[thaumasiotes]

> I would guess that using the tab key in this way was part of a patent they were pursuing and Microsoft's use would show this to be 'obvious' and thus not patentable.

Something that's bothered me about user-facing patents:

Let's assume that the idea of using a keyboard key to move between input fields in a software form is not obvious, and in fact is a brilliant stroke of genius the likes of which the world is not likely to see again. If that one guy hadn't been born, we would have gone thousands of years with no method, keyboard-based, mouse-based, or otherwise, of moving from one input field to another input field. Every piece of software would use nonconfigurable timers, and you'd just have to hope you could type fast enough.

I don't see what the hypothetical benefit of extending patent protection to this brilliant idea is supposed to be.

Say you're the company who comes up with the idea. You can benefit by including it in your product, where all your users can see it. In other words, the benefit you get from coming up with this idea is that you can publish it for the world to see, and that's the only way you can benefit from it. A usability feature that your users cannot use or know about doesn't increase usability.

Even though the idea isn't obvious, the implementation is. If you disclose your brilliant idea, everyone will copy it and your advantage in the marketplace will be transitory.

So... what is the purpose of giving you a patent? That cripples the marketplace, but it fails to realize the benefit of patents, publication. Publication necessarily had to happen anyway.

[somat]

Err... wasn't your post a perfect example of why patents exist?

The concept probably has a real name, I call it first mover disadvantage. It is much easier to copy a mechanism than to invent it. So why even try? Every thing you have to spend real effort to invent is trivially copied the instant you try to sell it. And them copying it don't have to bear the nearly the R&D expenses you did. so it is trivial for them to sell this mechanism for less meaning you don't even get a fair slice of the pie.

So to try and limit this imbalance we invent a legal fiction, ownership, not of a physical thing, but the way it works. Not forever, but for 20 years you get ownership over those works.

Patents do have their problems, But I think the core idea is sound, create a registry of mechinisms, use this to provide economic protection to the inventor.

[thaumasiotes]

> Err... wasn't your post a perfect example of why patents exist?

Why? In this scenario, what would happen with a patent that wouldn't happen without a patent?

[IcyWindows]

I worked on a software project make years ago. We spent a lot of money over months doing users studies to figure out the best UI for a narrow demographic.

The final UI was simple and intuitive, but it took a lot of money figuring it out.

I don't think the money would have been spent if our competition could immediately copy what we figured out.

Customers did benefit then, and now, 20 years later, anyone can do it, and humanity is little better off than if no research was done.

[thaumasiotes]

So... in this scenario, what would happen with a patent that wouldn't happen without a patent?

[svat]

I don't know whether I'm missing something obvious, but with a patent, only the patenting company would use their patented idea. In your post you say:

> If you disclose your brilliant idea, everyone will copy it and your advantage in the marketplace will be transitory.

but that is the very point that patents are supposed to prevent. So why do you say that?

The post you're replying to says:

> I don't think the money would have been spent if our competition could immediately copy what we figured out. Customers did benefit then, and now, 20 years later, anyone can do it

so clearly the patent worked for them: they were able to use their simple and intuitive UI, while the competition could not copy it till 20 years later. So what is the question?

[pavlov]

> “a brilliant stroke of genius the likes of which the world is not likely to see again. If that one guy hadn't been born, we would have gone thousands of years with no method”

But that’s not the criteria for granting a patent. It doesn’t have to be a stroke of genius. It can be something that many people could invent at the particular moment of the filing (as evidenced by many cases of near-simultaneous patent filings, like Daimler and Benz competing for the ICE in the 1880s). It just needs to be demonstrably novel.

I’m not saying tabbing back and forth through dialog fields qualifies, but then again it’s hard to place oneself in 1980.

[fragmede]

The arrow keys, and enter, are the obvious ones to use, but you have to move off of home row to hit them. That's the "non-obvious" bit of using the tab key to navigate fields. Back when that level of usability was important.

[toast0]

> A usability feature that your users cannot use or know about doesn't increase usability.

Cannot is maybe doing a lot there. There's plenty of usability features that aren't really obvious or apparent unless you look very closely. Ex: pinball machines have timed shots, but there's almost always a grace period so if you contact the ball with your flipper around when the timer hits zero and it makes the shot, chances are you'll get credit for it even though the timer expired. That's a usability feature most users won't ever notice. At WhatsApp, I would never send an S40 user a verification code where the 4th digit was 8, because if you got a text message with 123-890, s40 would turn -8 into an 8th note emoji; until today, probably 3 people knew that ... but it dramatically improved usability.

> Even though the idea isn't obvious, the implementation is. If you disclose your brilliant idea, everyone will copy it and your advantage in the marketplace will be transitory.

> So... what is the purpose of giving you a patent? That cripples the marketplace, but it fails to realize the benefit of patents, publication. Publication necessarily had to happen anyway.

If I had gotten a patent on the 'avoid -8 in verification codes', then the technique would have been public for everyone to see. So publication for exclusivity / forced licensing is an exchange of value between society and the inventor. Of course, avoid -8 is pretty obvious, when someone testing the s40 client complains about getting an 8th note in their verification code message, you make a quick tweak to code selection to avoid sending those.

For an invention that must be disclosed to be used, society isn't really getting anything in return for exclusivity. Maybe promotion of progress, theoretically, I guess, in that whoever thinks of it first gets paid; leading more people to think about things?

[jjmarr]

You're missing the historical context. Prior to patents, inventions would commercialized as magic tricks and the mechanisms hidden. Then the inventor died and the secrets were lost.

For example, Cornelis Drebbel air conditioned Westminster Abbey in 1620. King James I (of the Bible) thought it was a cool party trick. But there was little ecosystem to commercialize and Drebbel moved on with his life, trying to sell other products with temperature controlled feedback loops + a submarine. Then he died.

The only commercialized invention of his was creating a dye that was redder than others. His son-in-law kept that a family secret and focused on selling this improved dye throughout Europe, since that didn't require revealing the secret.

The rational move was to give up on a multitrillion dollar HVAC industry to sell redder dye, since the second could be a trade secret.

[peterfirefly]

> + a submarine

We still don't know how he solved the problem of carbon dioxide build up. We know he solved it, though!

[xp84]

Comments like this are the absolute best part of HN. Thank you for sharing this.

[jasomill]

Likewise.

And after reading the Wikipedia article on Drebbel, how have I never heard of this guy?

I'm particularly curious how the Royal Navy failed to realize the value of the submarine.

Reading over the article on the history of the torpedo, it sounds like early attempts to weaponize, by Drebbel and others, were unsuccessful.

Even so — bearing in mind that this a undoubtably a reflection of my own bias as a child of the Cold War raised in the shadow of the largest military-industrial complex the world has ever known — I can't help but marvel at the fact that no spare-no-expenses crash development programs arose to operationalize effective submarine-based warfare by the naval powers of the time.

[eastbound]

> the benefit you get from coming up with this idea is that you can publish it for the world to see, and that's the only way you can benefit from it

That’s your opinion, but it’s not the spirit of the law. I’m personally fully against Intellectual Property, including for movies and music, for reasons that are obvious (public money is being spent aimlessly trying to prevent two private individuals from copying things that are copied by their very nature of being published - or trying to prevent people from using ideas that are contagious - what next, put a copyright on political ideas? on dance moves? on beautiful colors?) but that’s not the law.

> we would have gone thousands of years with no method

There are other methods: The 4 arrows. The tab method is much more efficient and easy to implement, but we would have gone with the 4-arrows-to-navigate-fields method.

[kevin_thibedeau]

> move between input fields in a software form

IBMs earliest block mode terminals with field entry, including the 3270, predate the microprocessor. They were fully implemented with fixed hardware control.

[WalterBright]

IBM also infamously patented the XOR cursor.

[philipallstar]

Presumably it's to give you an advantage for putting in the work to develop it for a period of time.

[Onavo]

You can say the same about swipe to unlock and that had been litigated to death.

[thaumasiotes]

I did say the same about swipe-to-unlock:

>> Something that's bothered me about user-facing patents