If someone invests resources inventing something, why shouldn't that entity be entitled to participate in the on-going monetization of that invention? If we presume the prior statement is simply a straw man, do you agree partially with this statement and it simply needs reform or would you propose to throw it out altogether? If the former, how would you propose to reform it?
The problem is so many software patents just cover "do a thing on a computer," which becomes so broad nobody else can ever do that thing without infringing on the patent. Even if I have an objectively different, even better, way of doing it, software patents are used far too broadly because they tend to protect the act of doing a thing as opposed to specifically how to do the thing.
This is in contrast to something like a hardware patent, where if you patent a tool, and I build a better tool that does the same thing, the mere fact it does the same thing is not infringing unless I copy specific aspects of your patented physical design.
The reform is that an ideal implementation of software patents is largely the same as an ideal implementation of software copyright. I can't just copy what you did, but if I figure out a different way to do it, that's perfectly fine. That's why so many people say scrap software patents altogether and work on improving software copyright instead.
The software patents you described are consistently knocked-out on §101 eligibility grounds for being an "abstract concept".
IMO people who advocate scrapping software patents are disingenuous - look at what Google is trying to do software copyright at the same time. Essentially, if you take Google up on software patents and copyright, there will be no protection left for software.
Patents are granted, then if challenged, can be invalidated in court. It should be the other way around, they shouldn't be granted in the first case.
Not all can handle being taken to court for a claimed patent infringement of a crappy patent. It's expensive, time-consuming, and difficult. Did I mention wasteful?
I’m not trying to be argumentative and someone who is a lawyer can correct me here but generally speaking a company like ibm is only going to seek licensing from a party where the commercial impact is sufficient to merit the use of their resources to secure a licensing deal. Even in the case of Airbnb, it’s clear in the article ibm is suing only after attempting to exhaust other remedies. Again, I don’t think it’s necessarily bullet proof legal policy to advise companies to fly under the radar but de facto I don’t think ibm is spending a lot of time chasing companies who can’t afford a legal defense.
Also, some things are commonly recommended to do someone could have the patent to. There was a virtual world I was into a lot in the past and would follow the news on it, and some company was suing them and like 4 or 5 other companies for password hashing. So a method for retrieving a user's account and hashing their password comparing to a stored password hash... Can't find much on it though as was probably about 10 years ago.
Sounds like even patents on implementing two factors or blocking common/weak passwords... Even password resets through email...
Seems like you are likely to step on someone's patent without even reading it or just importing some open source code... unknowingly too. I guess not a huge risk until you are big enough where they'd get a good stream of income from licensing or you fight them off. Like Cloudflare had to deal with a patent troll. Some of these patents are so vague and I noticed some patent trolls use patents that are expiring in a few years since they get traded around. Then some company I heard sued a few companies before their patent expired by only a day or two since I guess even though the patent is expired they couldn't sue new projects using it, but existing stuff filed before it expired in court can still be litigated I guess. Well I guess not suing for current use then, but more the prior use of it infringing over a certain number of years might be another way to put it?
I know some companies tell employees to not read patents, but even if you don't read them might end up getting a patent owner who thinks their patent covers your functions to go after you. I think even someone has a patent on shopping sites where you can select from multiple colors for a shirt or phone, storage options, etc.
Maybe you start a company, get a patent to use to try to protect yourself but not actively going after companies. Then maybe your company isn't doing so well so the investors want you to sell off assets. So maybe a patent troll or shell company buys it up when you never planned on using the patent in that way.
Plus big companies like patents as it's like insurance, I guess there's the nuclear option. So if Apple sued Google over a feature of Android, Google could take a closer look at Apple Maps and say it infringes. So a large patent portfolio could discourage others from suing you. Not sure if that works in all industries but Google and Apple is a good example since a lot of overlapping stuff. I guess Microsoft could also be a good example, if they wanted to sue Google over Google Docs being similar to Microsoft Office maybe over a certain feature they believe they have a patent to then Google could turn around and say Bing infringes on something possibly. Then I think some tech companies rather sue OEMs like HTC and Samsung maybe instead of directly going after each other.
I think software patents are okay but should have shorter lengths, like 3 years. They also shouldn't be transferrable. IBM could license it from Jane Inventor but not roll it up as a weapon. We also need to have trained people in the USTPO so that we can have patents researched and not just rubber stamped. I also think that patent enforcement should force a review of prior art.
I recall an article a while back about how IBM is so innovative because it had the most patents filed per year on tech or something. I think we can see now that their patenting is less about innovation and more about patent trolling. Quote from the FT article on this below does not seem to show to me that this is the sort of patent that promotes real innovation - "improved navigation using bookmarks" does not seem like a breakthrough patent-worthy innovation, and I wonder how defensible these will be in court.
The computing giant has accused Airbnb of “building its business” by using patents relating to functions such as “presenting advertising in an interactive service” and “improved navigation using bookmarks”.
IBM files a lot of patent because (at least when I was there many years ago), employees and their management chain have strong economic incentives to file anything. Even interns were encouraged to file patents, and as a student it's a great way to beef up your resume. Ironically, even between technology professionals, the patents one files at IBM are great marketing material on the resume.
IBM marketing itself as 'the most innovative' does work on the vast majority of the world that isn't in technology.
I was pushed several times to get a patent when I worked at IBM. I never did it because I didn't think anything I really did was an "invention". I think they have a whole team dedicated to ghost writing patents.
That’s just a cynical response meant to devalue the OP. When people see a few patent #’s on a resume from a kid coming out of college, of course it’s a positive.
Genuinely inventing something, specially nowadays is very difficult. If a number of students start having those (especially if many of them do after an internship at IBM), it can become kind of a red flag.
Also, after talking with someone who had obtained a few patents (his work did not nearly reflect the calibre of an inventor), the expensive and convoluted process of filing for a patent means that the uniqueness of an invention may not be the most critical factor when obtaining one. I observed this when I worked at some companies hwo actively discouraged patenting because they had no resources to maintain and defend patents.
If I see patent #'s on a resume from a college kid, I'm going to actually look up those patents.
And I'm only going to view them positively if they are genuinely novel. If I can trivially find prior art or its another of those "with a computer" software patents, it's going to be a very big red flag.
Of course, this is just my own anecdote, and you may very well be right in the broader scale.
You described putting in more than 100x as much work going through someone's resume as the typical company.
Also, why would it be a big red flag if you can find prior art?
Whether or not there is prior art probably has very little to do with how capable of a developer the individual is.
Certainly. It is far more time than what our recruiter would put into it; but I don't see resumes until they've at least been filtered that way, so I don't really have to deal with a deluge, just a slow trickle. We're also a relatively small company, so the number of applicants is a bit reduced by that.
If I can find prior art that is effectively their patent, it shows to me that they were engaged in patenting something that shouldn't be patented. I have strong personal feelings about that, and I do not much want to work with someone that believes that every idea that _can_ be patented _should_ be patented.
With that said, there are many other reasons I would reject a candidate before I would reject them over this. If anything, with the relatively small number of resumes that I get on a weekly basis, anyone having any patents on their resume is going to raise a red flag that I am going to poke at more. It also gives me another topic to engage the candidate on, and on one occasion that lead to a conversation that made me vote to hire the candidate.
They may seem to beef up your resume, but whenever I saw resumes with IBM patents I would ignore the pstents or give them much less weight than any other patents.
I worked at a place that for a short while had a patent fan CTO.
They'd make plaques about the patents and hang them on walls around the company rotating them as they were filed.
I'd read them... like 90% of them I'd look at and they were straight up just a basic network design. Some I'm not even sure you could NOT do if you did any basic business process / built a computer network.
A patent must include enough information for the patent to be useful to a person of ordinary skill in the art, so applicants usually err on the side of including too much background information. It is always the claims at the end of the patent that describe the scope of the invention. Those claims are often only on a small part of what is disclosed.
> IBM sued Amazon in October last year, alleging that the company was infringing on a number of its U.S. patents, including those relating to storing data in an interactive network (Patent No. 5,442,771), adjusting hypertext links with weighted user goals and activities (5,446,891) and ordering items using an electronic catalogue (5,319,542)
The whole US patent system needs to either be scrapped or rebuilt. The purpose it was originally intended to be used for doesn't make sense in a world where most new technology is just software, and software is incredibly easy to copy and duplicate. Getting a software patent is mostly a matter of sneaking past the people at the USPTO, and making sure you're the first to file. These patent factories could just write code to generate patents all day (maybe start using PyTorch?).
I guess I always assumed this is more or less how it worked everywhere, at least anywhere that respect intellectual property. Is this not the case? What other models are out there, and which ones work better?
Too be fair, the EU also never managed to build a large scale software industry. I’m not saying this is only because of patents, but it’s not a great example to uphold.
The EU once upon a time was aggressively trying to implement them but they were canned by members . It's only a matter of time I feel before it is attempted again
In practice, EU already does allow them. The software invention just needs to be disguised as a machine. Industrial property lawyers know very well how to do that and it's unfortunately very common.
I'm not sure company value can really tell you what the volume of new tech is.
Does a company like Facebook really develop new tech, or just apply it? They don't produce that many papers, compared to even a small university department.
How are you even measuring the volume of new tech? What is one new composite material compared to one new JavaScript framework? How do you compare those?
Can you justify the claim that Amazon is mostly software? Is it because they hire a lot of well-paid software developers?
Microsoft produces a lot of value from software, but how much new technology are they producing? Some for sure, but how much?
I don't think your metrics prove the claim...
Facebook has developed a software product, and earned a lot of value from advertising. They've also developed several new technologies along the way, but I'm not sure their advertising revenue or market cap are good trackers of their R&D output.
Software products obviously scale very well, which makes them very valuable. But are you counting new technologies in terms of dollars earned? That's very different than just the number of innovations, because it depends on the size of the market for them, your capacity to exploit it, etc.
'Market cap' is not the best choice of metrics here, it's really a measure of investor surpluses, ignore the rest of the equation.
Wallmart, Exxon, Amazon retail revenues completely dwarf the 'tech sector' - it's just that their margins are more narrow, in most cases, surpluses to consumers are vast.
Honestly 'profit to investors' should be one of the last metrics most of us care about. Most individuals should be far more concerned about surpluses they receive through lower prices or higher wages, as they'll nary get any real material lift via investment income.
In this way, it's kind of odd how 'market cap' is so widely used and perceived as some kind of great measure. It's good for investors, and unless you're an investor, it's bad for you. Every dollar that goes into the pocket of Amazon's investors should be a dollar in your pocket in the form of lower prices or better products/services.
Have a look at the biggest companies by revenue [1]
The only 'tech' companies on there are Apple and Amazon.
Amazon makes the hardware, and most of Amazon's revenue is retail goods.
There are not mostly software companies on that list.
Actually, a lot of HNer discussions tend to veer into this magical surplus world as well, I'd encourage anyone to have a look at 'big revenue companies' because it gives a much clearer picture of how the world works outside our bubble.
I'm curious why you think revenue matters more than profits.
Take two hypothetical companies, say ebay` and amazon`. They both provide a marketplace, but slightly differently. ebay` allows manufacturers to list directly on their market for a fee. Amazon` buys from manufacturers and sells on their market for a markup equivalent to ebay's fee. Are these two companies substantially different? I don't think so but the revenue frame of reference says they are,
Revenue will give an indication of the size of the business activity. Valuation is just a measure of profits, which can vary a lot.
From an economic standpoint, what matters more will be revenue, it's a better indication of how meaningful what is done impacts the world.
As for Ebay vs. Amazon - for 3rd party listings, it doesn't matter that much, it's all accounting, but when Amazon actually does buy and sell stuff, it's very material because of a) cash flows: they send off cash (or get huge credit) to buy stuff b) they have inventory, warehouses, workers c) they are the merchant of record and take on chargeback risk, returns etc.. At the scale that is meaningful.
But I don't think that this comparison really highlights the difference between 'high margin' and 'high revenue' so much as for example AirBnB vs. Toyota. Even though Toyota is not worth that much more than AirBnB, it's considerably important to the economy whereas AirBnB is almost irrelevant.
Of course a lot of software goes into making AWS work. Is AWS a software business or a hardware business though? It certainly lets me get away from hardware. But I don't think that's true for AWS itself...
I mean, this conversation can keep going - I'm not really interested in digging in deeply to find the answer, because I don't think there's anything meaningful to be found. But I do object to scratch-the-surface level analysis like "Amazon is a valuable company these days, I guess the innovation happening in software outpaces all other fields of research combined" or "AWS makes most of Amazon's profit these days, which makes Amazon a software company".
Amazon might be a software company, but it might not be; it might be a logistics company, a consumer electronics company, a retail company, a data analytics company, a media company, a server farm company... it's not enough to say that AWS makes the most money, thus it's a software company.
>For starters, Amazon derives most of its profits from AWS.
Amazon has over $200B of revenue from e-commerce, $1 Profits. AWS Generate ~$25B revenue, $1M Profits.
Here is the headline. AWS ( Its Cloud Division ) Generating 1 Million times more profits than Amazon Retail!.
Or AWS Generate more profits than all of other Amazon Department combined!
What this mean is that Amazon is a vertically integrated Retail company ( Where Retail here includes Online ), with logistics, and transportation. Amazon is mostly software / AWS is a Silicon Valley / I.T / Tech view bubble.
Forgot to mention AWS is actually lots of hardware, land cost for DC, etc. i.e Not Software.
> Forgot to mention AWS is actually lots of hardware, land cost for DC, etc. i.e Not Software.
Cool, yeah, so you're saying if I go buy a bunch of servers and land I too can compete with AWS? It doesn't matter what software it runs?
The hardware and datacenter stuff is commodity. Table-stakes. Everyone has to have it. That's why they don't even manufacture the servers themselves. Software is where the value add is. This goes for any cloud provider, BTW.
That reasoning could be used for everything and hence Apple is not a Hardware company. And it doesn't change the fact majority of Amazon revenue does not derive from Software. And should not be valued as such.
Apple designs and manufactures (albeit through contracting) their products from the silicon up. People who buy Apple products care about the hardware as well as the software. Nevertheless I agree with you, Apple isn't a pure-hardware company and the market doesn't value them like that. Their P/E ratio is 20-22, roughly in the same ballpark as Google or Microsoft (higher 20s)
People who use AWS don't care about the metal that it runs on, as long as it does the job.
> Amazon revenue does not derive from Software. And should not be valued as such.
Ok. But it is (I think - I don't know that much about valuations). If you're certain that's wrong, you shouldn't be arguing with strangers over the Internet, you should be off making money from that insight.
Biotech would beg to differ. Depends on what your definitely of most is. Number of patients? Market cap? Investment dollars? Impact? That statement really overlooks hardware innovation, biotech, energy, space, nanotech, etc
It depends on your definition of "new technology", but I would say it's almost certainly not true.
In a world where electric coffee grinders exist, and batteries exist, is a battery powered electric coffee grinder a new technology? Or just a new product. I'd say the latter.
There's certainly new software technology being produced every day, but much less than there are new software products being launched every day.
Yes this is true for other forms of technology too, but no, I don't think software alone outbalances technology being developed in all other fields combined, including materials science, semiconductor, medical, photonics, robotics, drones, power electronics, microscopy, machining, metrology, renewable energy, telecommunications, etc... I think it's just an indicator of a bubble perspective from someone who probably mostly interacts with software developers or follows software technology.
I don't think the idea "battery powered coffee grinder" is patentable but why shouldn't the unique details of the implementation be covered?
Assuming that patents were actually useful as method of sharing useful designs with the world wouldn't you want to know how to overcome the engineering challenges?
I agree it probably isn't patentable. It's an analogy that a lot of software tech companies these days can make a good business by putting some frameworks together with a database and solve real problems that used to be solved by other tools, and make good money and valuable products in the process. But depending on your opinion of battery powered coffee grinders, it's not necessarily new technology.
When did I say I'm describing a patent? In fact I specifically said that category of new product is usually not patentable. I'm responding to the below claim:
"Battery powered coffee grinder" but worse: "battery powered drill, but with Li instead of NiMH" Milwaukee Tool v. Snap On (lots of commentary, here's one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9CLvU5-FRo )
On the software side, AFAIK the infamous "One Click" patent was never held up in court, but companies had to spend significant money defending against lawsuits based on it (and therefore the only possible victory was pyrrhic).
Right, but given that AirBnB listed illegal hotels and fought local governments in taking them down, it is fair to say they do not have regard for the law. Further, it is clear that a significant portion of their business relied upon such listings.
Good. If law is stupid company must defend it's interest and at the same time - hard earning hosts too. I don't see which law is being broken if those are fought in court.
I think the opinion is that they exploit lack of laws in this area. Their business model is built to let people run essentially unlicensed hotels and rentals without those pesky restriction. They could easily prevent this but they have no interest in that. It is growth at all costs; who cares if "regular" people can't find apartments because people are buying them up as AirBNB properties. The regulations will eventually catch-up but it will take time.
Unless you explain why, you're doing nothing to persuade anyone of anything other than employees at AirBnB disagree with the prevailing sentiment of HN. Having met the founders of AirBnB, I am incredibly skeptical of your claim, but I am willing to listen to what you have to say.
Of course it's the truth. There's literally rentals on there, right now, in the town I'm currently living in, that are illegal according to local laws. Airbnb doesn't de-list them, they just pretend they don't know.
Laws pushed by large companies so that others can't compete against them and they are able to price gouge the customer.
There is a large supply of housing that is available to customers that want to purchase it. The idea that two people can't make a consensual exchange of value is antithetical to a free society.
No one's saying that two people can't make a "consensual exchange of value" of legal actions. I can't make a "consensual exchange of value" by paying a mob hitman to kill someone that I don't like.
This is a good thing, and this is not antithetical to a free society.
Laws are laws, your insinuation of general corruption isn't really fair, the onus would be on you to prove that.
Both Uber and AirBnB knowingly break the law as part of their business model.
Zoning doesn't allow the kind of business that AirBnB has, they just don't care.
One could very well argue that maybe the laws need reform (as I do) but that's another story; the inherent ethos of YC et. al. is to err on the side of breaking the rules.
> The idea that two people can't make a consensual exchange of value is antithetical to a free society.
If you rely on the power of the state to be the ultimate enforcer of contracts and property rights, the state has the right and duty to delineate which contracts it will enforce.
> The purpose it was originally intended to be used for doesn't make sense in a world where most new technology is just software, and software is incredibly easy to copy and duplicate.
The very first patent was to duplicate an existing process (the loom) and have a monopoly to produce it.
I keep hearing this argument from patent proponents, but patents have never in their history been ostensibly for good.
The Constitution requires that Congress setup laws for both copyright and patent, for the good of the nation. Patents were always intended for the overall wellbeing of the nation. That's not to say that is what has always been achieved by the patent system, but it's not some sort of conspiracy. If anything, in history, they were always OSTENSIBLY for good, but perhaps ACTUALLY bad. So I find your statement to be A) historically and factually inaccurate B) literally incorrect given your usage of ostensibly.
> The Constitution requires that Congress setup laws for both copyright and patent
No it doesn't, it grants them the power but it doesn't specify they have to do it.
“The Congress shall have Power To…promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries….”
There is a big difference between having a power and being forced to use it.
I don't think that's a great reading of congress' enumerated powers. The shall refers to the powers being powers that can be used when appropriate, to achieve the intended goal of the power. Must language, here, would imply a constant duty to use each power.
My reading is that Congress has an OBLIGATION to promote the arts and sciences, and has the power to use copyright and patent law to achieve those goals as congress sees fit.
IANAL, but the fact that it says nothing about an obligation (I don't even believe it's implied, but I'm not a historical legal scholar) leads me to believe you're inserting your own bias.
One thought would be, if there was no duty implied in the specific enumeration of this power and it's implied goal, then why wouldn't it just be part of the necessary and proper clause?
If you think that you probably shouldn't deal with a lot of statutes. For what it's worth, despite your contentions, I don't at all believe it is confusing. But I'm a litigator and I went to law school.
If you think the necessary and proper clause can be read to authorize patents, you probably have a very different idea of how to interpret the constitution than the drafters of the constitution.
By your very logic, does that mean the second enumerated power "2. To borrow money on the credit of the United States;" means that we are also obligated to be in debt? Would it be unconstitutional to pay down the debt of the nation?
Additionally, even if Congress had an obligation to grant intellectual property rights, couldn't they simply grant patents for a term of 24 hours? or 15 seconds?
From what I've read (c.f. Clinton v. City of New York 1998), Congress can decline to use a power, but it cannot grant that power to another branch of government.
Agree with this. In administrative law (the principles of which apply here) certain words have technical interpretations that are very different from the colloquial meaning. "Shall" is one of those words - and I too would interpret this as an obligation.
But it doesn't say that "Congress shall promote the progress..." it says "Congress shall have the power to promote the progress..."
If the framers wanted to require that Congress do this stuff, why insert "have the power to" unnecessarily? There's no need for that phrase.
As another point against this being an obligation, if you look at the list of enumerated powers[0], you'll see some that are clearly not obligations. Congress doesn't have to borrow money. They don't have to maintain a navy. They didn't have to establish post offices. They didn't have to create a federal court system. (Granted, it makes a lot of sense for them to do many of these things, but it feels wrong to think that they're required to.)
That's not the reading I'm arguing for. The reading I'm arguing for is that it requires Congress to declare war when it is appropriate for Congress to do so
This area of law is very tricky. As I've stated above, the technical (i.e., legal) interpretation can be quite different from how a layperson would understand the same words.
The basic idea here is that an authority (e.g., Congress) that has been given a specific power (e.g., declaring war) is obligated to exercise that power where appropriate.
Do note the specific phrasing above: if there is a situation in which exercising that power is the appropriate course of action, then that power must be exercised. The authority cannot choose not to exercise the power in such a situation.
So, Congress doesn't have to declare war for the sake of declaring war. However, if there is an existential military threat to the USA (e.g., aggression by the Japanese Empire in WW2) you could argue that Congress is obligated to declare war, as this would be an appropriate situation to exercise that power.
Of course, the above explanation is very simplistic. There can be specific wordings that clarify how much discretion that authority has; there may be case law pertinent to that area; and whether a given situation mandates "appropriate" exercise of a given power is never a black-and-white decision.
That cuts both ways, though. It would be pretty easy to argue that it is not the "appropriate course of action" to implement the copyright or patent system in the way we have, and that, indeed, the "appropriate course of action" is to have minimal -- or even no -- protections.
The Framers were skeptical of enabling government to give out patent and copyright monopoly grants. Jefferson wrote:
Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
It is notable that patent and copyright are not natural rights. At no time was it assumed that people have such rights, nor that government, without explicit authorization could grant such limited term monopolies. Calling these monopolies "good" is definitely not uncontested, nor was it ever.
It's true some of the founders were skeptical, I never said otherwise and I never said it was "uncontested. What I said was that it's inclusion in the Constitution is for a clear reason, whether or not the reasoning is valid is a different debate.
As I pointed out, the constitution grants congress the EXPLICIT AUTHORIZATION you refer to, for the very purpose of promoting the PROGRESS of the arts and sciences.
I guess you think that the promotion of the progress of arts and sciences is not inherently a GOOD thing, but I'd disagree and I think the implied reasoning behind it's inclusion is entirely self-evident.
Does the current set of systems promote the progress of "science" and "useful arts" as they would have been known by those signing those laws many lifetimes ago?
From what I remember of other parts of the constitution and amendments offhand they generally don't include an explicit directive about why something is there. It's extremely implicit as an often obvious effect of what the law expressly allows or forbids.
Thus it is very reasonable to ask: Is the behavior we see from IBM in this news story promoting the progress of "science" and/or "useful arts"? Is the behavior of industry overall with respect to these tools doing more good or more harm?
It seems like you don't fundamentally get the point...
The intent of the patent systems != what the patent system achieves
What I described to you, that you disagreed with was the intent of the patent system. If you want to debate what the patent system achieves, it's a much more complicated question.
It is substantiated by the text of the Constitution itself.
From what I remember of other parts of the constitution and amendments offhand they generally don't include an explicit directive about why something is there. It's extremely implicit as an often obvious effect of what the law expressly allows or forbids.
They generally don't. And therefore the statement of intent for this particular clause should be given more weight, not less.
You cut out the very next sentence which describes the element that I am claiming is unsubstantiated.
Though you do understand the further elaboration of why I too feel it is __extremely__ important that there is a clause about why this power is reserved to Congress and a described intent / limit within which that power is to be used.
Unfortunately this clause was specifically litigated and we lost.
More specifically, can Congress achieve unlimited terms with regular copyright extensions to existing copyright? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft ruled that they can. However their next attempt to extend has so far failed.
We will find out in 2024 whether they get it together, or whether Mickey Mouse enters the public domain after all...like it should have done in 1984. (That was the maximum that could have been expected when Steamboat Willie was released.)
I still believe that's wrong, but a re-do now would be pointless. I doubt anyone within the next few decades will put someone for the people, rather than for the rich people and corporations, on the supreme court. There's a lot of corruption (money/influence) everywhere that needs to be cleaned up first.
"Framers" is more correct. Not all the Founding Fathers participated in authoring the constitution.
Secondly, an explicit reason implies a condition: Is current patent law actually fit for the stated purpose?
Lastly, another comment here refers to the language of "amendments," presumably the Bill of Rights. The Copyright Clause is a clause, not an amendment, and not part of the BoR.
The Framers also actively supported and participated in the slavery trade, believing it was perfectly reasonable and rational to own people as property.
The intellectual property system may have been intended as a force for good. However, it's gotten to the point where everyone knows how to abuse the system and get away with it. There is no reason for anyone to recognize it as a legitimate.
Companies file deliberately vague all-encompassing patents that are very hard to understand and pretty much useless for the purpose of educating the public and advancing the state of the art. Patents are merely weapons to be used against competitors. Companies file patents despite the existence of prior art and not only are they granted by the patent office but they're also allowed to stand uncontested due to the prohibitively expensive nature of patent litigation.
Disney and its copyright industry friends lobbied the government and successfully cheated the public out of its public domain rights by extending the duration of copyright to ludicrous lengths. If that's not criminal conspiracy, I don't know what is. YouTube and the copyright industry cheat people out of their fair use rights every single day.
It's weird that we expect the law to be perfect yet we don't expect that of other things. I think you make a lot of valid points. However, I think you miss the forest for the trees. The point is, if you don't like this system, another one would need to be put in its stead. Short of any ideas how that would work, I'm skeptical of the claim that these laws are illegitimate. I guess you don't think we should respect criminal law either? Should we not put any white collar criminals away at all because so many go free? It's an absurd argument that you are making, ultimately.
If patents had a requirement that they must be licensed under "reasonable" terms (i.e. if brought to court you can argue that the license was designed to price out or discourage competitors) then I'm totally in support of them since it's supposed to be a reward for sharing your design with the world rather than keeping it a trade secret.
Well, let's say you don't successfully negotiate over licensing terms and the other side continues anyway. When you sue, you will not be awarded damages more than what a reasonable royalty would be. Here, treble damages for willful infringement act as a pressure for actors to accept fair licensing terms. So the point being: you can't really use your patent to force unfair licensing terms because in the end a court will never give you more than a reasonable license would result in.
You can of course have any opinion you want, but at least present the actual rational for why patents exist. Let me attempt to state it, whether you agree with it or not.
A company may invent a mechanism or process which is better for its intended use than what came before. Sometimes it takes a lot of money and time and it doesn't always work. In the case of a mechanism, once it is sold, competitors could take it apart and reap the benefits without having expended the money and effort to create something new. If patents were killed off, it would discourage people and companies from making those investments. It has varied over the centuries, but currently a patent gives a 20 year time limited "monopoly" on the thing invented.
In the case of a process (vs a mechanism), without patents, a company is highly motivated to keep the process a trade secret. Even with patents a company may prefer to take that route. What do patents offer here? In exchange for disclosing the process, the company is granted that monopoly. In theory disclosing the process will spur the next round of improvements and help the system.
The problem isn't necessarily patents, but the process. Patent examiners are not paid all that well and literally have minutes to research and approve or deny a patent. They need to crank through multiple patent applications a day. And companies abuse the system. Secondly, the practice in patent law is to write the patents in such a way as to disclose as little as possible and claim as much as possible using obtuse language. If you read really old patents an ordinary person could understand most of them. Today I can read a patent in a domain I'm expert in and it is very hard to follow.
There should be some penalty for filing obvious patents, and part of the penalty would be to pay for for more patent examiners, and to pay the legal costs of the challenging party.
The first US patent was for a method of making potash, for fertilizer.
The early US loom patents are particularly ironic as they were “stolen” from the British design rather than actually invented, in violation of British law. The same thing applied to a whole bunch of other early technologies - the patents existed to encourage stealing other peoples ideas and hard work then claiming it as your own.
I agree and stories like this make the blood boil. You have a good idea though, lets create machine learning to create patent generators, and automate the submission of those patents. Then lets use ML to draft potential patent lawsuits with the patents we automatically generated.
I think it is working exactly as intended. The point of the USPTO is to provide a mechanism for carving up the universe of ideas into plots of land where ownership is clear and backed up by the force of the state. You can charge rent on it, you can develop it yourself, you can leave it idle, it’s yours. Software innovators are a bit like wholesome farmers who just want to labor in the fields, beat the elements and grow good crops to feed the people for a decent profit. That’s nice, but in a country without property law big mean farming operations with security staff will just come and park themselves where you were farming.
The problem I believe, is that software innovators are taught not to worry about patents. Perhaps this attitude helps the VC shops who are experts at it, and it gives them an information advantage. I don’t know who feeds the myth.
In a right-thinking world, we would look at this situation and say Airbnb just started farming on land that was unclearly owned. This is the natural consequence.
Your analogy makes no sense. Land is a scarce and finite resource. Land ownership is a zero sum game. Patents are arbitrary and there can be an infinite number of them.
You don't need patents to build software but you need land for crops.
The patent is the land, not the crop. The products that can be produced with the patent are the crops, with which it is impossible to have without the patent. Think of it this way, you spend years cracking a new invention. You bring it to market. You immediately go out of business because a larger company takes your invention and sells it at half the price you can because they don't need to recoup your R&D costs. Without patents you cannot protect against this circumstance.
Trade secrets don't protect against this because trade secrets don't protect against reverse-engineering whereas patents do. Patents are a temporary monopoly. Trade secrets can last indefinitely. Patents have a relatively short lifetime, though people do argue one still too-long for software.
Another possible scenario: You spend years cracking a new invention. A company you are currently working for files a patent, and then fires you. You are no longer allowed to use the knowledge that is in your head.
In this scenario, if they actually stole your invention without a valid IP assignment clause in your work agreement/contract, then the law absolutely provides a way for you to make this claim and enforce it via a court of law. Without the patent system, how exactly do you think the inventor would fare here?
> in a country without property law big mean farming operations with security staff will just come and park themselves where you were farming.
That's exactly what is happening in a country that does have the corresponding IP law and the IP law is enabling the practice rather than fighting it. In other news: war is peace, ignorance is strength, and freedom is slavery. Carry on!
When property laws were introduced to the US, parties with an information advantage were able to exploit loopholes, trick ignorant people into signing agreements that they didn’t understand etc. Lots of people fell foul to the new system and I’m sure it was written initially to favor certain parties. But it’s better than no ownership framework. The thing to do now is understand it.
That hardly follows. "IP" has very different properties than land, and "no ownership framework" is hardly the only alternative under consideration.
Even to the extent that land ownership and idea ownership can be analogized, using the former to justify the later is a poor argument on account of the enormous known systematic problems with the former. In particular, there's a reason why economists borrowed the term "rent" to mean "benefit received for non-produced input."
> The thing to do now is understand it.
That doesn't justify anything either. Did organized crime just take over your neighborhood? Understanding their priorities will help you deal with the problem, but it doesn't make them good and it doesn't make them worth protecting.
Right - because on places like here people are convinced that strong inventor's patent rights are BAD overall. That's how big corporations take up all the IP while simultaneously using it to strangle smaller players. With stronger IP regime, an inventor could get an injunction over an infringer - now they can't. Read about efficient infringement.
> The point of the USPTO is to provide a mechanism for carving up the universe of ideas into plots of land where ownership is clear and backed up by the force of the state. You can charge rent on it, you can develop it yourself, you can leave it idle, it’s yours.
The point of patent laws is to encourage the spread of knowledge. To put it another way, it's NOT yours, but we'll let you act like it for a bit in order to make sure the knowledge gets out. If we've created a situation where the "land of ideas" is remaining fallow, then the process isn't working as intended.
> The problem I believe, is that software innovators are taught not to worry about patents
Who's the innovator? What side of the worry?
The software companies I've been in have been all about MAKING patents. Teaching special classes, polling workers to see if they've done anything patentable.
Worrying about violating patents is a different story.
Meanwhile, as an individual coder doing anything outside a corporate market, the message is that it's too expensive and difficult to "worry" about violating them.
> If we've created a situation where the "land of ideas" is remaining fallow, then the process isn't working as intended.
I think you mean, ‘has fallow spots’. It seems to me that writing law is similar to building software systems; you always want a perfectly effective and economical system but you never have that ideal. So good engineers don’t stand up and say this system isn’t perfect, it’s obvious. What’s the proposed improvement? That is interesting.
That's why software engineers want to be allowed to do their work without a silly patent system blocking their work.
Software is a medium in which patentable "inventions" come naturally to software engineers at a very high rate, often the same ideas as each other in response to the same problems.
(This suggests they aren't really rare insights at all and shouldn't be patentable, but the standard is too low for that.)
Sometimes tens or hundreds of patent-grade "inventions" a week for a great software engineer.
It isn't even possible for a great software engineer to know if what they are writing infringes on patents, existing or pending. It's just too difficult because of the high rate of duplicate "inventions" that come naturally.
Mechanical and electrical engineers also have great ideas and are blocked by patents. But the rate at which new, patentable ideas come to individuals in those fields seems to be lower, perhaps because it takes longer to actually make things, perhaps other reasons. Maybe even just because there are so many software engineers that duplication is unavoidable.
Does anyone have details of how much IBM is trying to extract from Airbnb? I see the settlement with Groupon but surely they cannot be aiming that high? (of course I could be too optimistic here)
Software patents are a joke that the tech industry has relied upon to give it relevance.
Why should “using commonly known syntax patterns to enable mechanized organization and display of text and images in any number arbitrary configurations”, which is a reasonable enough description of what we’re doing from a user perspective, be protected?
That’s ALL software work is. “Feeling” ephemeral things are real is not a good enough justification for shackling us all with such laws.
That’s ripe for abuse. No less than being told we have to make laws this way because people “felt” God was telling them that’s ok.
But money makes laws change so they can collect on our innate agency and curiosity for these things.
They own the land and the ideas.
Sorry, mate, read a bit more than contemporary politics & economics books.
A philosophy that undoes all this captured emotional energy to prop up correctness of winning favor with stern old people who don’t literally contribute except via condescending approval is right there.
Society will instead kowtow to daddy despite all the now dead philosophers writing that we should avoid just that, lest they reign over us with their feelings of what is appropriate and emotional wanky tales of grandiose pipe dreams they want to achieve for themselves via our effort. More real gains for them, inequality gains for those of us that prop up their emotional castles.
Adam Smith was right: the extreme division of labor has created a society of ignorant humans whose agency has been boxed in by the state apparatus.
I’m not talking about anti-science and well argued positions. Politically the people are not existing in one. They’re existing as scared children too afraid of the ruler their fifth grade teacher who died years ago, keeps in her drawer.
Childish paranoias literally etched in these brains forever. Thanks neuroscience for showing us the long life of our childhood anxieties and paranoias.
I'm not sure why you are resorting to ad-hominem attacks and I'm not sure where you get your facts from as software patents have routinely and generally been knocked out for ineligibility since the Supreme Court's Alice decision years ago.
It's clear you have no idea what is involved in getting a patent, it's also clear that you have no idea what a patent gets you. Without litigation, generally nothing. Software companies are well aware of how flimsy most software patents that have passed actually are, and routinely knock them out in IPR proceedings or §101 claims.
And your quote is silly as it describes something that should not be patented. In fact, patent law specifically prohibits the patenting of anything "commonly known" or simply a computer-operated process that is something a human otherwise previously did. This is a very difficult area of the law, to prescribe what-yet-unthought-of-things are patentable and which aren't. That's why having a patent doesn't mean that a court will find it valid once you attempt to litigate over it. You seem to not understand this! The patent system isn't perfect, and it doesn't purport itself to be. We struggle to get criminal law right and that involves people's actual lives. So I'm not sure where you get the gall to call other people emotional when it's clearly just a projection of your own situation.
>>> The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.
Read the whole story and you will see how IBM makes money !
Yup, you can seek a declaratory judgment of non-infringement, or institute an IPR at the PTAB to get a patent knocked-out. As a patent litigator, I believe most people don't understand patents, the patent system, nor what it tries to achieve.
I think people misunderstand the patent system. It's not perfect, but to expect it to be so is entirely absurd. People do not realize it is a set of laws that is supposed to categorize and provide structure... to the unknown. If people realized this is the starting point from which all patent laws must be developed, it would create the context to understand why everything else happens. It's kind of absurd, even amongst the quite intelligent folks here, that this goes without notice. To say software patents shouldn't exist outright is to say that no one could invent anything in software that is novel and beneficial to society. I'm not sure how people come to that conclusion!
I think people also fundamentally misunderstand that the "patent troll" is kinda like the "jaywalker" a term made up by an industry attacking the very concept. The car companies made up jaywalking once they got cities to switch off streetcars and to free the roads up for individual's motor vehicles. Similarly, patent troll is something used by large corporations owning vast troves of IP that get attacked by a smaller company that owns less IP. Is every patent litigation great? No! But our legal system already prefers to let a guilty man free rather than put an innocent man in jail... yet there is some absurd belief that the patent system should be more perfect than this. And lets be fair, it's a lot easier to say "killing people is wrong and deserves XYZ punishment" than it is to determine every unknown thing in the world. Patent trolls aren't really trolls, they are the inventors. Most of the time, if you invent a patent, you still can't find the funds to take on a big corporation infringing your patent. At least if "trolls" exist, the founder can sell his patent right to an entity that specializes in enforcing it. This is the market working.
Not a lawyer but I'd imagine depends on the way they wrote the license. Like with software if someone open sourced something and then wanted to make it closed source, if they own the copyright 100% and you didn't violate the license you could keep using the current version but their new private changes you wouldn't get.
So I'd imagine something similar unless the license expires after X time but that doesn't make sense in open source as haven't seen that other than in commercial closed source programs, and even then some programs still work but you won't get updates unless you pay to upgrade or a yearly maintenance fee.
However you might want to document these things, heard once some copyright troll put images out under a free license and then changed their mind so went after websites using it.
I thought the reason behind that was because they wanted to make uniform charging ports so companies like GM didn't make proprietary ports you couldn't charge teslas with and vice versa.
According to the article, IBM did this same thing to Twitter (suing for ridiculous patent claims immediately prior to an IPO, in order to pressure some sort of settlement).
I don't know much about the stock market, but this doesn't make a ton of sense to me. If the claim really is meritless (which, it certainly seems to be), it shouldn't effect the fundamental value of Airbnb's business. If the underlying business is unaffected, won't whatever PR-related impact the lawsuit has on stock prices be erased rather quickly? Or would investors still price in some risk as long as the lawsuit was pending, even if they felt confident it would be thrown out?
It seems like patent laws are a barrier to grow your business up to a certain size in the US. Would it be more sensible to incorporate in a jurisdiction - say, Canada - which does not allow such broad patents?
It's pretty uncommon these days to see a major tech company (read: one that has a reputation to maintain) actually litigate over a software patent in court, especially over something as established and basic as "ecommerce". I'm curious what the exact patent is for.
There's this ugly thing called a continuation. You file a patent in the 90s, the patent office says "I don't think so", you modify the patent, the PTO still says no, you modify it again, and so on. If I understand correctly, you can wind up with a patent with a priority date of when you first filed, but an expiration date of 20 years from when it was finally granted. (The "priority date" means that you need prior art from before that date to invalidate the patent.)
> Airbnb is going to need a lot of luck with a jury to win this.
As an aside, the fact that these things are decided by juries is nuts to me. Why should the average Joe who needs help installing a printer be compelled to miss work to decide multibillion dollar lawsuits that are deeply technical? I understand the right to a jury if you are accused of murder, but for patent cases it just seems asinine.
This makes sense to me in the context of humans committing natural crimes, but not in the context of multinational corporations squabbling over IP. The very concept of ideas as defensible property depends on a pre-existing hierarchy.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadDoes anyone have a non paywalled URL?
This is in contrast to something like a hardware patent, where if you patent a tool, and I build a better tool that does the same thing, the mere fact it does the same thing is not infringing unless I copy specific aspects of your patented physical design.
The reform is that an ideal implementation of software patents is largely the same as an ideal implementation of software copyright. I can't just copy what you did, but if I figure out a different way to do it, that's perfectly fine. That's why so many people say scrap software patents altogether and work on improving software copyright instead.
IMO people who advocate scrapping software patents are disingenuous - look at what Google is trying to do software copyright at the same time. Essentially, if you take Google up on software patents and copyright, there will be no protection left for software.
... and this is a bad thing?
Not all can handle being taken to court for a claimed patent infringement of a crappy patent. It's expensive, time-consuming, and difficult. Did I mention wasteful?
Sounds like even patents on implementing two factors or blocking common/weak passwords... Even password resets through email...
Seems like you are likely to step on someone's patent without even reading it or just importing some open source code... unknowingly too. I guess not a huge risk until you are big enough where they'd get a good stream of income from licensing or you fight them off. Like Cloudflare had to deal with a patent troll. Some of these patents are so vague and I noticed some patent trolls use patents that are expiring in a few years since they get traded around. Then some company I heard sued a few companies before their patent expired by only a day or two since I guess even though the patent is expired they couldn't sue new projects using it, but existing stuff filed before it expired in court can still be litigated I guess. Well I guess not suing for current use then, but more the prior use of it infringing over a certain number of years might be another way to put it?
I know some companies tell employees to not read patents, but even if you don't read them might end up getting a patent owner who thinks their patent covers your functions to go after you. I think even someone has a patent on shopping sites where you can select from multiple colors for a shirt or phone, storage options, etc.
Maybe you start a company, get a patent to use to try to protect yourself but not actively going after companies. Then maybe your company isn't doing so well so the investors want you to sell off assets. So maybe a patent troll or shell company buys it up when you never planned on using the patent in that way.
Plus big companies like patents as it's like insurance, I guess there's the nuclear option. So if Apple sued Google over a feature of Android, Google could take a closer look at Apple Maps and say it infringes. So a large patent portfolio could discourage others from suing you. Not sure if that works in all industries but Google and Apple is a good example since a lot of overlapping stuff. I guess Microsoft could also be a good example, if they wanted to sue Google over Google Docs being similar to Microsoft Office maybe over a certain feature they believe they have a patent to then Google could turn around and say Bing infringes on something possibly. Then I think some tech companies rather sue OEMs like HTC and Samsung maybe instead of directly going after each other.
Quote from (https://www.ft.com/content/6f02ce76-e1d6-45d8-b27a-0491281c2...)
The computing giant has accused Airbnb of “building its business” by using patents relating to functions such as “presenting advertising in an interactive service” and “improved navigation using bookmarks”.
IBM marketing itself as 'the most innovative' does work on the vast majority of the world that isn't in technology.
Really? I wouldn't view that as a positive unless we're talking about law students I guess.
Also, after talking with someone who had obtained a few patents (his work did not nearly reflect the calibre of an inventor), the expensive and convoluted process of filing for a patent means that the uniqueness of an invention may not be the most critical factor when obtaining one. I observed this when I worked at some companies hwo actively discouraged patenting because they had no resources to maintain and defend patents.
And I'm only going to view them positively if they are genuinely novel. If I can trivially find prior art or its another of those "with a computer" software patents, it's going to be a very big red flag.
Of course, this is just my own anecdote, and you may very well be right in the broader scale.
Also, why would it be a big red flag if you can find prior art? Whether or not there is prior art probably has very little to do with how capable of a developer the individual is.
If I can find prior art that is effectively their patent, it shows to me that they were engaged in patenting something that shouldn't be patented. I have strong personal feelings about that, and I do not much want to work with someone that believes that every idea that _can_ be patented _should_ be patented.
With that said, there are many other reasons I would reject a candidate before I would reject them over this. If anything, with the relatively small number of resumes that I get on a weekly basis, anyone having any patents on their resume is going to raise a red flag that I am going to poke at more. It also gives me another topic to engage the candidate on, and on one occasion that lead to a conversation that made me vote to hire the candidate.
I guess software patents just didn't exist then.
They'd make plaques about the patents and hang them on walls around the company rotating them as they were filed.
I'd read them... like 90% of them I'd look at and they were straight up just a basic network design. Some I'm not even sure you could NOT do if you did any basic business process / built a computer network.
It was bonkers.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2545023/ibm--amazon-co...
Hahahahahaha
The world hasn't ended so far.
https://fsfe.org/campaigns/swpat/swpat.en.html for a decent overview
Is this really true?
1. Microsoft – mostly software
2. Apple – software and hardware
3. Amazon – mostly software
4. Alphabet – mostly software
5. Berkshire Hathaway – not tech
6. Facebook – mostly software
7. Alibaba – mostly software
8. Tencent – mostly software
9. Johnson & Johnson – not tech
10. Visa – not tech, but mostly software
Does a company like Facebook really develop new tech, or just apply it? They don't produce that many papers, compared to even a small university department.
How are you even measuring the volume of new tech? What is one new composite material compared to one new JavaScript framework? How do you compare those?
Is a small university department really producing more than a paper per working day?
Microsoft produces a lot of value from software, but how much new technology are they producing? Some for sure, but how much?
I don't think your metrics prove the claim...
Facebook has developed a software product, and earned a lot of value from advertising. They've also developed several new technologies along the way, but I'm not sure their advertising revenue or market cap are good trackers of their R&D output.
Software products obviously scale very well, which makes them very valuable. But are you counting new technologies in terms of dollars earned? That's very different than just the number of innovations, because it depends on the size of the market for them, your capacity to exploit it, etc.
Wallmart, Exxon, Amazon retail revenues completely dwarf the 'tech sector' - it's just that their margins are more narrow, in most cases, surpluses to consumers are vast.
Honestly 'profit to investors' should be one of the last metrics most of us care about. Most individuals should be far more concerned about surpluses they receive through lower prices or higher wages, as they'll nary get any real material lift via investment income.
In this way, it's kind of odd how 'market cap' is so widely used and perceived as some kind of great measure. It's good for investors, and unless you're an investor, it's bad for you. Every dollar that goes into the pocket of Amazon's investors should be a dollar in your pocket in the form of lower prices or better products/services.
Have a look at the biggest companies by revenue [1]
The only 'tech' companies on there are Apple and Amazon.
Amazon makes the hardware, and most of Amazon's revenue is retail goods.
There are not mostly software companies on that list.
Actually, a lot of HNer discussions tend to veer into this magical surplus world as well, I'd encourage anyone to have a look at 'big revenue companies' because it gives a much clearer picture of how the world works outside our bubble.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...
Take two hypothetical companies, say ebay` and amazon`. They both provide a marketplace, but slightly differently. ebay` allows manufacturers to list directly on their market for a fee. Amazon` buys from manufacturers and sells on their market for a markup equivalent to ebay's fee. Are these two companies substantially different? I don't think so but the revenue frame of reference says they are,
From an economic standpoint, what matters more will be revenue, it's a better indication of how meaningful what is done impacts the world.
As for Ebay vs. Amazon - for 3rd party listings, it doesn't matter that much, it's all accounting, but when Amazon actually does buy and sell stuff, it's very material because of a) cash flows: they send off cash (or get huge credit) to buy stuff b) they have inventory, warehouses, workers c) they are the merchant of record and take on chargeback risk, returns etc.. At the scale that is meaningful.
But I don't think that this comparison really highlights the difference between 'high margin' and 'high revenue' so much as for example AirBnB vs. Toyota. Even though Toyota is not worth that much more than AirBnB, it's considerably important to the economy whereas AirBnB is almost irrelevant.
And Samsung, Foxconn, and Alphabet. So 10% of the list.
For starters, Amazon derives most of its profits from AWS.
I mean, this conversation can keep going - I'm not really interested in digging in deeply to find the answer, because I don't think there's anything meaningful to be found. But I do object to scratch-the-surface level analysis like "Amazon is a valuable company these days, I guess the innovation happening in software outpaces all other fields of research combined" or "AWS makes most of Amazon's profit these days, which makes Amazon a software company".
Amazon might be a software company, but it might not be; it might be a logistics company, a consumer electronics company, a retail company, a data analytics company, a media company, a server farm company... it's not enough to say that AWS makes the most money, thus it's a software company.
Amazon has over $200B of revenue from e-commerce, $1 Profits. AWS Generate ~$25B revenue, $1M Profits.
Here is the headline. AWS ( Its Cloud Division ) Generating 1 Million times more profits than Amazon Retail!.
Or AWS Generate more profits than all of other Amazon Department combined!
What this mean is that Amazon is a vertically integrated Retail company ( Where Retail here includes Online ), with logistics, and transportation. Amazon is mostly software / AWS is a Silicon Valley / I.T / Tech view bubble.
Forgot to mention AWS is actually lots of hardware, land cost for DC, etc. i.e Not Software.
Cool, yeah, so you're saying if I go buy a bunch of servers and land I too can compete with AWS? It doesn't matter what software it runs?
The hardware and datacenter stuff is commodity. Table-stakes. Everyone has to have it. That's why they don't even manufacture the servers themselves. Software is where the value add is. This goes for any cloud provider, BTW.
People who use AWS don't care about the metal that it runs on, as long as it does the job.
> Amazon revenue does not derive from Software. And should not be valued as such.
Ok. But it is (I think - I don't know that much about valuations). If you're certain that's wrong, you shouldn't be arguing with strangers over the Internet, you should be off making money from that insight.
In a world where electric coffee grinders exist, and batteries exist, is a battery powered electric coffee grinder a new technology? Or just a new product. I'd say the latter.
There's certainly new software technology being produced every day, but much less than there are new software products being launched every day.
Yes this is true for other forms of technology too, but no, I don't think software alone outbalances technology being developed in all other fields combined, including materials science, semiconductor, medical, photonics, robotics, drones, power electronics, microscopy, machining, metrology, renewable energy, telecommunications, etc... I think it's just an indicator of a bubble perspective from someone who probably mostly interacts with software developers or follows software technology.
Assuming that patents were actually useful as method of sharing useful designs with the world wouldn't you want to know how to overcome the engineering challenges?
> most new technology is just software
On the software side, AFAIK the infamous "One Click" patent was never held up in court, but companies had to spend significant money defending against lawsuits based on it (and therefore the only possible victory was pyrrhic).
Good. If law is stupid company must defend it's interest and at the same time - hard earning hosts too. I don't see which law is being broken if those are fought in court.
This is BS. Those "regular" people just want rental market to collapse so they can live in center of the city for pennies.
It's nobody's business if someone rents apartment. If you can't afford it - you can't afford it.
Unless you explain why, you're doing nothing to persuade anyone of anything other than employees at AirBnB disagree with the prevailing sentiment of HN. Having met the founders of AirBnB, I am incredibly skeptical of your claim, but I am willing to listen to what you have to say.
There is a large supply of housing that is available to customers that want to purchase it. The idea that two people can't make a consensual exchange of value is antithetical to a free society.
This is a good thing, and this is not antithetical to a free society.
Both Uber and AirBnB knowingly break the law as part of their business model.
Zoning doesn't allow the kind of business that AirBnB has, they just don't care.
One could very well argue that maybe the laws need reform (as I do) but that's another story; the inherent ethos of YC et. al. is to err on the side of breaking the rules.
Surely that's true, but nobody can agree on which exact rules need to be broken. :)
So you'll forgive me when I call the police because you're building favelas in your back yard and have 20 micro-rentals.
If you rely on the power of the state to be the ultimate enforcer of contracts and property rights, the state has the right and duty to delineate which contracts it will enforce.
My town prohibits leases under a week but that hasn’t stopped AirBnb from accepting listings there.
The very first patent was to duplicate an existing process (the loom) and have a monopoly to produce it.
I keep hearing this argument from patent proponents, but patents have never in their history been ostensibly for good.
No it doesn't, it grants them the power but it doesn't specify they have to do it.
“The Congress shall have Power To…promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries….”
There is a big difference between having a power and being forced to use it.
My reading is that Congress has an OBLIGATION to promote the arts and sciences, and has the power to use copyright and patent law to achieve those goals as congress sees fit.
You are literally looking for something that isn't there, because it is not written down.
I would love for a lawyer to chime in, because admittedly this is not my wheelhouse.
Additionally, even if Congress had an obligation to grant intellectual property rights, couldn't they simply grant patents for a term of 24 hours? or 15 seconds?
From what I've read (c.f. Clinton v. City of New York 1998), Congress can decline to use a power, but it cannot grant that power to another branch of government.
If the framers wanted to require that Congress do this stuff, why insert "have the power to" unnecessarily? There's no need for that phrase.
As another point against this being an obligation, if you look at the list of enumerated powers[0], you'll see some that are clearly not obligations. Congress doesn't have to borrow money. They don't have to maintain a navy. They didn't have to establish post offices. They didn't have to create a federal court system. (Granted, it makes a lot of sense for them to do many of these things, but it feels wrong to think that they're required to.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_Stat...
The basic idea here is that an authority (e.g., Congress) that has been given a specific power (e.g., declaring war) is obligated to exercise that power where appropriate.
Do note the specific phrasing above: if there is a situation in which exercising that power is the appropriate course of action, then that power must be exercised. The authority cannot choose not to exercise the power in such a situation.
So, Congress doesn't have to declare war for the sake of declaring war. However, if there is an existential military threat to the USA (e.g., aggression by the Japanese Empire in WW2) you could argue that Congress is obligated to declare war, as this would be an appropriate situation to exercise that power.
Of course, the above explanation is very simplistic. There can be specific wordings that clarify how much discretion that authority has; there may be case law pertinent to that area; and whether a given situation mandates "appropriate" exercise of a given power is never a black-and-white decision.
Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
It is notable that patent and copyright are not natural rights. At no time was it assumed that people have such rights, nor that government, without explicit authorization could grant such limited term monopolies. Calling these monopolies "good" is definitely not uncontested, nor was it ever.
As I pointed out, the constitution grants congress the EXPLICIT AUTHORIZATION you refer to, for the very purpose of promoting the PROGRESS of the arts and sciences.
I guess you think that the promotion of the progress of arts and sciences is not inherently a GOOD thing, but I'd disagree and I think the implied reasoning behind it's inclusion is entirely self-evident.
Does the current set of systems promote the progress of "science" and "useful arts" as they would have been known by those signing those laws many lifetimes ago?
From what I remember of other parts of the constitution and amendments offhand they generally don't include an explicit directive about why something is there. It's extremely implicit as an often obvious effect of what the law expressly allows or forbids.
Thus it is very reasonable to ask: Is the behavior we see from IBM in this news story promoting the progress of "science" and/or "useful arts"? Is the behavior of industry overall with respect to these tools doing more good or more harm?
The intent of the patent systems != what the patent system achieves
What I described to you, that you disagreed with was the intent of the patent system. If you want to debate what the patent system achieves, it's a much more complicated question.
It is substantiated by the text of the Constitution itself.
From what I remember of other parts of the constitution and amendments offhand they generally don't include an explicit directive about why something is there. It's extremely implicit as an often obvious effect of what the law expressly allows or forbids.
They generally don't. And therefore the statement of intent for this particular clause should be given more weight, not less.
Though you do understand the further elaboration of why I too feel it is __extremely__ important that there is a clause about why this power is reserved to Congress and a described intent / limit within which that power is to be used.
More specifically, can Congress achieve unlimited terms with regular copyright extensions to existing copyright? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft ruled that they can. However their next attempt to extend has so far failed.
We will find out in 2024 whether they get it together, or whether Mickey Mouse enters the public domain after all...like it should have done in 1984. (That was the maximum that could have been expected when Steamboat Willie was released.)
Secondly, an explicit reason implies a condition: Is current patent law actually fit for the stated purpose?
Lastly, another comment here refers to the language of "amendments," presumably the Bill of Rights. The Copyright Clause is a clause, not an amendment, and not part of the BoR.
Companies file deliberately vague all-encompassing patents that are very hard to understand and pretty much useless for the purpose of educating the public and advancing the state of the art. Patents are merely weapons to be used against competitors. Companies file patents despite the existence of prior art and not only are they granted by the patent office but they're also allowed to stand uncontested due to the prohibitively expensive nature of patent litigation.
Disney and its copyright industry friends lobbied the government and successfully cheated the public out of its public domain rights by extending the duration of copyright to ludicrous lengths. If that's not criminal conspiracy, I don't know what is. YouTube and the copyright industry cheat people out of their fair use rights every single day.
A company may invent a mechanism or process which is better for its intended use than what came before. Sometimes it takes a lot of money and time and it doesn't always work. In the case of a mechanism, once it is sold, competitors could take it apart and reap the benefits without having expended the money and effort to create something new. If patents were killed off, it would discourage people and companies from making those investments. It has varied over the centuries, but currently a patent gives a 20 year time limited "monopoly" on the thing invented.
In the case of a process (vs a mechanism), without patents, a company is highly motivated to keep the process a trade secret. Even with patents a company may prefer to take that route. What do patents offer here? In exchange for disclosing the process, the company is granted that monopoly. In theory disclosing the process will spur the next round of improvements and help the system.
The problem isn't necessarily patents, but the process. Patent examiners are not paid all that well and literally have minutes to research and approve or deny a patent. They need to crank through multiple patent applications a day. And companies abuse the system. Secondly, the practice in patent law is to write the patents in such a way as to disclose as little as possible and claim as much as possible using obtuse language. If you read really old patents an ordinary person could understand most of them. Today I can read a patent in a domain I'm expert in and it is very hard to follow.
There should be some penalty for filing obvious patents, and part of the penalty would be to pay for for more patent examiners, and to pay the legal costs of the challenging party.
The early US loom patents are particularly ironic as they were “stolen” from the British design rather than actually invented, in violation of British law. The same thing applied to a whole bunch of other early technologies - the patents existed to encourage stealing other peoples ideas and hard work then claiming it as your own.
https://www.uspto.gov/about-us/news-updates/first-us-patent-...
The problem I believe, is that software innovators are taught not to worry about patents. Perhaps this attitude helps the VC shops who are experts at it, and it gives them an information advantage. I don’t know who feeds the myth.
In a right-thinking world, we would look at this situation and say Airbnb just started farming on land that was unclearly owned. This is the natural consequence.
You don't need patents to build software but you need land for crops.
The patent is the land, not the crop. The products that can be produced with the patent are the crops, with which it is impossible to have without the patent. Think of it this way, you spend years cracking a new invention. You bring it to market. You immediately go out of business because a larger company takes your invention and sells it at half the price you can because they don't need to recoup your R&D costs. Without patents you cannot protect against this circumstance.
Trade secrets don't protect against this because trade secrets don't protect against reverse-engineering whereas patents do. Patents are a temporary monopoly. Trade secrets can last indefinitely. Patents have a relatively short lifetime, though people do argue one still too-long for software.
I think this scenario is more realistic.
That's exactly what is happening in a country that does have the corresponding IP law and the IP law is enabling the practice rather than fighting it. In other news: war is peace, ignorance is strength, and freedom is slavery. Carry on!
That hardly follows. "IP" has very different properties than land, and "no ownership framework" is hardly the only alternative under consideration.
Even to the extent that land ownership and idea ownership can be analogized, using the former to justify the later is a poor argument on account of the enormous known systematic problems with the former. In particular, there's a reason why economists borrowed the term "rent" to mean "benefit received for non-produced input."
> The thing to do now is understand it.
That doesn't justify anything either. Did organized crime just take over your neighborhood? Understanding their priorities will help you deal with the problem, but it doesn't make them good and it doesn't make them worth protecting.
The point of patent laws is to encourage the spread of knowledge. To put it another way, it's NOT yours, but we'll let you act like it for a bit in order to make sure the knowledge gets out. If we've created a situation where the "land of ideas" is remaining fallow, then the process isn't working as intended.
> The problem I believe, is that software innovators are taught not to worry about patents
Who's the innovator? What side of the worry?
The software companies I've been in have been all about MAKING patents. Teaching special classes, polling workers to see if they've done anything patentable.
Worrying about violating patents is a different story.
Meanwhile, as an individual coder doing anything outside a corporate market, the message is that it's too expensive and difficult to "worry" about violating them.
I think you mean, ‘has fallow spots’. It seems to me that writing law is similar to building software systems; you always want a perfectly effective and economical system but you never have that ideal. So good engineers don’t stand up and say this system isn’t perfect, it’s obvious. What’s the proposed improvement? That is interesting.
It is important.
That's why software engineers want to be allowed to do their work without a silly patent system blocking their work.
Software is a medium in which patentable "inventions" come naturally to software engineers at a very high rate, often the same ideas as each other in response to the same problems.
(This suggests they aren't really rare insights at all and shouldn't be patentable, but the standard is too low for that.)
Sometimes tens or hundreds of patent-grade "inventions" a week for a great software engineer.
It isn't even possible for a great software engineer to know if what they are writing infringes on patents, existing or pending. It's just too difficult because of the high rate of duplicate "inventions" that come naturally.
Mechanical and electrical engineers also have great ideas and are blocked by patents. But the rate at which new, patentable ideas come to individuals in those fields seems to be lower, perhaps because it takes longer to actually make things, perhaps other reasons. Maybe even just because there are so many software engineers that duplication is unavoidable.
What a novel play by entitled aristocrats.
Why should “using commonly known syntax patterns to enable mechanized organization and display of text and images in any number arbitrary configurations”, which is a reasonable enough description of what we’re doing from a user perspective, be protected?
That’s ALL software work is. “Feeling” ephemeral things are real is not a good enough justification for shackling us all with such laws.
That’s ripe for abuse. No less than being told we have to make laws this way because people “felt” God was telling them that’s ok.
But money makes laws change so they can collect on our innate agency and curiosity for these things.
They own the land and the ideas.
Sorry, mate, read a bit more than contemporary politics & economics books.
A philosophy that undoes all this captured emotional energy to prop up correctness of winning favor with stern old people who don’t literally contribute except via condescending approval is right there.
Society will instead kowtow to daddy despite all the now dead philosophers writing that we should avoid just that, lest they reign over us with their feelings of what is appropriate and emotional wanky tales of grandiose pipe dreams they want to achieve for themselves via our effort. More real gains for them, inequality gains for those of us that prop up their emotional castles.
Adam Smith was right: the extreme division of labor has created a society of ignorant humans whose agency has been boxed in by the state apparatus.
I’m not talking about anti-science and well argued positions. Politically the people are not existing in one. They’re existing as scared children too afraid of the ruler their fifth grade teacher who died years ago, keeps in her drawer.
Childish paranoias literally etched in these brains forever. Thanks neuroscience for showing us the long life of our childhood anxieties and paranoias.
It's clear you have no idea what is involved in getting a patent, it's also clear that you have no idea what a patent gets you. Without litigation, generally nothing. Software companies are well aware of how flimsy most software patents that have passed actually are, and routinely knock them out in IPR proceedings or §101 claims.
And your quote is silly as it describes something that should not be patented. In fact, patent law specifically prohibits the patenting of anything "commonly known" or simply a computer-operated process that is something a human otherwise previously did. This is a very difficult area of the law, to prescribe what-yet-unthought-of-things are patentable and which aren't. That's why having a patent doesn't mean that a court will find it valid once you attempt to litigate over it. You seem to not understand this! The patent system isn't perfect, and it doesn't purport itself to be. We struggle to get criminal law right and that involves people's actual lives. So I'm not sure where you get the gall to call other people emotional when it's clearly just a projection of your own situation.
You made these chips with sand
And I own the land!
https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html
>>> The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.
Read the whole story and you will see how IBM makes money !
I guess the main difficulty is not the legal framework, but the business framing
I think people also fundamentally misunderstand that the "patent troll" is kinda like the "jaywalker" a term made up by an industry attacking the very concept. The car companies made up jaywalking once they got cities to switch off streetcars and to free the roads up for individual's motor vehicles. Similarly, patent troll is something used by large corporations owning vast troves of IP that get attacked by a smaller company that owns less IP. Is every patent litigation great? No! But our legal system already prefers to let a guilty man free rather than put an innocent man in jail... yet there is some absurd belief that the patent system should be more perfect than this. And lets be fair, it's a lot easier to say "killing people is wrong and deserves XYZ punishment" than it is to determine every unknown thing in the world. Patent trolls aren't really trolls, they are the inventors. Most of the time, if you invent a patent, you still can't find the funds to take on a big corporation infringing your patent. At least if "trolls" exist, the founder can sell his patent right to an entity that specializes in enforcing it. This is the market working.
So I'd imagine something similar unless the license expires after X time but that doesn't make sense in open source as haven't seen that other than in commercial closed source programs, and even then some programs still work but you won't get updates unless you pay to upgrade or a yearly maintenance fee.
However you might want to document these things, heard once some copyright troll put images out under a free license and then changed their mind so went after websites using it.
I don't know much about the stock market, but this doesn't make a ton of sense to me. If the claim really is meritless (which, it certainly seems to be), it shouldn't effect the fundamental value of Airbnb's business. If the underlying business is unaffected, won't whatever PR-related impact the lawsuit has on stock prices be erased rather quickly? Or would investors still price in some risk as long as the lawsuit was pending, even if they felt confident it would be thrown out?
(This is with respect to IBM vs. Groupon, an earlier case)
"What patents are IBM claiming Groupon infringed upon?":
https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/19726/what-paten...
Unfortunately entire system is built around protecting monopolies / giant corporations.
Airbnb is going to need a lot of luck with a jury to win this. Morally they ought to win it, but ...
As an aside, the fact that these things are decided by juries is nuts to me. Why should the average Joe who needs help installing a printer be compelled to miss work to decide multibillion dollar lawsuits that are deeply technical? I understand the right to a jury if you are accused of murder, but for patent cases it just seems asinine.
Morally, Airbnb deserves to go bankrupt.
"Method for presenting advertising in an interactive service"
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7072849B1/en