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Comment by bartl | Hacker News Reader

OK maybe I'm missing something, but what is new about this patent? The schematic "how does it work" figure 6 is nothing but a napkin design. Anybody with half a braincell can make that up within 5 minutes after being introduced to the perceived problem. In other words: the subject of the patent looks to be very obvious, to me.

OTOH This might discourage other companies from implementing a similar idea, which is something at some users will appreciate.

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There is nothing new. I suspect the writer of the article did not really study the patent [1]. Reading the summary and part of the text I got quite clear impression that this is ONLY about counting how many times a certain user has shared something prohibited and then blocking users who do that too many times. I don't see this patent having anything to do with actually recognising infringing content.

So I don't see any real invention here. I think the only explanation for patenting this is that if you don't do it, somebody else might and then you may need to fight in court. Since filing patents is cheap (compared to going court over them and on Microsoft scale) it just makes sense to patent everything you can.

[1] https://www.google.com/patents/US9614850

I think the innovation is in the detection algorithm that isn't shown in the article, and in the fact that it happens when the data is shared, rather than applied on data sitting in a personal account, or data identified by third-party (e.g. the rightsholder). The patent isn't available online just yet, it seems, so I can't say for certain.

https://torrentfreak.com/images/msrep.pdf

All US Patents are available online, there just isn't anything innovative or novel anywhere in the patent that I think justifies it as anything more than patent trolling.

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