Viewing profile — throwawaykf03

I'm trying not to "merely assert that" by giving examples supporting my point :-) I'm mentioning the legal standard just to point out that they have come to the same conclusion, an…

> I'm saying that something that can be trivially implemented by someone skilled in the art who is told what the invention does, but not how, should be below the bar. Right, but wh…

I encourage you to experience a patent prosecution yourself to test these claims. Fortunately, you can do it vicariously completely for free! The entire prosecution history of a pa…

I'm not sure which categories you mean I'm splitting mathematics into. As for precedent, even the Supreme Court cannot define abstractness other than "we know it when we see it." J…

By assuming RSA would be invented without patents, you are begging the question. Would R, S and A even be employed by MIT and given free reign to do their research if MIT was not a…

I agree we need fewer, better patents. But triviality is orthogonal to obviousness. As I said above ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7162049 ) the iPhone UI patents are downr…

As I said at the end of my reply to CamperBob2 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7162049 ), the answer is we don't know. There are many economic and historical studies on this…

> If an idea is so obvious that nearly everyone faced with a similar problem stumbles on a similar solution... And there in lie more issues with obviousness: it may be obvious if p…

The "software is mathematics" argument has a few flaws: 1) It is reductio ad absurdum, like saying "machines are metals". It is not the naturally occurring metals that are patentab…

No, IP is just a strong interest of mine, but I did study (and may sometime, for kicks, decide to give) the patent bar exam.

That is a (probably the most ) difficult question. Intuitively, I would say, "Of course not". But when you learn more about the patent system and how it works, you understand the r…

This is why I hate Internet reporting of patent cases: > Given that there's no question Internet broadcasting pre-dated Logan's business, Ars asked if Liddle and his colleagues at …

That's just one patent that got invalidated. And that required Google to identify one comment from more than a decade back to argue that the patent was obvious (rather than anticip…

B&N gave them a stake in the eBook business for $300M. That's not nothing. That is an instant entry into the eBook business for Microsoft. Compare that to the huge amounts of time …

No, it's really not. Pretty much all large patent portfolios get licensed this way, and always have been. There are a multitude of legal, technical, practical and business reasons,…

What most people are missing here is that government money only gets you as far as the discovery, and that's if you're lucky enough to, you know, discover something. More likely, y…

I guess any investor would want returns on their investments. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell* I never said "all important discoveries come from the government". …

Instead of hand-waving about the conductivity of air, what would have helped is a citation that clearly states how hot the heating element of toasters themselves get. (Really. Beca…

> and repeatedly rejected until the PTO folded under seven continued amended petitions in 2010 Also called "prosecution". This is, literally, how every patent is prosecuted at the …

Hmm, I'm been unable to respond because I get a "you're submitting too fast" error. Maybe I tripped some sort of flame detector. To avoid multiple replies, I'm consolidating respon…

There are a lot of misconceptions about research in your questions, but suffice to say that in most research, the vast majority of "ideas" don't pan out. In fact, a lot of research…

Maybe the OP understands what "IP" is, but it seems they do not understand the economics of research or why IP is still applicable to publicly funded research. If one knows the con…

Every time someone links to those episodes I feel compelled to chime in and note that they (well, the first one, at least) are a terrible piece of reporting about patents. 1. Read …

I'm not sure how accurate Groklaw was during the SCO case, but as someone who understands patents more than the average geek: Groklaw was horrible when it came to patent matters. L…

Those were copyright claims, true, but that doesn't change the fact that companies still sought to protect what they felt were their innovations. There were many other cases involv…