AMEN. Although it sounds like sour grapes, patents are truly the downfall of this nation's innovative core at the moment. If we look at the original intention of patents and how copyright law works, etc. we can see that what we have today is indeed a bastardization of what our nation once was. Elimination of patents would help science, medicine and technology in absolutely amazing ways. Yes, there'd be some very upset people and granted I have deep ties within the patent office, yet it is something that must come to an end for real progress.
Obviously, you've never invented something that was covered by a patent. I've been involved with R&D for several companies. We invested a significant amount of money in R&D based on the knowledge that we could patent our discoveries and keep the competition from copying them. Without that protection, it would have been easier and cheaper for us to just copy our competitors' products. The ability to get a patent was actually a critical part of our desire to innovate.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ranReloaded
Translation: "It's Not Fair!!!" (Kicks toys)
Quote:
Originally Posted by ranReloaded
{Ways to protect innovative products if there were no patents} Uhmm, "Being First to Market"?
Doesn't work. Company A spends 7% of revenues on R&D to develop a product and releases it to the market. Company B doesn't have any R&D expense, but simply copies Company A's product. All else being equal, Company B has a 7% cost advantage over Company A and can undercut A's price by 7%.
And it gets worse when you consider that the innovative companies tend (on average) to be the smaller ones where the larger company has supply chain and manufacturing scale advantages that make the difference even greater.
Quote:
Originally Posted by echosonic
Amen John. The ignorance shown here by those wishing to do away with the only effective process for protecting the innovation and creativity of the little guy is breath taking.
Bunch of open source hippy whine-bags. "Everything should be free!"
Exactly. There are countless cases where smaller companies have invented something and had it stolen by larger companies - but only the patent system protected them.
Is the system perfect? No. But, in general, it accomplishes most of what it's supposed to do.
Yes, changes could be made:
- Software patents are a mess. While I don't have any problem with the concept of a software patent, the execution has been poor. First, patent law requires reduction to practice. It is not clear that this has ever occurred for some software patents - but companies have gotten away with it. More importantly, the patent examiners don't seem to know what they're doing when it comes to software patents. I would assume that this is partly because the government couldn't easily compete with 6 figure (and higher) salaries for good software engineers. This situation is slowly changing, but will probably not go away.
- Reduction to practice is a mess. In the old days, when you invented something, you brought a model (often a working model) to the patent office to show that it did what you claim. Those days are long gone. In fact, far too many patents are issued without the inventor ever having made a working prototype.
- Cost. The cost to prosecute a patent is prohibitive - which is why so many patents have been sold to these monster licensing firms. If I had a patent and felt that a big company was infringing it, I would have to choose between fighting (which would cost me well in excess of a million dollars even for a moderately complex patent) and selling the patent to someone who could afford the battle. If I'm lucky, they might give me a percentage of any money recovered, but even if not, a few hundred thousand in the bank looks pretty good when the alternative is spending millions with no guarantee of success.
I don't think there's a solution. I know there's no easy solution. The problem is that the world has gotten far more complex than our founding fathers could ever have imagined. They envisioned a patent as being a new widget that you could bring into the patent office. Extending the same system to today's world of software, multibillion dollar machines, space technology, nanotechnology, etc is not, and shouldn't be expected to be, easy.
Google's search and indexing algorithms are trade secrets (like the Coca cola recipe), not patents. Google being able to keep them under wraps for this long using only NDAs and the like shows that a weakened patent system would still be workable in terms of rewarding innovators, provided trademark laws got a tweak to compensate.
Trade Secrets work well for Google because their key tech never leaves their data-centres, but it's not really applicable to other IT firms.
For most other software shops, copyright and trademark protection is perfectly suited to the problem domain but there are a few exceptions that even an anti-patent guy has to acknowledge.
Compression/Encryption algorithms are one such. You can't copyright them meaningfully because copyright only protects your implementation. If I implement your algorithm in a different language it can't violate your copyright. Trade Secrets obviously don't work either because a secret encryption algorithm is of much less use than a public one. Patents are probably the only way to protect these, but the requirement should be for a specific algorithm. In fact the development of patent-free compression schemes such as gzip shows that patents aren't a barrier to innovation in that sub-domain.
Another possible area where better IP protection is needed is UI design. Apple has a very good case that two or three times they've had a radically better product on the market than the competition, only to see their differentiation copied away.
The problem here is it's such an edge case, patent law clearly doesn't work well, and had Apple (or Xerox) had 20 years of patent protection on the GUI then we'd all be worse off. Is it worth having an entirely new class of IP just to protect the handful of firms capable of creating a new OS platform?
Patenting 1-click shopping and getting 'protection' for 17 years is not innovation. Software and business methods should not be patentable in the same way as basic research.
As much as I love Apple, very little they do should be covered by patents-- most should be dealt with as copyright and trademark/trade dress.
Patents at issue are generally vague, marginally innovative at best, and often little more than math or an algorithm. The 'innovations' should never have been granted a patent. Unfortunately the system rewards serial filets and the lawyers.
Wow! This is exactly why there are problems with software patents, all the ignorance. As a software developer I can truly say that I should be able to patent any method or implementation regarding software logic. There is absolutely no difference between building software with logic and code as there is in building a machine made with gears and pulleys.
They both involve design, methodology and implementation all of which can be very specific and unique.
I don't think there's a solution. I know there's no easy solution. The problem is that the world has gotten far more complex than our founding fathers could ever have imagined. They envisioned a patent as being a new widget that you could bring into the patent office. Extending the same system to today's world of software, multibillion dollar machines, space technology, nanotechnology, etc is not, and shouldn't be expected to be, easy.
Out of interest why do you think that copyright wouldn't be sufficient for software? It certainly proved sufficient in the early years, it's far far cheaper to litigate a copyright case, especially in a case of blatent infringement and copyright never presents the same kind of barriers to innovation.
Wow! This is exactly why there are problems with software patents, all the ignorance. As a software developer I can truly say that I should be able to patent any method or implementation regarding software logic. There is absolutely no difference between building software with logic and code as there is in building a machine made with gears and pulleys.
They both involve design, methodology and implementation.
Oh really? Have you read any software patents?
Below is a claim on a patent that Apple has been found to infringe(U.S. Patent No. 6,199,076).
Please point to the parts that involve design, methodology and implementation.
What is claimed is:
1. A player for reproducing selected audio program segments comprising, in combination:
means for storing a plurality of program segments, each of said program segments having a beginning and an end,
means for receiving and storing a file of data establishing a sequence in which said program segments are scheduled to be reproduced by said player,
means for accepting control commands from a user of said player,
means for continuously reproducing said program segments in the order established by said sequence in the absence of a control command,
means for detecting a first command indicative of a request to skip forward, and
means responsive to said first command for discontinuing the reproduction of the currently playing program segment and instead continuing the reproduction at the beginning of a program segment which follows said currently playing program in said sequence.
So if I can't get patent protection to keep others from copying my ideas, what exactly would be my incentive to invent anything?
this type remark is so ridiculous.
well i guess you just sit on your a$$ and do nothing.
lots of progress was made in the computer field before software patents. so i guess those guys (like steve jobs and bill gates) figured what the hell, lets do it for grins?
software patents are used to keep other companies down.
the motto for apple and the others should be "there's a patent for that"
Many of the arguments here are that software patents are bogus, but most of Nortel's patents are for more than just software. The patents are for LTE technology implementation in both software and hardware design. This is not that same thing as patenting the idea of highlighting a row or column in a spreadsheet.
I agree with many others here. The patent system is screwed up, just like the unlawful de facto government that maintains it.
Excuse me while I come up with an ingenious idea, patent it, and then sit on it for 30 years hoping that someone ELSE will actually do the work to bring it to market.
I hear this a lot but I have yet to hear anyone have a good argument for *why* patents don't fulfil the "original intention." It seems to me that they clearly protect the inventor of a device or process and only do so for a reasonable amount of time.
There are lots of obvious inventions issued patents, which is contrary to the goal of the system
There are many firms out there which buy patents but do nothing with them until someone else independently invents something and then the firm will sue for payments, despite doing nothing with the patent up to that point
There are lots of duplicate patents issued, which clearly indicates they aren't innovative enough to be patented in the first place, but the owners can still sue companies for a payoff.
Wow! This is exactly why there are problems with software patents, all the ignorance. As a software developer I can truly say that I should be able to patent any method or implementation regarding software logic. There is absolutely no difference between building software with logic and code as there is in building a machine made with gears and pulleys.
They both involve design, methodology and implementation all of which can be very specific and unique.
Being first to market isn't necessarily an advantage, many people wait for the second iteration. I certainly waited for the Ipad 2. I do think though that patent protection for electronic hardware and software be for a shorter period of time. Five years should be enough to bring something to market and have 1 or two upgrades before someone else can use the patent. By then if you're inovative you've got something better anyway.
It would also get rid of the patent trolls who sit on patents until they see something that just might infringe. Then it's off to east Texas.
Many of the arguments here are that software patents are bogus, but most of Nortel's patents are for more than just software. The patents are for LTE technology implementation in both software and hardware design. This is not that same thing as patenting the idea of highlighting a row or column in a spreadsheet.
I don't think Google is really too worried about the LTE patents because they'll all be covered by FRAND anyway.
I don't think Google is really too worried about the LTE patents because they'll all be covered by FRAND anyway.
Agreed. But Nortel is not a software company and most of the patents in this pool (outside of LTE) were not software patents. Arguing that software patents are garbage doesn't seem to really apply to this case...
A patent cannot "block innovation" by definition. It's embarrassing that he even said that. What a complete moron.
Besides which, they are the company that singlehandedly forced the price up to ridiculous levels. If not for them the patents would have went for less than half what they eventually did and if they don't belief in patents why did they even bid on them?
Besides which ... "sore losers" and "sour grapes" comes to mind.
maybe you should not call people 'morons'. why don't you read this to see how a patent can stifle innovation.
Agreed. But Nortel is not a software company and most of the patents in this pool (outside of LTE) were not software patents. Arguing that software patents are garbage doesn't seem to really apply to this case...
It's unclear which of the patents in the package Apple thinks potentially lethal. There only needs to be one or two really solid smartphone applicable software patents in there. Even just two or three could justify a billion dollars if they allow Apple to drive a competitor out of the US market.
There are definitely software patents in there for example 6,012,030
Of course Apple could also be interested in the unencumbered hardware stuff such as 5,977,867
Arguably that is practically a software patent, at least in the context of a smartphone.
To be honest I really do agree with Google. The software patent system is really sad. And not even just for the reasons Google has stated for the reasons that Google has stated. For example apple was recently sued for its playlist technowledgy and they lost. It gets worst the company is sueing apple once more this time for the use of the playlist technowledgy in ios. Like it or not this system is a joke. Yeah android riped off of some people, but hell everyone has ripped off of someone even apple.
Yeah, my client killed a few people. But hell, the murder laws today are really sad. Who hasn't done killed an enemy or two, or thought of it? Lighten up.
Funny, Google got to this point that you honestly agree with only after bidding $3,141,592,653.58. I guess if they had won, they'd still be stupid like the rest of us and believe that the rules count.
Comments
AMEN. Although it sounds like sour grapes, patents are truly the downfall of this nation's innovative core at the moment. If we look at the original intention of patents and how copyright law works, etc. we can see that what we have today is indeed a bastardization of what our nation once was. Elimination of patents would help science, medicine and technology in absolutely amazing ways. Yes, there'd be some very upset people and granted I have deep ties within the patent office, yet it is something that must come to an end for real progress.
Obviously, you've never invented something that was covered by a patent. I've been involved with R&D for several companies. We invested a significant amount of money in R&D based on the knowledge that we could patent our discoveries and keep the competition from copying them. Without that protection, it would have been easier and cheaper for us to just copy our competitors' products. The ability to get a patent was actually a critical part of our desire to innovate.
Translation: "It's Not Fair!!!" (Kicks toys)
{Ways to protect innovative products if there were no patents} Uhmm, "Being First to Market"?
Doesn't work. Company A spends 7% of revenues on R&D to develop a product and releases it to the market. Company B doesn't have any R&D expense, but simply copies Company A's product. All else being equal, Company B has a 7% cost advantage over Company A and can undercut A's price by 7%.
And it gets worse when you consider that the innovative companies tend (on average) to be the smaller ones where the larger company has supply chain and manufacturing scale advantages that make the difference even greater.
Amen John. The ignorance shown here by those wishing to do away with the only effective process for protecting the innovation and creativity of the little guy is breath taking.
Bunch of open source hippy whine-bags. "Everything should be free!"
Exactly. There are countless cases where smaller companies have invented something and had it stolen by larger companies - but only the patent system protected them.
Is the system perfect? No. But, in general, it accomplishes most of what it's supposed to do.
Yes, changes could be made:
- Software patents are a mess. While I don't have any problem with the concept of a software patent, the execution has been poor. First, patent law requires reduction to practice. It is not clear that this has ever occurred for some software patents - but companies have gotten away with it. More importantly, the patent examiners don't seem to know what they're doing when it comes to software patents. I would assume that this is partly because the government couldn't easily compete with 6 figure (and higher) salaries for good software engineers. This situation is slowly changing, but will probably not go away.
- Reduction to practice is a mess. In the old days, when you invented something, you brought a model (often a working model) to the patent office to show that it did what you claim. Those days are long gone. In fact, far too many patents are issued without the inventor ever having made a working prototype.
- Cost. The cost to prosecute a patent is prohibitive - which is why so many patents have been sold to these monster licensing firms. If I had a patent and felt that a big company was infringing it, I would have to choose between fighting (which would cost me well in excess of a million dollars even for a moderately complex patent) and selling the patent to someone who could afford the battle. If I'm lucky, they might give me a percentage of any money recovered, but even if not, a few hundred thousand in the bank looks pretty good when the alternative is spending millions with no guarantee of success.
I don't think there's a solution. I know there's no easy solution. The problem is that the world has gotten far more complex than our founding fathers could ever have imagined. They envisioned a patent as being a new widget that you could bring into the patent office. Extending the same system to today's world of software, multibillion dollar machines, space technology, nanotechnology, etc is not, and shouldn't be expected to be, easy.
Google's search and indexing algorithms are trade secrets (like the Coca cola recipe), not patents. Google being able to keep them under wraps for this long using only NDAs and the like shows that a weakened patent system would still be workable in terms of rewarding innovators, provided trademark laws got a tweak to compensate.
Trade Secrets work well for Google because their key tech never leaves their data-centres, but it's not really applicable to other IT firms.
For most other software shops, copyright and trademark protection is perfectly suited to the problem domain but there are a few exceptions that even an anti-patent guy has to acknowledge.
Compression/Encryption algorithms are one such. You can't copyright them meaningfully because copyright only protects your implementation. If I implement your algorithm in a different language it can't violate your copyright. Trade Secrets obviously don't work either because a secret encryption algorithm is of much less use than a public one. Patents are probably the only way to protect these, but the requirement should be for a specific algorithm. In fact the development of patent-free compression schemes such as gzip shows that patents aren't a barrier to innovation in that sub-domain.
Another possible area where better IP protection is needed is UI design. Apple has a very good case that two or three times they've had a radically better product on the market than the competition, only to see their differentiation copied away.
The problem here is it's such an edge case, patent law clearly doesn't work well, and had Apple (or Xerox) had 20 years of patent protection on the GUI then we'd all be worse off. Is it worth having an entirely new class of IP just to protect the handful of firms capable of creating a new OS platform?
and it hurt android and those that depend on it
i don't think any company will repeat a bid for anything using Pi
Patenting 1-click shopping and getting 'protection' for 17 years is not innovation. Software and business methods should not be patentable in the same way as basic research.
As much as I love Apple, very little they do should be covered by patents-- most should be dealt with as copyright and trademark/trade dress.
Patents at issue are generally vague, marginally innovative at best, and often little more than math or an algorithm. The 'innovations' should never have been granted a patent. Unfortunately the system rewards serial filets and the lawyers.
Wow! This is exactly why there are problems with software patents, all the ignorance. As a software developer I can truly say that I should be able to patent any method or implementation regarding software logic. There is absolutely no difference between building software with logic and code as there is in building a machine made with gears and pulleys.
They both involve design, methodology and implementation all of which can be very specific and unique.
I don't think there's a solution. I know there's no easy solution. The problem is that the world has gotten far more complex than our founding fathers could ever have imagined. They envisioned a patent as being a new widget that you could bring into the patent office. Extending the same system to today's world of software, multibillion dollar machines, space technology, nanotechnology, etc is not, and shouldn't be expected to be, easy.
Out of interest why do you think that copyright wouldn't be sufficient for software? It certainly proved sufficient in the early years, it's far far cheaper to litigate a copyright case, especially in a case of blatent infringement and copyright never presents the same kind of barriers to innovation.
Wow! This is exactly why there are problems with software patents, all the ignorance. As a software developer I can truly say that I should be able to patent any method or implementation regarding software logic. There is absolutely no difference between building software with logic and code as there is in building a machine made with gears and pulleys.
They both involve design, methodology and implementation.
Oh really? Have you read any software patents?
Below is a claim on a patent that Apple has been found to infringe(U.S. Patent No. 6,199,076).
Please point to the parts that involve design, methodology and implementation.
What is claimed is:
1. A player for reproducing selected audio program segments comprising, in combination:
means for storing a plurality of program segments, each of said program segments having a beginning and an end,
means for receiving and storing a file of data establishing a sequence in which said program segments are scheduled to be reproduced by said player,
means for accepting control commands from a user of said player,
means for continuously reproducing said program segments in the order established by said sequence in the absence of a control command,
means for detecting a first command indicative of a request to skip forward, and
means responsive to said first command for discontinuing the reproduction of the currently playing program segment and instead continuing the reproduction at the beginning of a program segment which follows said currently playing program in said sequence.
I wonder if big G would be for patent reform if someone started a search engine company using
LOL
Heck, the way people rip off the iPhone and the iPad, all they would have to do to circumvent patent laws is to make it look a little different!
So if I can't get patent protection to keep others from copying my ideas, what exactly would be my incentive to invent anything?
this type remark is so ridiculous.
well i guess you just sit on your a$$ and do nothing.
lots of progress was made in the computer field before software patents. so i guess those guys (like steve jobs and bill gates) figured what the hell, lets do it for grins?
software patents are used to keep other companies down.
the motto for apple and the others should be "there's a patent for that"
Excuse me while I come up with an ingenious idea, patent it, and then sit on it for 30 years hoping that someone ELSE will actually do the work to bring it to market.
I hear this a lot but I have yet to hear anyone have a good argument for *why* patents don't fulfil the "original intention." It seems to me that they clearly protect the inventor of a device or process and only do so for a reasonable amount of time.
Listen to the most recent This American Life.
It boils down to:
Wow! This is exactly why there are problems with software patents, all the ignorance. As a software developer I can truly say that I should be able to patent any method or implementation regarding software logic. There is absolutely no difference between building software with logic and code as there is in building a machine made with gears and pulleys.
They both involve design, methodology and implementation all of which can be very specific and unique.
patents don't provide source code do they?
Uhmm, "Being First to Market"?
Being first to market isn't necessarily an advantage, many people wait for the second iteration. I certainly waited for the Ipad 2. I do think though that patent protection for electronic hardware and software be for a shorter period of time. Five years should be enough to bring something to market and have 1 or two upgrades before someone else can use the patent. By then if you're inovative you've got something better anyway.
It would also get rid of the patent trolls who sit on patents until they see something that just might infringe. Then it's off to east Texas.
Many of the arguments here are that software patents are bogus, but most of Nortel's patents are for more than just software. The patents are for LTE technology implementation in both software and hardware design. This is not that same thing as patenting the idea of highlighting a row or column in a spreadsheet.
I don't think Google is really too worried about the LTE patents because they'll all be covered by FRAND anyway.
I don't think Google is really too worried about the LTE patents because they'll all be covered by FRAND anyway.
Agreed. But Nortel is not a software company and most of the patents in this pool (outside of LTE) were not software patents. Arguing that software patents are garbage doesn't seem to really apply to this case...
We're talking about software patents
You, cloud gazer, may be talking about software patents,
but the Nortel patents are for technologies and techniques implemented by hardware.
The patent dispute between Hoover and Dyson concerning who had valid patents for their vacuum cleaner technology is valid as a relevant example.
What a lot of ridiculous nonsense.
A patent cannot "block innovation" by definition. It's embarrassing that he even said that. What a complete moron.
Besides which, they are the company that singlehandedly forced the price up to ridiculous levels. If not for them the patents would have went for less than half what they eventually did and if they don't belief in patents why did they even bid on them?
Besides which ... "sore losers" and "sour grapes" comes to mind.
maybe you should not call people 'morons'. why don't you read this to see how a patent can stifle innovation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wri...ers_patent_war
Agreed. But Nortel is not a software company and most of the patents in this pool (outside of LTE) were not software patents. Arguing that software patents are garbage doesn't seem to really apply to this case...
It's unclear which of the patents in the package Apple thinks potentially lethal. There only needs to be one or two really solid smartphone applicable software patents in there. Even just two or three could justify a billion dollars if they allow Apple to drive a competitor out of the US market.
There are definitely software patents in there for example 6,012,030
Of course Apple could also be interested in the unencumbered hardware stuff such as 5,977,867
Arguably that is practically a software patent, at least in the context of a smartphone.
My opinion... I doubt it.
To be honest I really do agree with Google. The software patent system is really sad. And not even just for the reasons Google has stated for the reasons that Google has stated. For example apple was recently sued for its playlist technowledgy and they lost. It gets worst the company is sueing apple once more this time for the use of the playlist technowledgy in ios. Like it or not this system is a joke. Yeah android riped off of some people, but hell everyone has ripped off of someone even apple.
Yeah, my client killed a few people. But hell, the murder laws today are really sad. Who hasn't done killed an enemy or two, or thought of it? Lighten up.
Funny, Google got to this point that you honestly agree with only after bidding $3,141,592,653.58. I guess if they had won, they'd still be stupid like the rest of us and believe that the rules count.