Microsoft, Apple, Google sued over icon software patent | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft, Apple, Google sued over icon software patent

arstechnica.com

14 pointschaostheory22 comments

These bastards deserve nothing. Their software looks like garbage. It also seems really foolish to include Microsoft in this suit, as they are the most likely to have a competing patent. The Cygnus interface looks a lot like the Powerpoint slide sorter.

Patent law inherently represents everything that is fucked up about how this country works when it comes to innovative rights and creative control. The ability to patent ANYTHING should have been killed decades ago.

Again, this isn't patent law messing up - it's overworked USPTO examiners not finding the prior art. Furthermore, Google, Microsoft, Apple et al could have challenged the validity of the patent application when it was public, before it was awarded.

Google's official founding date was September 7, 1998, two months after the patent application was filed. I doubt they were in any position to search all of the patents applied for and challenge the validity of all of the vague ridiculousness that was currently on file that may some day interfere with a 20% project that might possibly become a product!

This is submarine-ary of the first order. It may be legal at this time but I'm ready to lean out and say that its immoral.

I don't know if immoral is the right word here, more incredibly irresponsible.

You're saying incredible irresponsibility is moral or morally neutral?

> This is submarine-ary of the first order.

The term submarine patent is typically used for a patent application where the applicant delayed issuance and kept amending the application until a worthwhile target appeared. Without looking at the application, I can't say whether that's true in this case.

However, US patent law changed some time ago to limit the value of this strategy. It used to be that the 20 year term started when the patent issued. Now patents expire 20 years after application, even if they're not issued until 10-15 years after application.

> Google's official founding date was September 7, 1998, two months after the patent application was filed. I doubt they were in any position to search all of the patents applied for

The "publish one year after application" rule for US patent applications is fairly recent. (I don't think that it was retroactive when it was introduced.)

So, even if Google wanted to search for patents back then, they couldn't have.

Actually it is patent law that's messed up. US patent law, anyway. It's not that patents shouldn't exist, of course they should in some form. And I disagree that the problem is with the examiners. People always say that more money needs to be invested to have specialists from every field doing the examining, but this is a waste of time. The point of the patent office is to deal with merging new technologies and fields, by definition they will always be behind.

The best thing would be to simply lower the cost of invalidating a patent. For example, in the UK anyone can challenge a patent without having to go to court. Just forward your prior art evidence to the patent office and when it is verified the patent becomes invalid.

I know of cases where individuals have gotten patents invalidated for things didn't compete with their business or affect them in any way. They challenged the patent just on the grounds that it was false (i.e. the owner of the patent didn't invent the idea).

The mistake the US makes is this idea that everything has to be proved/disproved by the court system. That's way to expensive and way too much trouble for things like patents. There are so many laws, patents and so on that shouldn't exist, but do because no one has been willing to challenge it in court to get it thrown out.

Yes, the system makes it very easy to do something that should be hard (patent trolling), and very hard to do something that should be easy (invalidating bad patents).

> For example, in the UK anyone can challenge a patent without having to go to court.

As can anyone in the US. One of the procedures is a petition for reexamination.

The US patent system has problems, but if you're going to suggest changes, it's good form to know how it actually works.

If it's just as easy why doesn't it happen? From what I've seen, companies seem to only challenge patents in court.

Well, it does happen sometimes. It's very cheap and easy to file a patent reexamination. You just need to dig up some prior art, pay about $2000 and you're good to go. You can even do this as a defense against an infringement allegation and if you're lucky the court will suspend proceedings pending the outcome of the reexamination.

The hard part is knowing in advance what frivolous bullshit patent the trolls are going to throw at you.

> If it's just as easy why doesn't it happen? From what I've seen, companies seem to only challenge patents in court.

Why do you think that what you see of the US patent system is representative of how it works? If you're relying on news, you don't have a chance.

News is almost always a conflict account, typically written by someone who doesn't understand the system. When a patent holder sues someone, that's a court case. At that point, the sued may well file a reexamination request, but they're also likely to make an in-court invalidation request. (The RIM case has some interesting twists having to do with the combination of these factors.) You'll hear about the latter but the former isn't part of the case.

FWIW, there are some fairly prominent reexamination cases that folks who follow the US patent system would be aware of. One is Amazon's one-click patent.

Look up excludable and rivalrous. They help describe the problem patent laws attempt to solve.

Here, I'll do it for you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excludability

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)

This is excellent news in that it may make patent law look even sillier.

Does anyone understand the purpose of patent law? It provides incentives to inventors to keep inventing. To denounce patent law because of a ptent troll is pretty silly. The system needs tweaking but there patent law (and intellectual property law in general) allows creators to monetize innovation easily, which is incredibly important.

For me patent law is like communism, the purpose/ideals of it might be nice, but I'd like to see an implementation that does not suck...

Then step outside the US.

I'm french and living in japan. Japanese patent law is not much better than the us one (or at least from the little I learned about it) and in europe we are constantly fighting to prevent software patents...

Now in truth, while I used to be interested in this, I haven't looked much in the question in the last few years.

I'm not surprised that Japan's solution isn't very good (especially considering their some-what toxic property/business ownership laws), but it's a big step from "all the ones I'm familiar with suck" to "they all suck".

That's why I said 'I'd like to see an implementation that does not suck', it means all the ones I've seen (= familiar with) suck... :-)

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