Hacker News Reader

Comment by smokinn | Hacker News Reader

If that's your most pressing concern about expanding the business you should probably consider challenging the validity of the patent if it's truly as obvious as it seems.

http://info.legalzoom.com/challenge-patent-21969.html

View on HN

Or just abandon the US because the regulation is a pain in the ass. It's not Josho's obligation to keep the US from turning into a technological ghetto.

No, don't challenge the patent, minimize infringement, amass cash.

Challenge it after being sued hopefully with enough cash to defend yourself.

Or maybe, don't infringe the patent and innovate by creating your own approach to the problem?

If the patents really are as josho characterized them, what kind innovations would those be? How do you "innovate" storing GPS data in a database?

Wouldn't a database be prior art? If a general solution to an entire problem domain exists (in this case, databases solve the general problem of adding computer representable data to a record) and predates a patented application of that general solution to a specific instance, then the general solution seems like a very good candidate for prior art. At least it seems to stand to reason that applying a general solution to a specific domain can't be considered novel. The novel solution is the general one, if it exists. Since the oldest databases have existed much longer than 20 years, it would be impossible for an active patent for a solution within this problem domain to not have prior art.

I like the way you think. The problem is that it is quite expensive to invalidate a patent. In fact anything to do with a patent is quite expensive, which is part of the problem itself. As to file a strong patent that can't easily be worked around costs a lot of money, so much money in fact that a lot of small companies don't bother. So, it's only bullies and large companies that have patents. While the guys focused on doing the real innovation often don't any.

Let's start with concrete facts: what patent are we talking about exactly? A simple link to the USPTO web site will do.

Then we can brainstorm and see if we can innovate.

I appreciate your offer to help, but I won't be providing that detail. But, for the spirit of the discussion assume that it is similar to what the EFF described in their article.

But, to make the exercise a bit more fun!? Don't read the EFF's summary, go read the patent and try to make sense of it. If you were an e-health company how would you work around that patent?

Poor solution when the USPTO allows people to toll the public domain of obvious solutions.

You didn't read the article, did you?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com