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But, again, the purpose of patents are to protect inventions, not ideas. The idea that VR now has a viable market is not patentable. Unlocking a phone is not patentable.

I don't think any software patents should be granted, but the biggest problem with them in practice is how they are allowed to be written: "a system that does thing X" now is a patent on anything that does thing X, essentially a patent on that idea. Software patents often give the illusion of specificity, but if you look at e.g. the "Siri patent", you see that it really just says it searches multiple databases and displays them in an order based on some heuristic. They're written in a way that it could arguably cover a huge class of inventions, again, essentially patenting an idea, not an invention. This can be especially bad when it gets in front of a jury, as it seems all too reasonable to them that that description does in fact match the competing product in question. Just look at Newegg vs a patent on "A method for transmitting data comprising a sequence of blocks in encrypted form": http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/jury-newegg-infri...

>The idea that VR now has a viable market is not patentable.

You're missing the point. The issue wasn't that VR now has a viable market (it always did), the issue was that a good implementation was now viable. And its not just that it can be implemented, its that we generally know how they did it. From this perspective, after having seen a fully working prototype, it can seem obvious that VR technology was just on the horizon. My point is this is a fallacy; its easy to say climbing mt. everest is possible when you can look down and see the path someone else just treaded before you. In a similar vein, judging something as "obvious" and thus not patentable after it has been invented is flawed.

I agree that things often seem obvious in retrospect, even if they were not obvious before. But that's ok. The point of patents is not to protect things that are obvious in hindsight. The point is to protect things that are not obvious even after you see them. Things that make you want to say: ok, it's right in front of my eyes, but what is this magic?

No, they're not. You may like to believe this, but it's not a fact. Many inventions are quite mundane, but doesn't mean they weren't inventive (ie, non-obvious) at the time. And the other thing that most people seem to forget is that examiners must be able to show that the invention is obvious to be able to object to it, there must be proof that a person skilled in the art _world_ do X. you might counter that by saying the applicant must say why it is inventive, but that's something that is impossible to do (except in circumstances where the common general knowledge in the art has been that X is impossible, and then you show that you have done X).

Simple things should not be ineligble for patents, and what you are proposing is excluding from patent protection anything that is simple. Also if you're looking at a patent that is in a field that you're skilled in and you can't understand it "ok, it's right in front of my eyes, but what is this magic?" then the patent hasn't fully disclosed the invention and it shouldn't have been granted (or you're just not skilled enough, many patents require vast amounts of knowledge to be able to understand and the "person skilled in the art" may be a team of people).

I think the last paragraph there is self-contradictory. Simple things shouldn't be patentable, precisely because the invention doesn't need to be fully disclosed.

To take a silly example, let's say I propose a patent on the process of painting a house green. That's the entire text of the patent. Should it be granted? No. In part because I haven't fully disclosed the invention. But what could I possibly add? "Step 1. Cover house with green paint."

A government granted monopoly is a big gun. Far too big if the goal is just to provide you with revenue. Government works for the people, not one company, and if we're going to give you the right to exclusively profit from something, we demand to get something in return. The thing we demand is knowledge. We want to know how you did it so that after your monopoly expires, everyone can benefit from the increase in knowledge. If your "invention" is so simple that we all already know how to do it, then we don't need the "full disclosure" of a patent, and we don't need to buy your description of painting the house green for the enormous cost of having to pay you exhorbitant fees for every green house for the next two decades.

Firstly, your example is so ridiculous I can't see how it adds anything to the discussion. No, it would never be granted a patent, so what exactly is your point?

Secondly, you have accurately described the patent system;

> if we're going to give you the right to exclusively profit from something, we demand to get something in return. The thing we demand is knowledge. We want to know how you did it so that after your monopoly expires, everyone can benefit from the increase in knowledge.

But you go off the rails when you confuse simple and known. The point of a patent is to disclose the invention in a clear enough way for someone else to be ablwe to perform it. Once you know the answer, it probably will seem simple. But that does not mean it's not inventive (ie, no one else has done it before, and you qwere the first to have made that knowledge available to the public).

I'm not confusing simple and known; I'm just including both in the decision as to whether something is eligible for patent protection. As the patent office is required to do (the term used in patent law is "non-obvious" rather than simple, but it's the same concept).

You aren't eligible for a patent just because you did something first.

Simple is not the same as non-obvious, so no, it's not the term used in patent law. Something is obvious if a non-inventive person skilled in the art _would_ have performed it through routine steps (at least here, some of the mosaics I see coming from the US are batshit insane and no sane person would have used them to come to same result the examiners is claiming - that said, this is a practice that is in favour of the public, it requires the applicant to reduce the scope of the claims further which leads to smaller monopolies).

> The point of patents is not to protect things that are obvious in hindsight.

You might like that to be the case but most of the canonical examples of things that should be patented are just that sort of thing. For example various patents have been granted for paper clips[0]. If it still isn't obvious how it is done after people see it you could argue that the patent isn't necessary - trade secret would do.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_clip

When was Lois & Clark on the air... I seem to remember an episode of that which contained the concept of an immersive VR experience fairly well, and pretty sure that was more than 20 years ago... I'd be hard pressed to find any concept in the past 20 years specifically regarding software that is truly unique and deserving of a patent. IMHO combining obvious or existing idea + on a computer, isn't patent worthy, and neither is combining two+ obvious ideas on a computer.

Please re-read my comments and understand that I was not using VR as an example of something that should be patented. Why are people incapable of comprehending an argument as presented, rather than attempting to make connections that do not exist in the text?

It is because you started your part of the discussion with:

>> Could I reproduce this patented system without ever reading the patent just by looking at the results of it

> This reasoning is deeply flawed. There is a tendency for something to seem "easy" or "obvious" after the fact, but this is ignoring all the insight, effort, and risk it took to find that initial successful path to the solution to begin with. Take a look at the Occulus Rift for example.

You're right, you didn't explicitly say that Oculus Rift is an example for a system that could be patented because it is more complex than it seems. But if I had wanted to make the point that I believe it is patentable I could have phrased my argument in the same way as you did to imply it implicitly.

> Why are people incapable of comprehending an argument as presented, rather than attempting to make connections that do not exist in the text?

Because communication is always context dependent. It's easiest to see in the extreme ends, for example math, where you invent an entire sublanguage / dsl for precise communication and still your definitions change with the context you are working in: Does a ring contain a multiplicative identity element? Which operations is the homomorphism homomorphic in? We leave out these details, because most of the time it helps communication because everyone is on the same page as you anyway and those extra bits and pieces distract from the core argument. Then there is stuff that the reader is faster to figure out for him- or herself than reading "the proposition is true for the base case n=0 of the induction as (3-0)^2-9=0" or sometimes even faster than "the base case is obvious"

As I already mentioned, patents aren't supposed to concern themselves with ideas and there is no fundamental effort or risk beyond initial idea when it comes to slide-to-unlock or bounce scroll, they are both extremely simple implementations. A bit of freshman high school math at best.

And as far as your Oculus example goes... actually lots of people cared a great deal about VR back in the 80s and 90s. VR was a huge deal back then, it just kinda sucked.

The brilliance of Oculus/Palmer Luckey (which I don't mean to diminish in any way via this post) is recognizing that fundamental technologies (mostly in the form of advancements made for the smartphone market -- which Oculus didn't create themselves) had finally caught up to the point where convincing VR was possible. But the idea of strapping some head-mounted displays onto a system with various gyroscopes and such is very old and the early systems for it looked quite a bit like the Rift at a high level, they just performed much shittier because the fundamental technology wasn't ready yet.

This is similar to tablets where various players like Microsoft and Apple themselves put a lot of effort into them a decade before the iPad came around.

I swear you guys are intentionally missing my point with the Occulus example. It wasn't an example of something that should be patented, it was an example of how things can seem obvious after it has been done. No one cared about VR 2 years ago, precisely because it had already been tried and failed numerous times before. That was a central part of my argument.

Now that Occulus has proven VR ready for prime time, everyone claims they have a competing headset on par or better than the Rift. Some would use this as evidence that VR tech is "obvious" (again this is simply an analogy, nitpicking on the particulars is the wrong way to address this argument). My point is that this is not evidence for obviousness when your vantage point is after it has been shown it can be done. In fact it will only bias your judgment.

If it's obvious in hindsight, it's still obvious.

The trade is: we give you a monopoly on the thing, you give us (the public) written step-by-step instructions on how to create that thing.

If instructions aren't necessary to create it — i.e. I can figure it out from just seeing it — then the deal is broken, and isn't serving public good any more.

They're getting their monopoly, what did we get? Zilch.

This is the problem with patent protection in our industry. We can recreate things pretty easily. In say, biotech, it's much harder to figure out.

I'm still behind just scrapping patents altogether though. It's adding process for process' sake. The same feeling you get when you have big section of unnecessary code, and ripping it out has a no effect on the result — patents feel like that chunk of code, before you rip it out. They seem like another area where people have created work for themselves effectively doing or creating nothing. If we got rid of them, not a lot would change, but millions of people would instantly have less weight on their brain.

>They're getting their monopoly, what did we get? Zilch.

We get to buy a product that we otherwise may not have been able to. The original purpose of patents is debatable (just read this thread), but one cannot reasonably argue against the current understanding of their purpose, which is to encourage invention. Patents on (some) "obvious-after-the-fact" things encourage invention. Why bother to put in time and effort to invent something when BigCo. will simply roll out their own before you can even bring it to market?

Now I'm not saying all obvious-after-the-fact inventions should be patented, my original argument was against using obvious-after-the-fact as an exclusionary test. One should attempt to judge obviousness before it was proven to be viable using the given method, as an after-the-fact judgement is inherently biased.

While I don't agree with you, it's sad to see that HN is no different from, let's say, reddit in this regard - downvoting people because you don't like their opinion.

> There is a tendency for something to seem "easy" or "obvious" after the fact, but this is ignoring all the insight, effort, and risk it took to find that initial successful path to the solution to begin with.

He carefully said "without ever reading the patent" to avoid your counter-argument.

My point had nothing to do with the particulars of a supposed patent. Just knowing it can be done is a non-trivial obstacle in solving a problem. Add onto that general information that's usually discussed in relevant circles, and you may have enough information to "recreate" the solution to the problem. Judging the difficulty of a problem from this vantage point is the flaw I was referencing.

There are vastly different values for "knowing something can be done".

Consider: Knowing we could get a man to the moon and back pre-1960s vs. knowing we could implement "bounce scroll" on a cellphone.

The latter example everyone who is a programmer "knew" prior to the iPhone even if they never actually considered it... because the implementation of it is so amazingly obvious. It is nothing but a good idea, and good ideas aren't supposed to be patentable. Which isn't to say they don't get patented, but that's a side-effect of how fucked up the patent system has become in the past 2 decades, not representative of what patents are supposed to be.

>There are vastly different values for "knowing something can be done".

I agree; not really relevant to the argument though.

Note that I am not arguing in favor of bouncy scroll patents.