-ese. If you can penetrate the obtuse form of English used, "in embodiments, ... may be ... to name a few" for example (and the weird ordering of paragraphs, etc.), it's actually not that hard to understand patents. There are a lot of people whose job it is to read patents, too.

[TimPC]

A very common pattern is to write a patent and a research paper after the initial patent filing. When the patent office doesn't do their job you can still usually learn the invention from the paper. They key thing is companies wouldn't let employees publish without the patent part.

[cycomanic]

> > Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering.

> That's pretty false. The requirement for a patent in the US is that it is detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the patent. Doing so efficiently and at scale is a different issues. Having dealt with patents personally, lawyers very much stress this point as a requirement for a patent that is not easy to overturn.

I have dealt with patents myself as well and in every instance the lawyers told me ok give me all the other ways of you can think of how to do things, no matter if it works or not. Also keep what you did sufficiently vague.

> You're confusing a patent being broad with it not being detailed. They are both. A patent is a detailed reproducible description that includes a ton of language to also cover other similar things. For example, "in one embodiment of this invention a silver coated aluminum substrate is used for part N." This is very specific in that it says what was used to make the invention (a silver coated aluminum substrate) but also broad enough to cover other substrates (one embodiment).

This is actually a great example. Often the implementation will only work with a specific thickness and quality of silver and the substrate has to be prepared in a specific way to get the correct properties. None of these would be mentioned in the patent, and would typically require large amount of experimenting (costly) to find out what actually works.

[denton-scratch]

> Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them

My father used to work for Pilkington's Glass. Pilkington invented the float-glass process, which made better, flatter glass than the plate-glass process. Yes, it was patented; but the main protection was control of know-how. When you licensed the process, you got several engineers onsite to make it work.

This is similar in some ways to the mediaeval Venetian glassmakers; they didn't have patents, but they did have assassins, who would hunt down runaway glassmakers and silence them.

[hasmanean]

Assassins are a step too far, but maybe advertising…let the public choose whether to buy the real deal instead of the parasitical imitators.

[mminer237]

The public will buy the cheapest, almost-as-good option 99% of the time. If morality were a strong deciding factor, we wouldn't have megacorporations like Nestlé and Unilever making everything, nor would all of our clothes be made by sweatshops.

I'm not going to spend billions of dollars on some new gadget when every other company will have the exact same thing for sale next month with razor-thin margins. There's no way to make a living innovating.

[Draiken]

It's almost like capitalism stifles innovation.

Paradoxically it's one of the most common arguments people use in favor of the system: it pushes innovation!

It actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation. When real innovation happens it's mostly by coincidence on the small intersection of the Venn diagram.

Edit: It's interesting that the patent system was created, in theory, to allow people to profit from innovation and actually promote it. Ironically it instead created a whole industry of extracting rent from broad useless patents that stifles innovation even further.

[throw10920]

> It's almost like capitalism stifles innovation.

It's not. It's nowhere close. "Capitalism" (which is a weasel word to begin with), has produced far more innovation than any other economic system.

Even aside from the overwhelming historical evidence soundly disproving your point, your argument is designed to deceive:

> It actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation.

Strawman argument - very few people believe or claim that "capitalism" directly incentivizes innovation - the "side effect" of innovation happening as a result of chasing profits is literally how "capitalism" is designed to work - and does so extremely effectively. Unless you've been living under a rock the past century, it's not hard to see the incredible technological advances that have happened purely as a result of "capitalism". The "small intersection of the Venn diagram", while small in relative terms (and there's nothing wrong with that), is a large absolute amount.

It's also the case that it's completely infeasible to directly incentivize innovation - the best that you can do is attach it to some other measurement - which is exactly what "capitalism" does.

> It's interesting that the patent system was created, in theory, to allow people to profit from innovation and actually promote it. Ironically it instead created a whole industry of extracting rent from broad useless patents that stifles innovation even further.

It's pretty obvious that a system created for a purpose can initially fulfill that purpose very well and then be corrupted by humans over time, with no implication of being initially unsuitable.

Patents have become rent-seeking because of corrupt regulators - corrupt regulators that anti-capitalists would happily put into greater positions of power and give more power to meaningfully decrease the quality of human life.

[bradjohnson]

And what exactly would stop an imitator from advertising that they're the "real deal"? Or maybe just that they're an "improved version"? There's extremely little regulation in advertising even now.

[rtkwe]

Patents IMO work better when it's a physically instantiated implementation of a very specific task. The big issue is where we've gone with software patents that are little more than "a server talks to another server and requests information from a database". Those implementations are extremely vague and cover way too much ground. Like the game patent that covered the entire idea of having a playable game during a loading screen or at least pretended to and the idea of fighting it was too expensive to bother trying to force the issue.

[nness]

> Discoveries of R&D that was done anyway

Not sure I agree — That's still investment. All that time spend doing research, even if for a completely different goal, doesn't come for free. Discovering two things in a process intended to discover one doesn't half the value of both things.

> None of the successful technology companies made their business by patenting > written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering

I agree — software patents are ridiculous, too broad, and stifle the intent of IP rights. But parents protect other industries. My point is that a blanket "get rid of intellection property protections" statement is not realistic. It's nuanced.

[cycomanic]

FYI, I am in a hardware field and the companies I'm aware of (having had direct discussions with on CTO or senior engineer level) largely did patents to have something tangible to justify R&D to investors and financial analysts. They would never put know how that they considered crucial into a patent and considered patent litigation pretty worthless, especially against direct competitors, as they knew that everyone was violating everyone else's patents, because everyone working in the field comes up with the same solutions (so much for patents being non obvious to a subject expert).

[throw0101a]

> Citation needed.

* OECD: http://fs2.american.edu/wgp/www/park_lippoldt08.pdf

* Via: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallphelps/2015/09/16/do-pa...

A review of the literature:

* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5664960/

[kiba]

It is a good idea to read the citation, at least in part. I am quoting from conclusion as that's the only part I am interested and read.

Today, I would argue that given the limitations of the existing literature we still have essentially no credible empirical evidence on the seemingly simple question of whether stronger patent rights – either longer patent terms or broader patent rights – encourage research investments into developing new technologies. While researchers have recently begun to make progress on the more limited question of how patents on existing technologies affect follow-on innovation (Galasso and Schankerman, 2015; Sampat and Williams, 2015), evidence on the overall effects of patents on research investments are needed as one input into optimal patent policy design.

[geysersam]

This comment implies that most of the massive technological innovation since 1400s came around because of patents. That's far from the truth. Patent systems that old were local and very different from the modern variant. Besides, most regions didn't have patent systems at all. The Netherlands didn't really get patent law until early 20th century. That didn't stop them from innovating and inventing. Germany similarly.

[MRtecno98]

No, they are questioning the parent comment's argument that patents are against the basis for modern technological development itself, which is obviously false if patents where present well before this development

[oniony]

I did not read any such implication.

[master_crab]

The dash marks injecting the second part of the sentence does make a strong implication.

[yareal]

Having worked at Amazon, patents there were "if you can imagine that software might be able to do a thing, patent it now". Absolutely no research was necessary, or indeed requested. You simply had to state "I have an idea".

In exchange you got a plastic puzzle piece to put on your desk. There's nothing more embarrassing to me than seeing a large number of those puzzle pieces in someone's care. You stood in the way of progress in service of Jeff Bezos? Awful.

[kajumix]

The idea of "intellectual property" is anti-productive as well as immoral. Open source software is a very good evidence of the utilitarian benefits of doing away with software patents. And IP is immoral because it's impossible to grant and secure "intellectual property" rights without violating physical property rights. Please read Stephen Kinsella's "Against Intellectual Property" for a good treatment of both the utilitarian and the moral dimensions:

https://cdn.mises.org/15_2_1.pdf

[nness]

Open Source software is an awful example because by-and-large no one gets paid to do make it.

OSS doesn't exist to spite IP, it exists because of IP rights protect creators from others stealing their work.

[deepsun]

Yes, but the same can be said about non-compete agreements. Imagine a company invested a lot in research and infrastructure, only to get their key employees poached and bring most of it to a new company in their heads.

Yet, California forbids the non-competes, because it promotes competition and at least somewhat eases capital lock-ins (i.e. two dudes in a garage can start competing with "big ones"). I don't really see much difference with patents here.

Remember early Facebook infra looked very similar to Google, they had to get creative to make new names for internal projects clones of Google ones.

[nness]

If you are arguing that non-competes shouldn't exist therefore patents shouldn't exist — I think you're framing the issue too broadly.

If a professional joins an organisation, creates something novel and valuable, and then is poached to another organisation to do the same thing — that's exactly what patents are there to protect.

Say they spend 5 years developing a nice kind of lubricant — the company can patent that lubricant. Then if the professional goes and joins another company, even if they have that knowledge, they'd have to conduct new research to find a new approach which doesn't run afoul of the existing patent. That's the point — patent's don't protect your market dominance, they just protect against imitation/copying.

Now say the work of that professional is systems architecture for some Google project, and they leave and join Facebook to build the same systems architecture for Facebook's project — of course that shouldn't be patented (although sometimes it is, and that's a different issue.)

A "restraint of trade" agreement in your employment contract (a "non-compete") is intended protect companies from others copying their product when other IP rights don't exist — and I agree that it shouldn't exist. It quite literally prevents new invention and done through an imbalance of power. But, organisational already have plenty of mechanisms to mitigate that risk — pay the person more, better working conditions, or just pay them a long gardening period.

[fauigerzigerk]

>1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc.

I agree with the gist of your comment, but a fundamental issue with patents is that your investment in research can be destroyed if someone else independently did overlapping research and filed first.

[marcinzm]

Which you mitigate by keeping an eye on competitors and avoiding overly saturated market spaces. This in turn incentives a broader research focus and also incentives publishing paper in saturated areas to make sure there's documented prior art. There's also an incentive for multiple smaller inventions spread over time. This all seems like a positive and not a negative for society as a whole.

[fauigerzigerk]

I think it can be a positive as long as the threshold for what counts as an invention is high enough. If the threshold is too low then patents become an instrument for harassment and rent seeking, slowing down industrial progress.

We have to find the right balance. If a large number of patents sound like a sad joke to most professionals in a field, then something has gone very wrong.

[kiba]

We have to find the right balance. If a large number of patents sound like a sad joke to most professionals in a field, then something has gone very wrong.

That presume that we have the ability to finetune patent laws as needed and also presume that world changing inventions are necessarily novel enough to professionals in a given field. It has often happened commonly enough that inventions will occur to several innovators at once as the next step. It is questionable that it would be fair to penalize an inventor just because another was first to file a patent, potentially driving these inventors out of the industry.

It is also pushing against the reality that people are always building on the works of others. Patents are by themselves monopolies. That is how they work. Thus, people had resorted to arrangements to avoid constant patent lawsuits, which had happened in the past.

[nness]

Yes, that's an interesting problem — the more capital you have to invest, conceptually, the more you can invest in talent and the faster you can research compared to smaller competitors.

Great for the rate of technological advancement, not so great for fairness.

[marcinzm]

Now image if there weren't patents. The larger entities would simply wait for their smaller competitors, copy their products and then use their capital to more efficiently/cheaply manufacture/market them.

edit: While also maintaining massive private documentation stores that further give them a moat. Patents are public so you at least know what someone did 20 years ago even if you're a one person shop. Without them you'd be in trouble unless you had access to a large companies massive and very private internal invention documentation store.

[kiba]

Larger entities have lawyers and can afford more of them. It doesn't protect the little guys so much as allow larger entities monopoly power.

Patents are by themselves not a business model. They merely buy a seat at the negotiation table. Leverage is another matter entirely.

[Leherenn]

It feels like you could overcome this by awarding a patent to both, if they can prove the research was independent?

[fauigerzigerk]

Yes, but how do you prove that it was after one of the teams publishes their work? It seems nearly impossible.

[spion]

You can use the "dropping a hash" method (patio11 has used this). As you progress your work, you publish a hash of it using a service trusted by everyone to correctly identify the researchers and timestamp their hashes.

If someone publishes the paper, you can then publish the files that resulted with the dropped hash and therefore prove you had certain progress of the work at a certain time.

[arthurcolle]

4d merkle trees etched on a proton or something

[fauigerzigerk]

Yes you can provably document your progress, but it doesn't solve the problem that someone else may have published overlapping ideas earlier and you can't prove that you didn't read what they published.

[Leherenn]

I was mostly thinking in the case of overlapping research as mentioned in the parent comment, not independent research years after the publication (where indeed it sounds impossible to prove you didn't read it).

Basically, if you could show that you had already made significant progress before the publication date, then you might be granted the patent as well.

[datascienced]

a use for blockchain at last?

[smsm42]

I've been working in the industry for decades, and most patents I've seen are either portfolio-inflating bullshit, or rent-seeking that blocks innovation for decades (like the infamous compression patents). I'm sure some people worked on their technology a lot, but pretending like software patents are necessary for people getting paid or for technology to advance is nonsense. They are much more frequently used to impede than promote innovation, and their overall impact is mostly negative.

[worksonmine]

> The first patent was issued in the 1400's — it is exactly how humans have progressed technologically and sociality.

The last 600 years is a rounding error in the history of humans. Imagine if the different methods of lighting a fire were patented. Those humans also burned witches and imprisoned people for criticizing the church.

We would have a better world if our goal was progress for all over profit for a few.

[mkl]

For the first 200,000 years of human existence, hardly any technological development happened at all relative to the last 600 years (though I am doubtful how much patents contributed to that development). The rate at which technological development has continued to speed up is part of what's causing problems here: patents last ~20 years, which is an eternity in IT. The other problem is granting patents on software at all - the USA is unusually permissive in this.

[graemep]

Most witch burnings happened in the last 600 years - there had been very few (at least in Europe) in the previous millennium and a half. I just pointed out in another comment that the first criminal blasphemy laws in England and Wales were also passed 600 years ago.

It is not easy to divide human progress into before and after. Technological progress very much depends on what has gone before. It accelerated when it reached a certain point of development.

I agree with you that patents are not a key cause of progress, and they often impede it by preventing people other than the patent holder further improving anything patented.

I also think they probably work pretty well for mechanical inventions, but they have been applied to everything - drugs, software, electronic devices, even business methods in some places.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> Imagine if the different methods of lighting a fire were patented.

It would have implied a better, more developed society.

It would implied that there is a writing system.

It would have implied that there was a way to store records long term.

It would have implied that there was a long distance communication system.

It would have implied the existence of some state and rule of law.

It would have implied some type of justice system where you could get redress.

It would have implied a society with excess production of essential materials that it can support the division of labor involved in supporting this system.

[worksonmine]

Not really, it could also have implied cavemen killing everyone they see lighting a fire instead of spreading the knowledge.

[smabie]

And yet, it turns out last 600 years saw many orders of magnitude more innovation than the years prior.

[chongli]

We’d expect this regardless of intellectual property laws. I think the overall innovation follows a logistic function. Early in history most people were primarily engaged in subsistence (hunting or agriculture). It took a really long time to develop the basic tools and infrastructure to get to the point where people could start to specialize in jobs not immediately related to food production, storage, or defence.

None of that stuff is strictly dependent on IP laws, they just happened to be the obvious solution to the problem “how do researchers and artists protect their investments from folks that steal/copy their ideas and beat them to market?”

[wongarsu]

Even ignoring education, the compounding effect of innovation and how most people didn't have the preconditions for innovating at all, you would expect us to have vastly more innovation right now just by virtue of having more people. We now have 20 times as many people on earth as in 1400, 40 times as many as in the year 1, and 200 times as many as in the year -4000.

[worksonmine]

Correlation ≠ causation. The printing press came around the same time and probably contributed to this development, not patents. If he was greedy maybe he would've patented the technology and normal people wouldn't learn to read.

[mrguyorama]

Also, much more importantly, the invention of the scientific method and science as a philosophy of epistemology.

Common knowledge of physics for a thousand years was that heavier things fall faster, so spoke Aristotle. Nobody actually "fact checked" that because "duh, of course heavier things fall faster, this feather falls so slowly, everyone knows that" and so knowledge could not advance.

[_fat_santa]

IMHO patents are useful for things where you spend a ton of money researching something, but the implementation is rather straightforward. Think of the secret Coke or Pepsi recipes, I would imagine very hard and expensive to develop but easy to produce once you know what to do.

Compare that to something like AWS and the equation is basically flipped. Figuring out what to do is not that difficult compared to actually doing it, Amazon could probably open source all of their cloud offerings tomorrow and outside a handful of very capable actors, implementing another AWS would be next to impossible.

Lots of things in tech are flipped on their head like that, you can describe the idea and functions of Uber at a high level on a back of a napkin, but good luck actually implementing and doing so successfully.

That's why personally I think patents should be abolished in the tech space, they just don't help anyone except the owners of the patent but they don't help in the way people actually intended it to. Here it's not like Cove lost out on being a huge cloud player because Amazon stole the idea behind S3 and DynamoDB, they just "own" the idea and are trying to extract money from Amazon.

[LordKeren]

Coke’s recipe is protected by Trade Secret, not patents. If you can figure out how to reverse engineer Coke 1:1 on your own, you can sell the resulting product. Coke is only protected from people selling their recipe to competitors.

[kiba]

Patents are only useful if they are actually enforced, through lawsuits and lawyers. The amount of time and money spent on patent lawsuits as opposed to innovation is a form of deadweight cost and must be factored in any argument for or against patents.

What patents give is a seat at the negotiation table. It is not by itself a business model.