Comment by Vivtek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Vivtek | Hacker News Reader

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In the case of one-click, it's first important to note that in addition to prior art, a patent must also pass the obviousness test. One-click does not. You may not be a developer, I don't know, but I know any developer here could implement one-click in a day.

Patents are not intended to be a lottery rewarding insight. Patents protect development effort. One-click fails that test.

But in terms of prior art, Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly backed BountyQuest in 2001 as a forum for researching prior art for patents. They couldn't monetize it, so it shut down in 2003 - but not before O'Reilly received what he calls a "killer piece of prior art" on the one-click patent, which he has on his bookshelf in case "Amazon loses its senses and sues someone". [http://openp2p.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2003/bountyquest_10...]

The point here is not that your example is wrong. Where you go wrong is assuming that a patent granted on software is anything like a useful mechanism to support innovation.

But again - "i know any developer her could implement one-click in a day" and indeed a huge number of inventions could be implemented in a day. But you are again applying retrospecitivity (at least in my mind) - you need to remove that. Just because something is simple - doesnt mean it is not innovative. You contend that simply because something is simple that therefore it fails the test of obviousness - but that is not true and it's right that it's not true.

The test is asking whether the invention is an adequate distance beyond or above the state of the art. The state of the art at the time had no idea of such a simple one-click method - if it did - why wasn't it invented ? The fact it can be implemented so easily is irrelevant to fundamental idea that its innovative, non-obvious and unique. The best ideas are usually the ones no one see's and yes I am a front-end dev so I deal with more interaction components than anything.

Patents do not protect development effort - they protect novel, non-obvious and useful concept's. If they protected development effort - it would be a requirement to actually develop the idea and there is no such requirement and indeed many inventions wouldn't be possible to protect if such a requirement existed - that is, you must fully develop the invention before being granted protection. You're contention that because something is simple infers that its not patentable is incorrect in my mind.

I am utterly flabbergasted to discover that you are right with respect to a working model. [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-09/startups-new...]

However, I think I don't "need to lose" my opinion that innovation consists of more than saying "put a grid of buttons on a larger screen than most phones" or even "click one link to get to an order screen". You're welcome to your view, although I question your ability to understand what innovation is. I don't issue arrogant ultimata that you "need" to lose your attitude. I just think you'll fail if you live your life that way.

And I totally do agree with you that some patents are totally absurd - but I reject your notion I don't understand what innovation is. The problem is - innovation as a concept and innovative step under law are two completely segregated idea's. The language and their use are unfortunately bipolar.

My point is - the unfortunate way that patent law currently works is - you are a doomed if you have something innovative that is patentable - not to patent it because you are most likely going to invest a huge level of resources developing it only to have someone copy it later without anything to fall back on. You might not agree with the patent system, you might hate the way it currently works (and I agree with this notion) but you are stuck with it and you aren't protecting your business from an intellectual property stand point - or providing adequate shareholder return if you don't seek to protect it.

You will do hundreds or thousands of hours developing, fixing and perfecting what could be an amazing idea - you will (maybe) get lots of fresh VC investment and take money from your parents, friends and family all who believe in you - only to push it to market and have someone copy it in a flash and reproduce it without question. What to do then ?

Granting a monopoly on insights does not benefit society. Granting a monopoly on non-obvious inventions in return for the knowledge to replicate it does benefit society. Pharmaceuticals take years and millions of dollars to develop. Pinch-to-zoom took a moment of insight and a day of development work to prototype.

Apple's victory in this case is a negative for society.

> Just because something is simple - doesnt mean it is not innovative.

Just because something is innovative doesn't mean it isn't inevitable.

I believe capacitive touchscreen interfaces like the iphone's were inevitable. In fact, pinch to zoom was widely demoed before the iphone's launch. That doesn't invalidate the patent, but it does invalidate the idea that without apple it wouldn't have been invented.

Should the first on a market that was going to arise anyway get the monopoly rights on that market? If we were talking about a 5 year patent I could begrudgingly accept it, but to see the touchscreen device market chained to apple's whims for two decades cannot be anything but bad for the customer.

The patent doesn't cover the idea of using pinch to zoom. Patents are not on features or on ideas. They are on implementations.

Thus someone else demoing pinch to zoom using a different implementation is completely irrelevant to this discussion.

You guys are trying to redefine patents in order to argue that they should be "reformed"!

No, i think they should be abolished, not reformed, at least in the case of software. While they may benefit the megacorps like apple, they seem to be only doing harm to the industry as a whole.

By the way, patents don't cover implementations, they cover methods. A method can be so generic that it covers all possible implementations.

Specifically, apple's 915 patent seems to cover two things: determining whether you're in scroll or zoom mode based on the number of discrete inputs on the screen, and also while zooming rubberbanding the content if zoomed out too much. The second claim is something you could replace with some other solution (and samsung did that in a software update), but the first one seems generic enough that it covers all sensible implementations of the concept.

http://www.google.com/patents/US7844915.pdf

I don't know any programmer who could implement one click in a day.

You think that it is just "checking out with a single button press", but that's not what the patent covers.

This is the fundamental problem with the anti-patent position. It is based on a lie.

The lie is the claim that patents give the "right" to use "features", like checking out with one click. They do not.

The One-Click patent, for instance, spends a great deal of time talking about fraud.

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