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no.
Could you please elaborate on this? Is there any direct confirmation of this? There wasn't any single answer from anyone affiliated with the Swift core team on this specific point. Or from any lawyer for that matter.
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That doens't make it any less sick really (as applies to all software patents). But it's especially sick in the context of programming languages.
It is clear that you, like many commenters in this thread, have very little, if any, understanding of US patent law. This patent is a nothing burger. Don't take it personally. Patent law is about the most complex area of law. Most tech press blows it too.
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Could you please elaborate on this? Is there any direct confirmation of this? There wasn't any single answer from anyone affiliated with the Swift core team on this specific point. Or from any lawyer for that matter.
Patent claims define the legal scope: if "using Swift" isn't in the claims then using another language, provided it fits the language of the claims, is also covered by the patent.
Also, "using Swift" isn't in the claims ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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theoretically publishing an explanation of the methods and not patenting it is sufficient
Not since the US changed to first-to-file. A patent can be issued to another party and you can be sued for using your own invention. If an examiner never finds your prior art you're still on the hook to deal with the expensive legal process of defense and invalidation.
Prior use in public would count as "prior art" and void a patent too.
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IP lawyer here. You should ignore everything but the claims, and see what the claims say. So stare at https://patents.google.com/patent/US9952841B2/en and look only at the claims. To me, that set of claims is ... worrying
Could you recomend me a book or course on how to file an utility patent? I took a mooc explaining the overall process but it lacks details.
It's not because there is magic here, it's because the set of rules, regulations, and interpretations to follow is voluminous.
The document you want is called the MPEP. https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/index.html
This covers the rules/regulations/interpretations/etc that they will expect you to know/follow, and examiners to know/follow. In that sense, it literally does cover everything you'd need to know to do this right, and how the examiner/etc will look at your patent application, etc. It's even understandable by normal human beings and goes to great lengths to explain its reasoning and the case law that supports their views.
However, it's also thousands of pages.
Now, it's definitely possible and in my experience, examiners are fairly nice to pro-se applicants and try to be helpful.
But this would really be a thing you'd want to have to spend a significant amount of time doing. For the vast majority of people, it's much more effective to hire someone who will charge a fixed fee.
(for a single person filing a patent for the firs time, you'd qualify as a micro-entity, so most of your fees would be the lawyer/agent for sure)
But, if you decide to do it, that's the document you want.
(And just as a disclaimer: i don't make a living patenting stuff and think patents in general hurt a lot more than they help. So i'm really not the type to tell you to go spend money on a patent lawyer if i can avoid it)
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Patent claims define the legal scope: if "using Swift" isn't in the claims then using another language, provided it fits the language of the claims, is also covered by the patent.
ok, does it mean that if you implement only parts of the patent (say only a single feature) there's no infringement because then it doesn't "fit the language of the claims"? Also, "using Swift" isn't in the claims ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When drafting the claims writer (patent attorney or agent usually) will add clauses to work around prior art. You can't just add unrelated features though, the features need to have synergy to represent a single invention.
[I've read a lot on USA patents but only worked directly with UK and EU patents.
This is not legal advice.]
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Thats not the only thing, no? Doesn't it also prevent e.g. other people/company from including that feature in their own programming language that doesn't use Swift at all?
Someone could even implement the feature in a dynamic language like Python or Lisp for a particular application. Does that mean the application is infringing the patent because they didn't use Swift?
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Ah, but you are overlooking the key difference: you cannot commercialize an engine without building it. With software, commercialization costs "nothing" [1]. A smaller company could come up with a unique engine design, but without patent protection, a bigger company could just drop by and take the design and build it themselves. In other words, the larger company would get R&D "for free". In the engineering world, on…
”With software, commercialization costs "nothing”” So, I invent a method that dramatically improves search engines. How do I commercialize it for “nothing”, if I’m not one of the few companies with access to a huge data set, and cannot protect my invention with patents?
And yes, there are definitely exceptions, but my point is that the general case in software != the general case in engineering, which is why you cannot directly compare the effect the patent system has on the two fields.
Chris Lattner has commented on the OP: ----- Disclaimer: I'm not an apple employee and not am not lawyer, this is just my understanding of the situation having spent lots of time talking to lawyers and other experts about this: I agree with much of the sentiment that software patents are often silly and the system is broken in many ways. This patent is a reasonable example of that (patenting syntactic sugar for monad…
IP lawyer here. No, that is a correct interpretation. The reason it doesn't matter is because of this: "then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work" As the owner of the patents, Apple doesn't need this license to have rights to those patents. They have rights otherwise. Now, it would terminate the rights they have to other people's patents under the license. (IE if a contributor submitted…
For example, with Swift, IBM is a major code contributor and runs significant portions of the project. IBM is one of the largest patent holders in the world. If Apple and IBM ever had a patent dispute involving swift, wouldn't that naturally lead to attorneys scrutinizing every other similarly licensed open source project to find an angle against each other or their partners? Wouldn't that then lead to other companies getting drawn into the dispute? And once the gates are opened, any long-simmering patent issues would be easy to add... affecting more projects and companies...
What would have happened if the Microsoft/Google/Android dispute involved Apache 2?
IANAL, but these boilerplate patent-agreements-in-open-source-licenses seem scarier than just leaving things ambiguous.
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Someone could even implement the feature in a dynamic language like Python or Lisp for a particular application. Does that mean the application is infringing the patent because they didn't use Swift?
no.
Companies that are mere consumers of IT have been sued by patent trolls, and paid up.