Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

This is the kind of crap that makes me not want to be in the software business. Every time I read about a software patent incident and go off to read the patent my jaw drops to the floor. None. Not one of the hundreds of software patents I have ever reviewed should have been granted. Not one. These things are not inventions. They are implementations based on choices and decisions made by an individual or a team. The patent office is a lunatic asylum. Unbelievable.

I really think we are at a point where the tech community needs to send a super-strong message to both create awareness and catalyze rapid change. This issue could be resolved in one session of Congress with the invalidation of all software patents, current and future.

What to do? All web companies and game developers ought to agree on a date and have a carefully crafted message displayed to every one of their users. The message should be blocking. In other words, for a full minute (a minute of silence for the killing of innovation) you cannot play your game, cannot search the web, cannot use a service, etc.

Taken further, those who have the balls would suspend the entirety of their services for an hour. How much of a stir would be created if Google, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and others all displayed a page explaining the problem and demanding action for a full hour. I can't think of a better way to force the issue and quite literally have every human being on this planet and every media outlet pickup the topic.

Everyone would learn about the damage being caused by software patents. Politicians would have no choice but to seriously address the issue. I would further suggest that this protest become a monthly event until such time as the issue is dealt with sensibly.

Can this be organized? What else could we do? It really is time to force a national dialog about this. How much more of this do you guys want to endure?

Targeting users is pointless. No consumer is going to call up their senator and demand reforms to patent law. They just don't care. The thing to understand is that patent trolls did not create the existing regime. They're opportunists, but they have no money or lobbying power behind them. It was the IBMs of the world that brought software patents to the fore. It's companies like that that perpetuate the regime. Imagine you're a senator: you see Apple and Samsung spend millions litigating over some patents. What is your takeaway, as a non-technical person? It must be really important...

It's the tech giants that must be persuaded to lobby hard for patent reform. These are the people who can fix the regime: http://techpost.bsa.org/2013/02/22/clear-thinking-on-softwar..., because these are the people who Congressmen consider to be the "experts" on the tech sector whose opinion they value.

Game theory (and possibly anti-collusion laws) dictates that the best course of action for any one website in a sector is to keep their website up. If I'm Bing, and Google, DDG, Blekko, etc. shut down, that's exactly the time that I want to be up and running. So even though this is a good idea, I don't think it will happen. At least not all at once like this.

I love this idea, and think it's the winning move.

A problem I see is in the details, where I wouldn't want to lose X million dollars just to force a dialogue. If I were the entire decision-making branch of Amazon, I would only dedicate X million dollars to something guaranteed to produce change, like deploying numerous robots (or whatever).

The other caveat is that, although a number of bigger companies have gotten on board the anti-troll train lately (particular props to Newegg and Rackspace), the most popular of services from the largest of companies already have substantial legal teams. They run a higher risk (e.g. Amazon losing sales) for a problem they have already "solved" for themselves, albeit with an equally-expensive solution of a legal team.

Hey let's not give Amazon a free pass here (as a company that has merely solved the problem for itself with an expensive legal team). Amazon was at the forefront of frivolous patents with things like its "one click shopping" patent.

No reform is possible as long as industry leaders like Amazon and Apple not only don't push for reform, but actively embrace the status quo. To laypeople, Congresspeople included, the opposition of small companies like Newegg and Rackspace is indistinguishable from noise. They look to the market leaders for guidance on the direction legislation pertaining to the industry should go.

Well... all engineering is simply "implementations based on choices and decisions made by an individual or a team"... What do you think inventions should be, if not that?

At least your take on it is more in tune with reality than the common misconception that patents cover "abstract ideas". The law views abstraction differently than we do(and really, even the Supreme Court doesn't know how to define it other than "we know it when we see it."

However, I'd like to know: what exactly is it that you think this patent covers, and what about it do you find "unbelieveable"? Not that this is a stellar patent, but from most of the comments on this thread, it is amply clear most here don't know how patents work.

>Not that this is a stellar patent, but from most of the comments on this thread, it is amply clear most here don't know how patents work.

Which comments are you referring to, what do they not understand about patents, and what makes that fact so "amply clear"?

At time of your writing, there are 18 comments in this thread (including your own), four of which comment on the patent directly. All except the grandparent are quite terse. One links to the patent, two express outrage but do not analyze the patent's content directly, and only one (by nknighthb) seems to make a claim about the validity of the patent with a direct reason.

You have a good point: That people have developed a knee-jerk outrage against patents without necessarily considering a number of related issues (e.g. claims and the system by which a patent is deemed to have been infringed). I ask for clarification because your own comment seems to have been a reactionary assumption to a type of comment which, as of yet, hasn't really entered the thread.

When I wrote that comment, in addition to the parent, a bunch of comments discussed the contents and possible "prior art", including specifically, the whole subthread where the actual patent is linked to on uspto.gov. Those are perfectly representative of the level of misunderstanding people here betray whenever a patent is discussed.

So, yes, my comment was a reaction to the general level of discourse on patents beyond just this specific one, but I would not call it knee-jerk. Case in point: the sibling comment to yours.

It's unbelievable because (1) the patent is in no way tied to a physical system as required by US Patent law, (2) is merely a generic and obvious collection of related activities and basic processes, and (3) is invalid based on at least a decade of prior art that predates the patent.

Do you understand that the patent, as written, would lay claim to the basic functionality of every MMO ever released? That is quite literally lays claim to the character selection screens that have been around since Ultima Online (as the patent limits itself to networked game, earlier SP games are not relevant), which came out in 1997?

This isn't an old patent--it was filed November 2010.

How did you determine exactly what it is that you think this patent covers? It is a silly patent, but mostly for reasons that are opposite to what you seem to believe.

I reviewed the claims and, as is frequently the case, nothing there screams "invention" but rather "implementation".

I don't know what you do. There could be an issue of context here. All I can say is that from the context of someone like me there's very little in software development that deserves a patent these days, of ever.

In fact, I'll go farther than that: Having any kind of patent granted should almost be exponentially more difficult with the passage of time. As technology develops and we, as a species, learn and become more adept most engineering falls under implementation rather than invention.

What's the difference? If I take the same problem and give it to five different people skilled in the art and they can pretty much rattle off a proposed implementation in short order, it's umplementation, not invention.

In this particular case the claims start of by describing a networked game where users can choose characters and their attributes via a UI and their selections are stored in a database. It goes on from there. If you read it as an engineer there's absolutely nothing there that was "invented". If you read it as a lawywer, well, almost anything is possible.

I'm glad you know enough to read the claims -- you already know more than all but a vanishing minority here.

Even then, you are not strict enough in your interpretation of the claims. This patent covers nothing more than tallying the number of times multiple players select a given attribute for their characters in an MMO. That is it. Whether you read it as a (patentese-speaking) engineer or a lawyer, that is literally it. (Unless it gets to a jury, in which case, all bets are off...)

That is why, IMO, it is a silly patent, and why I think it should have very limited negotiating leverage. Unfortunately, the current legal system does not differentiate between "infringing" and "infringing on a nigh-useless feature", and if a lawsuit is involved it is already too expensive to argue this difference. (For the legal-minded around here, from a pseudo-lawyer perspective, I think Rule 11 could use a little tweaking.)

All the other comments in this thread talking about the merits of this patent are absolutely baseless because the posters don't even know what claims are. Yet, this is the type of rhetoric that drives patent-related discussions on online forums these days. Why should anyone, least of all "your congress-critters", bother listening to you when you all literally don't know what you are talking about?

Some other points I'd like to address:

1. You say you could pose the problem to 5 engineers and get a solution -- but what if the problem itself is non-obvious? As an engineer, can you acknowledge that it's not always the solution that is clever, but the phrasing of a problem in a certain way, or heck, even the discovery of a problem, that leads to a solution? If so, where does "implementation" end and "invention" begin?

2. If you think getting a patent should be exponentially difficult these days, congratulations, you have what you wish for! The way prosecution goes these days, it is almost quantitative, whereby almost any combination of snippets of text in any publication anywhere in the world could be used to show obviousness, it is very difficult to get patents, regardless of the merits. The game now is not to claim "real" inventions, but something narrow enough that combinations of prior art do not "make obvious" yet something that somebody else will stumble upon inadvertently. Which is how you get stupidly narrow patents like this one... which people still end up infringing!

The patent system is a bit of a mess, but for many different reasons than what most here think.

A good old strike is not a bad idea.

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