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Comment by HiLo | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't disagree with you more.

If you don't know HOW to build a multi-billion dollar product without stealing prior work that isn't yours, WHY should you be able to sledgehammer your way into lots of money by preventing somebody else from getting paid for what they did?

Furthermore, a current lack of sufficient resources to pursue an idea does not mean that you never intend to do anything with it. The poster seems to think that the arbitrary amount of "a few years" discredits any prior work, as if it doesn't take people much longer periods of time to get their life in order and bring their life's work and ideas to fruition.

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One big reason is because the whole world runs on prior work. We have cities full of things built before we were born. We are only able to do what we do now because of massive amounts of work by millions of people who probably did not foresee what all their efforts would lead to. Should we be forever obliged to funnel millions of dollars to the estates of the dead because they contributed (like so many others) to the success of today's products?

The current system unreasonably rewards arbitrary subsets of the total group of people responsible for making useful things. It also manages to include essentially middlemen in the rewarded set.

Something of a straw man when speaking of paying off people who are long dead, versus people are were actively trying to get their products to market at the same time as you.

You also assume that there is an alternative to having arbitrary subsets. We're dealing with the law, which is almost by definition an imperfect compromise that we put up with simply because it's better than the alternative.

Kind of like how some people are arbitrarily thrown in jail, under the same legal system. Without rambling, I feel like you are just assuming an impossible and nonexistent counterfactual.

Furthermore, in this case, we aren't talking about paying off the guy who set up the sewer system 100 years ago, we're talking about paying off the people who had a patent 7 years before you, and you decided to say "screw them" and use it anyways. As if Apple didn't know it was violating those patents? Come on. Why should companies be allowed to operate outside of the system we, as a society, set up?

>If you don't know how to build a multi-billion dollar product without stealing prior work that isn't yours, WHY should you be able to sledgehammer your way into lots of money by preventing somebody else from getting paid for what they did?

The assumption being, of course, that you actually stole prior work instead of coming up with the same idea. From what I can tell, most of the time these patents cover obvious stuff.

A touch screen on a phone? Who would have thought of that? Everybody, actually. Everybody.

Patents are a bit more nuanced than "touch screen on a phone."

It's been a long time since I saw a patent that wasn't a description of the most obvious way to do something. Where I work the company is trying to patent everything (mostly, I would hope for defensive reasons). I have patents in my name.

And they're all written as broadly as the USPTO will accept, which is pretty damn broadly. The language is subtle, but in most cases the implications of the language are not subtle.

Do you read the claims and the arguments made to differentiate over any prior art the examiner finds? Trying to guess at the "implications" of the language is a futile endeavor unless you have a ton of context, because a ton of things need to be considered to understand the scope of a claim. In patent lawsuits, in fact, a Markman hearing is one of the most critical phases, as this is where it gets determined what terms in the claims actually mean, and hence what claims actually cover.

The idea that anyone bothers to read patents to find ideas to steal is laughable, at least in the fast-moving tech industry.

The "tech industry" is incredibly diverse to make such a broad generalization. I know for a fact that many players in, say, the telecommunications, chip design and semiconductor industries regularly read their competitors' patents. This helps them not only keep pace with the state of the art, it also helps gather competitive intelligence and guess at their competitors' future directions.

In software, sure, few people read patents. Primarily I'd say it's because a) 99.9% of software development is producing infinite variations of simple CRUD apps, not solving hard problems that require looking up any sort of references, and b) NIH is a like a congenital defect in developers.

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