To cheer up that sad realization... on the other hand I think we can say good bye to technology monopolies forever. To spearhead that movement, I believe we need to declare Google's proprietary search algorithms "not beneficial to consumers and individuals that value their right to privacy" in a class action suit. Hence, they must be forced to license those patents at any ridiculous price a solitary judge deems appropriate, with full open source code for necessary adjustments as we or any other company sees fit.
Talk to Stanford about that. They hold the original PageRank patent and Google is merely a licensee. Their license became non-exclusive several years ago. But PageRank alone isn't going to help you these days. Pagerank is just the foundation on which Google performs a whole bunch of optimizations. Their secret sauce is mostly a collection of trade secrets, not patents.
The idea of extracting structured content from documents is patentable is preposterous. This is what regular expressions do. The general mathematical concept originated in 1956. It is laughable that this is being brought forward as novel technology 60 years later.
The first implementations were in early versions of UNIX, by Ken Thompson in the Kleene editor in the 1960's where it was used to find patterns in text.
Any intellectual property system that would entertain this needs to be scrapped.
Talk to Stanford about that. They hold the original PageRank patent and Google is merely a licensee. Their license became non-exclusive several years ago. But PageRank alone isn't going to help you these days. Pagerank is just the foundation on which Google performs a whole bunch of optimizations. Their secret sauce is mostly a collection of trade secrets, not patents.
I said what I meant, and I meant what I said, but it escaped you in trying to show some sort of higher intelligence on the matter.
I stated "propietary algorithms" for a reason... so lets call them "trade secrets" if it makes you happy. I was mostly pointing out the absurdity of a solitary judge making the decision for a company, in the name of we the people as "consumers", the justification whether a company can be forced against their will to license their IP, patents or trade secrets, and what the price should be.
So yes, using that logic of justice, I want Google's trade secrets made to be licensed by a judge at a price he/she deems appropriate so that Apple (or anyone else) can include them in a competing search engine service of their own for their devices. Going further, Apple could then even state with certainty and publicly that their implementation of the trade secrets is sans the chunk of code that Google uses to build individual doziers on everyone that uses their services. Which happens to be against the law in some places... but I guess that's a debate for another day.
Last but not least, I'm hereby declaring holy war on all Secret Sauces! :smokey:
You know in your world googles search algorithm that does much the same thing as data detectors but on a larger scale should not be patentable either. Googles search engine is just links! You are missing the forest for the trees.
IMO You are absolutely right tho that search algorithms should not be patentable. Period. Any they have should be invalidated for that matter despite the fact they've never threatened any competitor with them
Patents on software haven't always been allowed and think it was a mistake to change it. Now they're trying to figure out how to wrest back control, put the toothpaste back in the tube so to speak.
IMO You are absolutely right tho that search algorithms should not be patentable. Period. Any they have should be invalidated for that matter despite the fact they've never threatened any competitor with them
Patents on software haven't always been allowed and think it was a mistake to change it. Now they're trying to figure out how to wrest back control, put the toothpaste back in the tube so to speak.
More facile arguments against intellectual property? No sir. Labor creates value. Intellectual property is the result of labor.
It's awesome how you can patent what is basically a link.
What a ridiculous supposition that is. You are trying way too hard to disparage and diminish what is in fact a very difficult thing to accomplish well.
First, they didn't "patent what is basically a link". They didn't try to patent the (resulting) links themselves at all. No, what they really patented is an automated and intelligent method of CREATING relevant and contextual links from within text files. Identify, highlight, and offer contextual, relevant action options. In some cases now, they even connect intelligently with no user action required (e.g. auto-mapping a location when an address is detected in an event).
Do you see the difference there? They didn't patent links at all. Not even remotely implied. Nor did they patent the links that are created by their patented tech. They patented the method of creation.
Do you get that? And do you get why it isn't a trivial accomplishment?
It's a rare example of why we sometimes need software patents, and also a rare example of a "software method" worthy of such protection. Truly signature stuff, that.
It's a rare example of why we sometimes need software patents, and also a rare example of a "software method" worthy of such protection. Truly signature stuff, that.
Yet essentially useless to Apple for 10 years. I do agree with the rest of your post tho.
And you dont understand how broad this patent is and how this is the patenting of the idea of a link and hyperlink.
As others have explained to you, Apple's patent does not prevent the use or idea of links or hyperlinks. It does however, prevent someone from automatically parsing data and automatically creating the appropriate link based on the type of data it found. You may think this concept is too broad and it's unfair. Yet, nobody cries foul when company's like Amazon gets patents for something as simple as 1 - Click shopping. Apple was forced to license that rather obvious technology. Yes, patent reform is needed, but this is example is actually far more worthy of patent than most of the items being contested by either Apple or Samsung.
Yet essentially useless to Apple for 10 years. I do agree with the rest of your post tho.
Whether or not it had a "use" during the interim period is irrelevant to the validity of the patent itself. Consider this example: some of the methods Apple chooses to patent today might not be immediately "useful" in part due to CPU power not being great enough when invented, but then down the road after Moore's law presses onward, processing power makes the patent viable.
I know this from experience. I produce digital music, and I can tell you that much of what I do today on a laptop wasn't possible fifteen or even ten years ago on the most powerful desktops I could afford, simply due to processing power alone. I can stack real-time soft-synths, FX and tracks like crazy now, where I could barely run one or two without overwhelming the system then... I can also tell you that there were patent "methods" created then that didn't become "useful" until the CPU power caught up. And I am enjoying those as much as I enjoy the data detectors that should be exclusively a part of Mavericks and iOS (unless otherwise used by permission of or licensed by Apple).....
Great history on ADDs. The thing I find most disturbing is the judge's desperate comment, that PixelDoc alluded to, about Apple being forced to licence some patents to Motorola because otherwise the public would suffer due to inferior technology. One can only hope that that judge is put out to pasture at the earliest opportunity.
The thing is, Google's implementation of data tapping doesn't seem to do any fancy background processing of context; the documentation suggests that it basically just runs something like the "sed" unix utility at the programmer's request.
"<span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);line-height:1.4em;">The first task is to defined a regular expression that matches the kind of WikiWords we want to find...</span>
<span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);line-height:1.4em;">We also need to tell Linkify what to do with a match to the WikiWord. Linkify will automatically append whatever is matched to a scheme that is supplied to it.</span>
<span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);line-height:1.4em;">"</span>
That's all well and good and the specific implementation will determine whether Google infringes any or all of the claims within Apple's patent. I let the courts decide such things, as reading a patent is a comprehensive task. The term 'reading' in this context means to compare the actual accused infringing work against each claim in the patent and can become so esoteric as to launch debates on the meaning of individual words in context of a claim. I've done this in defense of software my own company has developed against claims of infringement on another party's patents. It's quite tedious.
The idea of extracting structured content from documents is patentable is preposterous. This is what regular expressions do. The general mathematical concept originated in 1956. It is laughable that this is being brought forward as novel technology 60 years later.
The first implementations were in early versions of UNIX, by Ken Thompson in the Kleene editor in the 1960's where it was used to find patterns in text.
Any intellectual property system that would entertain this needs to be scrapped.
I don't think so. I'll give a very basic example. Can a regular expression, while evaluating a piece of text, take into account that the text represents an email? Or a text message? There is context that needs to be taken into account that is not present strictly within the data the regular expression has access to. This is a minor example of where Apple's method goes beyond what a regular expression can do.
However, the larger point is not what can or cannot be accomplished in a programming syntax, as that would cover everything that can ever possibly be accomplished. I suppose that's the basis of the argument by those who suggest software patents should not be allowed, but they are allowed and so we deal with the rules in place versus those we would impose.
I don't think so. I'll give a very basic example. Can a regular expression, while evaluating a piece of text, take into account that the text represents an email? Or a text message? There is context that needs to be taken into account that is not present strictly within the data the regular expression has access to. This is a minor example of where Apple's method goes beyond what a regular expression can do.
Can you clarify what you mean by "context" in the context (heh) of data detectors? It would seem reasonable to assume any string of the form *@*.com in a textview to be an email address. And it would be trivial using regular expressions to prepend a "mailto:" tag to each instance of that pattern, thereby making it launch the email app when tapped. All of the relevant information in that case is contained in the text itself.
While I understand your point, your example is off.
The cotton gin doesn't pick cotton, it separates the seeds and husk from the fibers.
Why should you know this? Because although picking the cotton could only be done by hand, ginning was still the bottleneck in the process. The invention of the mechanical cotton gin made cotton a viable crop in the South, solidifying the economic driver for slave labor, and all that this entailed, etc.
Not to mention that Simson Garfinkel with SBook.app did automatic recognition of phone numbers as well as emails in freeform text around 1991 on NextStep. Shortly thereafter I asked my development team to put a similar feature in our SpeedDex application. Clicking on the auto inserted relevant icons would take the appropriate action ( see https://simson.net/ref/sbook5/ ). You could argue that Simson should have made the actual text hyperlinks instead of using icons but considering that Tim Berners Lee first released WWW.app that same year, I think I think Simson can be forgiven for not doing that...
Not to mention that Simson Garfinkel with SBook.app did automatic recognition of phone numbers as well as emails in freeform text around 1991 on NextStep. Shortly thereafter I asked my development team to put a similar feature in our SpeedDex application. Clicking on the auto inserted relevant icons would take the appropriate action ( see https://simson.net/ref/sbook5/ ). You could argue that Simson should have made the actual text hyperlinks instead of using icons but considering that Tim Berners Lee first released WWW.app that same year, I think I think Simson can be forgiven for not doing that...
Comments
To cheer up that sad realization... on the other hand I think we can say good bye to technology monopolies forever. To spearhead that movement, I believe we need to declare Google's proprietary search algorithms "not beneficial to consumers and individuals that value their right to privacy" in a class action suit. Hence, they must be forced to license those patents at any ridiculous price a solitary judge deems appropriate, with full open source code for necessary adjustments as we or any other company sees fit.
Talk to Stanford about that. They hold the original PageRank patent and Google is merely a licensee. Their license became non-exclusive several years ago. But PageRank alone isn't going to help you these days. Pagerank is just the foundation on which Google performs a whole bunch of optimizations. Their secret sauce is mostly a collection of trade secrets, not patents.
The first implementations were in early versions of UNIX, by Ken Thompson in the Kleene editor in the 1960's where it was used to find patterns in text.
Any intellectual property system that would entertain this needs to be scrapped.
It seems like you're a paid commenter for Google and/or Scamsung.
A quick look at your post history:
You've been member of this site since 2012; you've posted 18 comments. Your A.I. activity shows us that it has all been Google & Scamsung related.
So you just popped up to defend Google & Scamsung, again. Fack. The. Fack. Off.
I said what I meant, and I meant what I said, but it escaped you in trying to show some sort of higher intelligence on the matter.
I stated "propietary algorithms" for a reason... so lets call them "trade secrets" if it makes you happy. I was mostly pointing out the absurdity of a solitary judge making the decision for a company, in the name of we the people as "consumers", the justification whether a company can be forced against their will to license their IP, patents or trade secrets, and what the price should be.
So yes, using that logic of justice, I want Google's trade secrets made to be licensed by a judge at a price he/she deems appropriate so that Apple (or anyone else) can include them in a competing search engine service of their own for their devices. Going further, Apple could then even state with certainty and publicly that their implementation of the trade secrets is sans the chunk of code that Google uses to build individual doziers on everyone that uses their services. Which happens to be against the law in some places... but I guess that's a debate for another day.
Last but not least, I'm hereby declaring holy war on all Secret Sauces! :smokey:
IMO You are absolutely right tho that search algorithms should not be patentable. Period. Any they have should be invalidated for that matter despite the fact they've never threatened any competitor with them
Patents on software haven't always been allowed and think it was a mistake to change it. Now they're trying to figure out how to wrest back control, put the toothpaste back in the tube so to speak.
More facile arguments against intellectual property? No sir. Labor creates value. Intellectual property is the result of labor.
If patents are essentially the same types of property as your front yard and living room furniture as you imply why are they treated differently? Once again I'll ask you what you think the Founder's meant when they wrote that the rationale for US patents would be "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts..."
http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/178184/apple-opts-out-of-latest-patent-acquisition-fund-from-intellectual-ventures#post_2514644
It's awesome how you can patent what is basically a link.
What a ridiculous supposition that is. You are trying way too hard to disparage and diminish what is in fact a very difficult thing to accomplish well.
First, they didn't "patent what is basically a link". They didn't try to patent the (resulting) links themselves at all. No, what they really patented is an automated and intelligent method of CREATING relevant and contextual links from within text files. Identify, highlight, and offer contextual, relevant action options. In some cases now, they even connect intelligently with no user action required (e.g. auto-mapping a location when an address is detected in an event).
Do you see the difference there? They didn't patent links at all. Not even remotely implied. Nor did they patent the links that are created by their patented tech. They patented the method of creation.
Do you get that? And do you get why it isn't a trivial accomplishment?
It's a rare example of why we sometimes need software patents, and also a rare example of a "software method" worthy of such protection. Truly signature stuff, that.
Yet essentially useless to Apple for 10 years. I do agree with the rest of your post tho.
And you dont understand how broad this patent is and how this is the patenting of the idea of a link and hyperlink.
As others have explained to you, Apple's patent does not prevent the use or idea of links or hyperlinks. It does however, prevent someone from automatically parsing data and automatically creating the appropriate link based on the type of data it found. You may think this concept is too broad and it's unfair. Yet, nobody cries foul when company's like Amazon gets patents for something as simple as 1 - Click shopping. Apple was forced to license that rather obvious technology. Yes, patent reform is needed, but this is example is actually far more worthy of patent than most of the items being contested by either Apple or Samsung.
Yet essentially useless to Apple for 10 years. I do agree with the rest of your post tho.
Whether or not it had a "use" during the interim period is irrelevant to the validity of the patent itself. Consider this example: some of the methods Apple chooses to patent today might not be immediately "useful" in part due to CPU power not being great enough when invented, but then down the road after Moore's law presses onward, processing power makes the patent viable.
I know this from experience. I produce digital music, and I can tell you that much of what I do today on a laptop wasn't possible fifteen or even ten years ago on the most powerful desktops I could afford, simply due to processing power alone. I can stack real-time soft-synths, FX and tracks like crazy now, where I could barely run one or two without overwhelming the system then... I can also tell you that there were patent "methods" created then that didn't become "useful" until the CPU power caught up. And I am enjoying those as much as I enjoy the data detectors that should be exclusively a part of Mavericks and iOS (unless otherwise used by permission of or licensed by Apple).....
Just saying...
Great history on ADDs. The thing I find most disturbing is the judge's desperate comment, that PixelDoc alluded to, about Apple being forced to licence some patents to Motorola because otherwise the public would suffer due to inferior technology. One can only hope that that judge is put out to pasture at the earliest opportunity.
That's all well and good and the specific implementation will determine whether Google infringes any or all of the claims within Apple's patent. I let the courts decide such things, as reading a patent is a comprehensive task. The term 'reading' in this context means to compare the actual accused infringing work against each claim in the patent and can become so esoteric as to launch debates on the meaning of individual words in context of a claim. I've done this in defense of software my own company has developed against claims of infringement on another party's patents. It's quite tedious.
I don't think so. I'll give a very basic example. Can a regular expression, while evaluating a piece of text, take into account that the text represents an email? Or a text message? There is context that needs to be taken into account that is not present strictly within the data the regular expression has access to. This is a minor example of where Apple's method goes beyond what a regular expression can do.
However, the larger point is not what can or cannot be accomplished in a programming syntax, as that would cover everything that can ever possibly be accomplished. I suppose that's the basis of the argument by those who suggest software patents should not be allowed, but they are allowed and so we deal with the rules in place versus those we would impose.
"It's basically a hyperlink" is the new "it's just rounded rectangles."
Not impressed. It's apologetics masquerading as elucidation.
I don't think so. I'll give a very basic example. Can a regular expression, while evaluating a piece of text, take into account that the text represents an email? Or a text message? There is context that needs to be taken into account that is not present strictly within the data the regular expression has access to. This is a minor example of where Apple's method goes beyond what a regular expression can do.
Can you clarify what you mean by "context" in the context (heh) of data detectors? It would seem reasonable to assume any string of the form *@*.com in a textview to be an email address. And it would be trivial using regular expressions to prepend a "mailto:" tag to each instance of that pattern, thereby making it launch the email app when tapped. All of the relevant information in that case is contained in the text itself.
While I understand your point, your example is off.
The cotton gin doesn't pick cotton, it separates the seeds and husk from the fibers.
Why should you know this? Because although picking the cotton could only be done by hand, ginning was still the bottleneck in the process. The invention of the mechanical cotton gin made cotton a viable crop in the South, solidifying the economic driver for slave labor, and all that this entailed, etc.
Otherwise, a good analogy though. :-)
[though its application may be questionable.]
Quote:
Idea: cotton picking
Process: cotton gin
One is patentable the other is not.