throwawaykf

> human nature to share knowledge

Oh boy, where do I begin...

1. First of all, [citation needed]. Humans have been exploiting information asymmetry since the dawn of time.

2. It is also "human nature" to want to want to have sex with people one finds attractive. Are rape laws also never going to "work out"?

3. Entertainment counts as "knowledge" now? That's even more of a stretch than calling it "culture"!

The papers I read indicate that trolls actually often have "strong" patents, but like you said, most of those settle out of court, so you never hear about them. The ones that go to court are the weak ones, and those are the ones you hear about, which creates an image that all trolls assert bogus patents.

I mean even NewEgg, who've been spouting a lot of "We Never Settle" rhetoric admitted, in this very case, that they've licensed a majority of patents that were asserted against them. The coverage on Ars is a bit brief, but it sounds like out of 80 assertions NewEgg has taken it to court only a handful of times. To me, that sounds like the system is not imbalanced.

> If someone is ambushing people in the street, hitting them over the head with a pipe, and robbing them, I don't need to see a double fucken' blind study to decide that this needs to stop.

Or maybe the alleged victims claiming to be robbed are lying because they don't want to pay money owed to the alleged assailant and they're hoping he gets put away? Are you going to believe individual he-said/she-said cases or data?

BTW the parachute study sounds hilarious. Link?

Unfortunately, the jury is very much not in the crypto field. As far as they know, he's just some guy who claimed to invent something, and the plaintiffs are making the most of it.

Similarly, aside from the ad homs about educational pedigree, the line about not being the "real" inventor is pretty critical. The point is "secret" (i.e. unpublished) inventions don't count as prior art in invalidity arguments. So even if you accept that GCHQ invented public key crypto, Diffie's patent is still valid. I imagine IP Nav wants to argue that private demos of Lotus Notes don't count as prior art.

Me, I prefer to see data. Fortunately, there are a number of studies coming out about patent trolls. Unfortunately, there is no clear consensus. Also, things like the impact of baseless demand letters simply cannot be studied because they cannot be tracked and there is no data. This will hopefully will change soon.

But I'd much rather prefer analytical study over uninformed vitriol. Ars Techica is usually good, but not when it comes to patent matters. This is the same blog that painted CSIRO, a well known Australian research lab, as a patent troll because they claimed to invent WiFi and sued manufacturers over it. The comments on that article (many from posters down under, naturally) kept calling out Ars' incorrect rewriting of history, but they would not back down. I wouldn't want my news from somebody who won't accept the facts because they don't agree with their biases.

And what about the algorithms that measure and control the thrust and the robots that make the chassis and compute the folding that leads to drug design? Much more often than you'd think, that is the crucial point of novelty and competitive advantage, and what many patents cover. Software eating the world and all that.

> ... And they are all things that, like other software, can be protected by copyright. 

Functional things cannot be covered by copyright. If it's the functionality itself that is novel, no amount of copyright can protect it.

> On the other hand, the watch isn't the same thing. The formula that describes the timing of a watch mechanism is not a watch mechanism. A watch simulator is not a watch.

That wasn't my point. Simulation is not what I mean. A watch mechanism is essentially a series of cascaded counters. X "ticks" of one gear = Y "ticks" of another gear. It's an algorithm: if (m++ == 60) h++; You'll find such physical implementations of algorithms all over the place if you know where to look, especially in automation, from factories to toasters.

> You can patent a physical watch without patenting its "algorithm" ...

And that applies to most "software patents" too. Most software patents don't cover the abstract algorithm, they cover the application of that algorithm. Case in point, the patent in TFA: it didn't cover comparing a bunch of numbers to find another number, it covered comparing a bunch of numbers representing preferences to find a match between business entities associated with those preferences. You could very well use the exact same algorithm to find a match between a vacationer and a list of vacation spots and not infringe the patent. I'd say the judge's analysis in rejecting was a bit off: this patent is invalid because it's non-novel, not because it's abstract.

> The second is a refutation of the first.

No, but do you mean to say that the majority of software startups are doing technically innovative work? Heck, look at the much vaunted YC companies. How many are doing something beyond some variation of CRUD?

> If you take Microsoft, IBM et al as not doing anything particularly technically innovative...

I'm sorry, I live outside the HN bubble, so I completely disagree that Microsoft and IBM don't do innovative work. (Well, OK, these days it's mostly IBM Research, in case of IBM. In case of Microsoft, both MSR and MS products introduce inventions and innovations at a pretty fast pace.)   Just because you don't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.

Sadly, the vast majority of the software industry is not like Microsoft and IBM. The vast, vast majority involves translating pre-existing business logic into code. And most software startups are not much different.

I agree, though, that most patents (not just "software patents"), are not really "interesting", but historically this has always been so. And all the hand-wringing you see here is not new either.

> It doesn't surprise me that the study found both of these. This is evidence that software patents are ineffective to promote innovation.

Well, then maybe we need to make it cheaper to file "software" patents and make them more powerful so they afford some real protection? :-)

>The real trouble is that software patents areharmful, because they entrench incumbents by creating patent thickets and facilitate the trolling of successful innovators by lawyers and failures.

There is no undisputed, convincing empirical evidence that software patents are harmful on average, other than tech media fishing for rage-views. For every paper saying software patents harm entrants, there's one saying the opposite (see "Software Patents, Incumbents and Entry" as an example). There are even studies suggesting that thickets helped innovation by centralizing licensing efforts.

Also: "Innovators". You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you etc. etc.

> If we get rid of software patents then VCs would need to find some other signaling mechanism to distinguish between startups, ...

1. It's not just in software that VCs look for patents. If you read that survey or other studies, or heck, watch Shark Tank, you'll see it's common in most industries.

2. If you drop the empirically unfounded assumption that all patents are bogus, a patent is a proxy for a multitude of signals that VCs find useful.

3.  Studies show that startups with patents are more likely to have a successful exit. I don't know what better signal a VC would want to find.

Ever wonder why all the jurists all over the world have not stumbled upon such a simple and elegant definition? Herein lies just one problem: your definition of software patents may also include:

- Control systems for automotive, industrial and robotic systems.

- Signal processing methods for digital communications, audio processing, speech processing, image processing, video processing, automated control systems, and so on.

- Microcode in processors

- Embedded firmware in appliances and devices.

- Mechanical watch designs. They are simply mechanical implementations of algorithms.

- Digital circuits, chips and hardware that implements any of the above.

The software / hardware equivalence makes simple definitions impossible.

> Which does tell you something, doesn't it?

It could tell me many things, depending on what assumptions I may apply. Let's see how many you disagree with.

- The majority of software startups are not doing anything particularly technically innovative.

- The (vast) majority of the software industry as a whole is not doing anything particularly technically innovative.

- Patents are expensive to apply for and get, something a startup can't often afford.

- Patents don't provide enough protection for software products anyway.

(The last two are actually borne out by the study.)

> query whether the VCs are interested in patents vs. interested in them as a method for weeding out uncommitted startup founders.

Why wonder when there are studies on the subject? It's called "signaling". Of course VCs have no interest in IP itself, only what it means for their ROI. But if there's no funding, there's no startup, let alone innovation, so for many founders it's a necessary evil.

> Because if software startups aren't getting many software patents, but the number of software patents being issued keeps going up, guess who is.

Again, why guess when there are studies :-) If you believe James Bessen it's actually manufacturing, industrial and semiconductor firms. (See his "A generation of software patents" paper. Flawed study, IMO, but a useful starting point.) If the answer surprises you, maybe you should consider that "software patents" are not easy to define.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/newegg-on-trial-m...

As for "ammunition", look up the Berkeley Patent Survey [1]. The only damning thing you'll find in there, though, is that entrepreneurs in software on average don't think they present a competitive advantage, so "only" 60% of software startups file for patents. And it's typically because investors ask for them.

Edit: I misremembered... It's actually only 25% of all software startups in the survey, but 67% of VC-backed startups.

1. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1429049

To be fair, I don't think the author's a shill. But I've been following him since he wrote for Ars (and he's also on HN sometimes), so I can tell he certainly has drunk some Kool-aid, and it has a slight Google flavor. He interned there after all, so that may explain why Microsoft was highlighted in the headlines. 

But notably, he also is (or was) a "scholar" at the Cato Institute, which believes in "limited government and free markets" and seems to have anti-IP leanings. Unsurprisingly the author's articles (even this one!) often uncritically cite the works published by academics like James Bessen, which like to paint a "sky is falling" situation with respect to US IP policies, even though these works have time and again been strongly called into question by other academics. Given that he's a scholar himself, I'd be surprised if he's unaware of that, but his articles only ever present one side.

So the Kool-aid may have other, stronger flavors as well, but he's definitely drunk some.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/40735369/Can-Esta-101

http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/

And you can bet corporate networks will be NATted. Not to mention data centers.

Another concern is Carrier Grade NATs. These are already being deployed within ISP networks to alleviate the IPv4 address shortage. I worry that once this infrastructure is in place, not only will it delay IPv6 adoption, but the adoption will be uneven, as ISPs with CGNs may hold off transitioning much longer. So even if there is a part of the Internet that is all IPv6, the rest of it might still be behind CGNs, and to connect arbitrary peers we'd still have to deal with NATs.

1. http://lwn.net/Articles/452293/

If you found out about the wide range of networking protocols and services they provide in Windows, you wouldn't feel that way. For example, P2P. A few years ago, while working on P2P applications, we discovered Microsoft has a lot of technologies in that area. Things like Teredo (IPv6 transition and NAT traversal) and a complete P2P networking API -- which gives you encryption, self-organizing overlays and DHTs out of the box -- have been around since around 2001, and have been built into Windows since Vista. They also had lower level protocols for things like link-layer topology discovery and automated device (printers, etc) configuration.

Almost all proprietary stuff, of course - except Teredo, which has an RFC and an open source implementation - but quite interesting nonetheless. We talked to the team working on this, and they claimed it was even being used by some customers in 1000+ machine deployments.

For some reason, these things are not widely marketed. Maybe because it's a niche market. However, I wouldn't say they're not forward-thinking, at least when it comes to networking.

I recently went through a job change, and to enhance my chances, I spruced up my Github profile, and put a link to it at the top of my resume. It's not the most active profile, but all the work there are wholly self-initiated projects, all of which tackle some interesting, often original problem. One of the projects randomly ended up with a few stars without me posting that link anywhere. Having code out there would give me a little leg-up over the intense competition, right?

Of the dozen or so tech phone screens, not one asked about it. Only one asked me to talk about a personal project, and it was abundantly clear he had not looked at the Github link.

At least he asked. One phone screen was with a recruiter at a famous open source company, and even she had not looked at it. To be fair, it was a recruiter call and not a technical one, but I thought she'd at least acknowledged it.

Most of the phone screens turned into onsite interviews, and again, nobody even mentioned Github. Well, it did come up in one interview, where the interviewer was doing a deep dive into IP networking details, and I told him in an offhand manner that, y'know, I had code out there that did exactly what he was asking...

The companies I interviewed with ranged from a couple of startups to a bunch of US technology giants in a variety of fields, and many of them get discussed on here regularly.

My advice is, don't put too much stock in your Github profile to help your job prospects. For whatever reasons, maybe the same as TFA's, practically nobody cares. Instead, invest in practicing the same old Google/Amazon/Facebook whiteboard-a-problem style that everybody and their grandmother uses, even if the work involved is nowhere near the kind of work (some people at) Google/Amazon/Facebook do.

Yes, it is. If you do that with physical items, it's called "shoplifting" :-) You may now argue that taking, say, a loaf of bread deprives somebody of it. But consider that between 14 and 40 percent of perishable supermarket groceries are discarded as waste. Who's to then stop you from saying you took the loaf that was going to be discarded anyway and so you're not depriving anybody?

> I'm not saying that copyright infringement is legal, I'm saying it's not theft.

And I'm saying, colloquially, copyright infringement is equivalent to theft. This is why there are laws against it, it's just that the legal code is different for different crimes. Now, one may insist on using the proper legal terms, but note that this is not a legal forum or a legal debate, so colloquial usage is fine :-)

> And you can also call "a bargain" "a steal". That doesn't mean it's illegal to shop at a fire sale...

And you can say "she stole my heart". That does not mean it's illegal to be attractive either. Obviously the context of how the word "steal" is used matters. But note that it typically has negative connotations, implying that the act is somehow unfair. And when talking about taking without permission, stealing describes the act pretty well.

All the other links on that page (about, etc) do go to http://-only pages, but at least the links you provided and their static resources all go over https.