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Honestly, I think software people have a largely skewed view of the patent system in general. I used to be in traditional engineering (mechanical/electrical to be precise), and the amount of R&D dollars that has to go into any major innovation is astronomical.

The amount of testing, regulatory costs, tooling costs, etc etc, makes bringing an innovative thing to market very, very expensive indeed. Most of these things are also trivially easy to reverse engineer - the patent is the only thing preventing a company's competitors from cloning the tech, avoiding all of the costs associated, and discouraging innovation overall.

The trick is software patents - software largely doesn't cost a lot, not compared to big heavy machinery requiring onerous certification and government authorizations. 3 guys hacking for a month straight is peanuts compared to, say, the amount of money it would cost to bring a new fuel injection system to market, yet the software these guys produce can be equally valuable from a marketability perspective. This is where patents fall apart - the point of the patent system is to encourage R&D spending by allowing protection of its results, because being simply first to market is not a large enough advantage in many industries to be profitable. It is, however, true in software, so I'm personally dubious of software patents in general.

Just some perspective - I dislike the "patents are evil, always, every way!" kneejerk reaction. It has a very valid role in a lot of industries that aren't well represented or understood by people on HN.

Here's an interesting Apple hardware patent:

"It is somewhat surprising that Apple received some of the patents in question, such as the patent on "Conserving Power By Reducing Voltage Supplied To An Instruction-Processing Portion Of A Processor". When you peel away the technical language, the patent basically is talking about saving power by supplying less voltage to a circuit and some common strategies to do so. Not only has then been seemingly done before (prior art), but it also is inherently given by laws of nature (power = current * voltage). If that's patentable, the general concept of die shrinks should be patentable, overclocking would be patentable (watch out Anandtech.com!), and a whole host of other processes made possible by laws of nature."

http://www.dailytech.com/Apples+Wild+iPhone+Patent+Attack+To...

Everything patented or implemented in the history of the world is possible under the laws of physics; the argument that because it is possible, it is not patentable makes no sense.

As must be stated anytime there is an article on here concerning patents, read the claims, not just the title. Most of the titles are so broad as to be meaningless, but the claims must be made specific, as these are what can be defended against infringement.

In this particular case, the claims themselves ( http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=7CCWAAAAEBAJ&dq=7... ) are vague and extremely obvious, and I would be shocked if every claim hadn't already been implemented and/or patented by someone else. In fact, if you read the application, they were forced to retract the first twenty of their original claims.

I know it has become fashionable to say that the concept of patents in general is flawed, and that patent examiners are sub-human imbeciles. I disagree on both counts; software patents are generally crap and should be done away with to a large extent, but as another commenter has pointed out, many inventions require a great deal more investment and patents provide a great incentive to develop such things. It is unreasonable to expect patent examiners (engineers, not lawyers) to do a perfect job of pattern-matching each application with every similar previous application, considering that patent applications are deliberately worded in a language which is impenetrable to anyone trying to figure out what the hell something does. Reform at the policy level is needed, and acting as though the problem is that patent examiners aren't smart enough or that patents in general are a bad idea tends not to be very persuasive.

Which is a software patent.

No one ever said the Patent office was useful, competent, or smart.

Software is also somewhat protected because unlike a physical device reverse engineering is far more difficult. I can open pretty much anything and have a CAD model in less time than the original engineer took to design it.

True, I have learn programming and experience disassembling programs, and is really really difficult to understand how a program work just this way. If the program has millions of lines of code it is nearly impossible.

Patents are a contract, the state gives you monopoly, you give the state the knowledge(with plans, drawings and explanations) of how your thing works. Without showing the code, you should not be granted a patent.

The problem is ... all innovation is moving in the direction of software innovation.

For any given field, it is simply much easier to have a single, general purpose machine into which special instructions for special circumstances are programmed. You can see everything from 3-d metal printers to synthetic genetic computers on the horizon. Software will fuel all of these.

So if any future patent system is going to be a software patent system. And we've seen how evil software patents are.

There isn't an easy middle ground.

Touché sir, I should have narrowed my words a bit, I did not mean to claim that the entire idea of patents is bankrupt, I'm sure there are scenarios where it's helpful.

But as you state, in software, it's very detrimental, and I'm sure software isn't the only industry where that's the case. That's why we need a far more nuanced approach. We could start by not handing out 20-year monopolies for ideas that take only a few months to implement and bring to market.

In general, I think that it would be useful for all legislation to carry along with it legally binding "original intent" written down in broad, layman terms. That way a legal framework would exist to protect people from legislative hypocrisy.

I can remember once representing the principal architect of the ScriptX language used at Kaleida Labs (a 1992 joint venture between Apple and IBM) and, when going for meetings at Kaleida, constantly being made aware of the role within the company of a team whose sole job was, day in and day out, to scour everything that was being done for patentability. Given such a focus, you can be assured that countless patents were filed from that effort, not so much because they were useful as because this helped build an IP arsenal to use against competitors.

Intel used patents in this way for years to intimidate and harass potential competitors in the desktop platform that it effectively monopolized for years. Apple is doing the same thing now with respect to its platform. What amazes me is not that Apple is being a jerk about this but that so many believed it would be otherwise. While Apple may in many ways be a rebel company (or at least has cultivated its image this way), when it comes to IP protections, it plays strictly by the standard script.

I wouldn't call it the standard script. Most tech companies actually do show restraint and use patents for defensive purposes only. In fact I heard a heart-warming story at lunch today about how one of the top guys at a large well-known software company recently shut down an internal proposal to start using its IP more offensively. This is, however, the standard script for Apple, originator of the long, infamous, ultimately unsuccessful attempt to sue Microsoft for "look and feel" infringements. For a company that stole so much of its own core technology in the early days from Xerox, Apple has never been shy about making overly broad IP ownership claims. Their legal department has historically been one of the most aggressive and overreaching in the industry. I agree with you that it is surprising that so many people are only now seeing Apple in this light.

Apple did not steal from Xerox. They licensed the good parts legitimately and made substantive improvements. Xerox's stuff didn't draw overlapping windows properly, for instance; redrawing to an occluded window surface was a problem for them and in order to redraw they basically had to redraw the entire window stack. Apple's menu bar (at the top of the screen, where menu bars belong) was a huge usability win over the context menus Xerox employed, enabling -- among other things -- the UI to be manipulated with a mouse with a single button. And on and on.

Look, Apple defines entire classes of devices. That's what they do. Look at the history of PCs, media players, and smartphones: everything that came before Apple's entry into the market was a rough prototype, and everything that came after was a knockoff. Their IP claims are not overly broad for a company whose work shapes the entire industry.

Picasso had a saying: "Good artists copy, great artists steal." We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. -Steve Jobs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK7TQVFSA1Y

Despite the encroachment of patents on the ridiculous (one-click, etc), I respect the value of having a patent system when it comes to real technology or design that deliver a new type of value to the consumer. Its a noble attempt to reward innovators. While weakness in the system has been top of mind recently with big player oppressing the little guy, or holding companies using patents to extort money from innovators, patents can also protect the little guy. So, just because there has been some excess, we shouldn't see patents, as a whole, as a bad thing. Instead, what we may need to reconsider are the bounds of what should be patentable, and possibly duration.

In regards to Apple, it may be that some of these patents in question are completely legitimate, and are consistent with the spirit of the idea of patents. I would not view Apple in a negative light for protecting what others might have knocked-off. Lets see how the case works out. It may turn out that many of Apple's claims are invalidated through prior art, etc. But if they do hold, I say good for Apple. BTW, I carry an Android phone.

The patent system is a attempt at achieving a noble goal (rewarding inventors) but in my opinion it fails both at:

- Generally failing to reward innovators.

- Encouraging more benefits than it costs to society.

The former is because:

- Generally individuals cannot afford to effectively use the patent process.

- Any innovation usually has a couple of good ideas but requires many other (already patented) building blocks which makes the new innovation unprofitable or impossible to pursue.

- Companies that can afford to file and use patents generally can't realize their new ideas, or if they do, not to the full extent of their promise. (Every company has limited resources and a patent on, say, the mouse has a whole load of possible applications.)

- Technology moves so fast than 20 years is essentially 5 product life cycles.

I would argue that the patent system does nothing at all to deliver value to the consumer.

Generally things are cheapest for consumers when there is a large market of near-homogeneous products, such as consumer televisions - exactly the kind of market patents are designed to stop by the granting of temporary monopolies. Yet in that market (where everyone can build a TV) we see pretty rapid innovation - when I grew up in 1980 we had one black and white TV. Now we can reasonably expect that 3D TVs will be available for twenty bucks before 2020.

> So, just because there has been some excess, we shouldn't see patents, as a whole, as a bad thing.

You say 'some' excess, but it's my understanding that the vast majority of patent applications and patent lawsuits fall under the 'abuses' that you're talking about. How often is the patent system really protecting the little guy vs being used as a tool by large corporations to oppress the little guy?

I fail to see how Apple stating their intent to be an asshole makes them any less of an asshole.

Apple isn't a person, they are a company, and their primary goal is to make money, not be nice. In recent years their R&D budget has topped $1 billion. I don't think it's far fetched to assume that they are going to extract everything of value, patent everything they can, that springs from that investment. To do otherwise would be a disservice to their shareholders.

_I_ don't like what Apple is doing, but they are following the current rules of the game. If you don't like the outcome, then work to change the rules. Expecting Apple to play nice is unrealistic. They are going to do whatever is in their own best self interest. That's how our economic system works.

Except that market perception IS part of the game. Perhaps I'm too far into the echo chamber, but after this I think a lot more people are going to feel that twinge that pg wrote about. http://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html

Believe me, I understand. That's part of the insanity of the system, it's turning everyone into assholes, especially publicly traded companies like Apple.

A large part of the problem is that most people aren't even aware that there is a problem. That's why public discussion such as this is valuable: if enough people are aware, then change is possible.

I did not state or imply that Apple is not being an asshole. I was simply pointing out that Jobs made clear from the very introduction of the iPhone how much of an asshole he intended to be in regard to defending iPhone patents, and thus no one should now be surprised about what is happening.

"First to market is already a huge competitive advantage." In some circumstances yes. In some circumstances, a truly innovative and inventive creation can still be duplicated by an un-innovative competitor in a matter of days.