[powertower]

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." -- John Carmack

[rayiner]

That's one possible narrative. Another would be:

The idea that I can be presented with a problem, hire a dozen experts and spend millions of dollars coming up with a solution to the problem, and have someone come along and just copy the solution and use it in their own product to compete with me is horrifying.

[georgemcbay]

Looking at the roster of high-dollar patent lawsuits (both successful and unsuccessful) over the past few years, quite a lot of them are the Carmack type.

Bounce scrolling, emoticon keyboard input, unified search across multiple apps, "placing internet information on a tv screen", etc. These are totally obvious ideas, not the type of thing that you spend millions of dollars on researching for years.

[rayiner]

I absolutely agree.

[manaskarekar]

And here's another one:

The idea that someone can come up with a solution:

- prevent anyone else henceforth from using it without paying them,

- enforce that by force and using taxpayer money,

- stretching over political boundaries,

- not even giving the remotest fair chance to the unborn to ever come up with that solution,

- charge a price fixed by whatever whims tickle that person's fancy and deny others of a possibly cheaper solution

- just to protect a possibly overvalued idea

.. is extremely horrifying to me.

Please refer this earlier post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591253

[dr_doom]

Can you give me an example of how this would happen? If google spent millions solving a problem how would I copy the solution and integrate it into my product, considering I will never see google's codebase?

Genuinely asking, a real world situation would be cool. It seems like this would happen most when ex-employees try to compete with the large company.

[rayiner]

The fact that it's difficult to reverse-engineer Google's technology is an accident of the kind of products it makes: web services. You can access the product while the "secret sauce" remains safely tucked away in a data center.

At the opposite end of the spectrum think of a company like Intel investing into WiMAX. Developing that standard was not cheap, but almost by definition it was something that required disclosure of the end result. Intel can try to recoup the initial investment by selling chips implementing the standard, but competitors can always undercut them on price because they didn't have to spend any money coming up with the initial design.

There is a lot of technology that's much easier to reverse engineer than it is to develop. Especially with software, where it's often very easy to dig out a copy of the firmware from a competing product and decompile it.

You might think this kind of stuff doesn't actually happen, but in the 1990's American companies hated working with the Chinese precisely for this reason. They'd take an American product and copy it right down to the silk screening on the PCB's, and sell the result for cut-rate prices.

[angersock]

You might think this kind of stuff doesn't actually happen, but in the 1990's American companies hated working with the Chinese precisely for this reason. They'd take an American product and copy it right down to the silk screening on the PCB's, and sell the result for cut-rate prices.

And the world is arguably a better place now that the Chinese can make super-cheap parts and clones of American designs and sell them to people who couldn't afford them otherwise.

[whatshisface]

For software-as-a-service, trade secrets are easily kept. Not so much if google published a desktop version of their fancy product. And no, making saas the only viable platform is not a good outcome. (then we wouldn't have to worry about trusting the user, but we would have to worry about trusting the provider.)

[danielweber]

'jandrewrogers makes a very cogent point above when he points out that the patent system was put into place precisely to stop all information from being hidden. Without any legal protection, you have to create all sorts of ugly things (like guilds) in order to protect the things you develop.

We may have lost some of Shakespeare's plays because he had to be so secretive with his work, since he had no other legal protection from people just copying the stuff and putting on their own plays.

[chrisbennet]

I just read how Shakespeare borrowed/stole heavily from other artists of his time.[1] Today he would have been sued for this and you wouldn't have those plays at all perhaps.

[1] Last chapter of the recent book "Imagine" by Jonah Lehrer

[barrkel]

That isn't horrifying at all; one person loses (you), but the consumer wins big time. On a utilitarian basis, this is great.

What would be more horrifying is a dearth of innovation for fear of other people copying it. Is that realistic? Is first-mover advantage enough? What about prize funds (e.g. Netflix prize, X prize, etc.)? Would the inefficiency costs of those mechanisms be larger than the coordination, government regulation, litigation etc. costs that patents cause?

Are there any kinds of innovation that definitely would not happen under alternate schemes, that we absolutely need patents for?

[neumann_alfred]

No, that's not another way to describe the same situation; it's an entirely different situation. Was this a honest mistake or deliberate sophistry?

[prodigal_erik]

When "what's appalling about patents existing" is the emotional argument, "what would be appalling about patents not existing" is a good counter-argument. On the gripping hand, not having patents would only threaten big solutions that work as non-disclosed competitive advantages, where having patents currently threatens all solutions no matter how straightforward.

[neumann_alfred]

When "what's appalling about patents existing" is the emotional argument,

I thought the argument is actually that they exist in the way they do, not in them existing at all.. ?

"what would be appalling about patents not existing" is a good counter-argument.

Then someone make that argument; the post I replied to didn't IMHO, and here is why: If patents didn't exist, you wouldn't do the same R&D in the same way as you would do in a world with patents. So that's just apples and oranges. "If this chair didn't exist, the person would fall on their butt!" No, actually in that case the person wouldn't even have gotten into a situation where they need a chair to not fall.

Which is of course something that is often claimed, that we need patents to "encourage innovation". But consider all the inventions that are made at more or less the same time by people who never heard of each other. To me it's obvious that (large chunks of) invention are more inherent in the laws of physics and human society than in individual inventors. "I made this" actually means "everything up to and including me made this"... sounds less grand, is so much more true. But I guess taking credit for pre-existing things and squeezing money and power out of them is something we actually got used to. Doesn't make it true though.

To me it's all bogus anyway, I don't even buy the claim that a bunch of molecules and the memories others have of them constitute an entity called "John Carmack", as if that was a real thing. But with that outlook it's very hard to influence the political process, or even to just make sense to the average person.

[pekk]

While we're demanding that the government give us artificial rents, why not just pay it directly to remove our competition, and skip all the bullshit.

[rayiner]

You know what's also artificial? This whole idea that I can file a claim with the county clerk to a particular area of the Earth, and from thenceforth I don't have to defend my territory like every other animal on the planet--other people will do it for me with government sanction and at taxpayer expense.

[anonymoushn]

In my state we cannot own land. We must rent it from a gang. I believe the rent is called "Property tax."

[rayiner]

Better than the state of nature, where you don't "own" land, just control it until another animal kills and eats you.

[powertower]

Yes, if the solution takes "dozen experts and millions of dollars", it should be possibly patentable.

But if the solution is reproducible by an average or good programmer leading by logical steps, then it shouldn't be patentable at all.

[manaskarekar]

The fallacy of this suggestion is in deciding where to draw the line.

[neumann_alfred]

"You can't patent obvious shit" is actually patent law, so that's not a suggestion at all... it's just not enforced very well, is it, and that's the whole "mystery".

[prodigal_erik]

"Obvious" in US patent law basically means you assembled pieces of prior art like Lego bricks. If you use something nobody ever wrote down, it doesn't matter how many of your peers would have immediately realized the same solution (i.e., whether your disclosure actually benefits anyone), you win the race just by having encountered the problem first.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn...

[magicalist]

Sort of. That's really part of the Federal Circuit's ever-expanding scope of patentability, which the Supreme Court has made some moves to hem in (as noted in the third paragraph in the section you cite), and is a somewhat recent development. The Supreme Court in fact ruled exactly the opposite to the Federal Circuit's test that you paraphrase, ruling that "obvious to try" is a valid obviousness test. In other words, even if encountering a totally novel problem, if a person with ordinary skill in the art would have also tried the same solution as yours, it should not be patentable. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KSR_v._Teleflex

The fact that the decision was unanimous has a lot of us hopeful that the new patent cases that the supreme court is taking on will see more of the federal circuit's nonsense cut back. It won't be patent reform, but it will be progress.

[bhousel]

The average programmer can't solve fizzbuzz.

Therefore anything more complicated than fizzbuzz passes the nonobviousness test and is patentable.

[wtallis]

The hypothetical "person having ordinary skill in the art" is presumed to have some actual skill, to be more skilled than a layperson, to have have some actual creativity, and to have an educational background similar to that of active workers in the field. People who merely call themselves programmers without having any significant skill do not count toward determining what the level of "ordinary skill" is.

[CaveTech]

Average programmer definitely could. Average applicant, maybe not.

[powertower]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I wasn't suggesting that the "Is a solution reproducible via logical steps?" rule to be a validating rule... It only invalidates patentability if found to be true. Otherwise, nothing.

[JanneVee]

Well that is an aspect of the issue. But the issue that Carmack points out is that: if somebody has patented it does not matter that the competition does not copy, they hire their own dozen of experts and spend their own millions they still can violate the patent. Someone else can come in and rob them of their investment because they came to the same logical conclusion.

[eweise]

The actual technology is only one part of running a successful software business and not the most important from my experience. Just copying someone else's solution does not necessarily mean that you can be as successful as the originator.

[danielweber]

The technology may not be the most important thing, but (excepting a few weird industries with significant legacy costs that newcomers can ignore) it's also the advantage the young start-up has against the established company.

[loceng]

This is how electricity was developed though, too, no?