The Patent Pledge • Hacker News Board

Re: The Patent Pledge

#181

Post by tcarnell » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 12:05 PM UTC

Great stuff! I would add my company, but there is not point - I have no patents!

I think until we see Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Apple on that list it wont be worth much.... and if we do see Apple on that list, would be believe them? and would they care if we didn't believe them?

Re: The Patent Pledge

#182

Post by fredBuddemeyer » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 12:07 PM UTC

michaeldhopkins wrote: post #112

pg wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to start a movement, you can't aim too high initially, or you just stall. The patent pledge in its current form is at least fairly easy to swallow. If it sticks, it will have the effect of making patent suits against competitors seem more dubious, which would in turn prepare people for more exacting versions. How far ultimately would you want to push it? I honestly don't know yet. Patents may have some ut…

Paul, how do we join? I'd like to support this.

i cant see a place to take the pledge so i added one on my own site http://littlebiggy.org/2005087. its still in alpha but it oughta work since you need to use your real name.

Re: The Patent Pledge

#183

Post by vadiml » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 1:02 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #149

gabrielroth wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The poster above was asking specifically about software patents.

Oops. I don't know of anything that would have turned out for the worse without software patents. But I only know about a subset of uses of software. There might be cases in pharmaceuticals or manufacturing where patents helped protect individual inventors against big companies.

It seems pretty obvious that if instead of patent system we had a mandatory obligation to publish full specs (schematics and source code) for all marketed products the invention rate will grow exponentially. The development costs will be cut down because of possibility to incrementally improve on existing products.

Re: The Patent Pledge

#184

Post by randallsquared » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 2:46 PM UTC

doron wrote: post #161

artursapek wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A deterrent is only useful if you employ it from time to time to demonstrate its power. Are you suggesting people who own guns should kill someone from time to time so nobody will fuck with them?

Are you suggesting that this is not how guns usually get used?

I'll suggest that.

Over 50 million households in the US own 200 million or more guns, collectively. If these guns were usually used this way, the US would be depopulated by gun violence in a decade or two.

Re: The Patent Pledge

#185

Post by bourdine » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 3:12 PM UTC

PG, you're absolutely right - IP is a real problem, that so far no one has decided, but I think Moon have also another one side - limits to 25 will run to huge number of small startups that can not be grow more then 25 peoples and this is can stops investment from venture capitalists. I think, we dont need draw a line between huge and small startups. We just need another patent system - transparent and work well as we need. At first, we need to know, was gived a patent on our inventions or not - by few clicks. At second - we need to know, what kind of invention and claims for it was pended but still have not sugessted. At third, we need to see all climes of concurents patents - because we are allways can invent another one claims, and build on them ower new products, that we can protect. I think we can solve this problem - as technicians, we are much easier to prepare a bill and after appeal to members of Congress or the legislature with a request to meet our demands.

We need to change the whole system. Obtaining a patent should be a simple thing as buying a domain name or product in the online store. Now, placing an order, we practically give it to the blind - we do not know if already issued a patent for the same invention or is it the same invention is filed by someone. We do not know this and therefore has a great chance that in six months we will letter of refusal and then we just lose time. This is I'm think about. And, IP and Patents is a strongly related to my startup, I'm will apply to YC W12.

Re: The Patent Pledge

#186

Post by brlewis » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 3:29 PM UTC

SoftwarePatent wrote: post #46

This pledge boils down to "shine light on bad actors", but I doubt it will change any behavior. Only rent-seekers [1] want software patents to exist, and you can't decrease their reputation any more, it's already 0. The S. Ct. already had their big chance in Bilski to dial back software patentability, and they blew it. Our only hope is Congress. (/me shudders hopelessly) And to anyone suggesting we abolish patents co…

How exactly did the Supreme Court blow it? They affirmed the Fed Circuit opinion that said to stop using State Street and Alappat as precedent. Those two rogue court decisions were the only reason we have software patents. Aren't we now back to Benson, Flook and Diehr?

Re: The Patent Pledge

#187

Post by dantheman » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 3:49 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #134

haberman wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a good example of something that would have turned out worse if there hadn't been software patents? (I know you've argued before that software patents aren't fundamentally different than patents on anything else, but to a lot of people software patents have more obviously negative consequences).

The most famous example is probably Watt's steam engine. Bolton & Watt had high development costs and could not have gotten funding without their patent. But once established they definitely used patents against smaller competitors. So it is hard to say for sure even in this case whether patents were a net win. They probably were though. The patent probably caused modern separate-condenser steam engines to happen at…

Here's a slightly different take on Bolton & Watt http://mises.org/daily/3280

I think the key takeaway is that the patent was retroactively extended; so the idea was already created. If the extension was necessary for funding and development, then a case can be made for granting temporary monopolies for anything regardless of the inventor (the idea already exists, so we should find the best implementer) - I think most would be against this idea.

Re: The Patent Pledge

#188

Post by officialstation » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 3:53 PM UTC

I was checking the source code for http://thepatentpledge.org/ and noticed a reference to favicon.ico which is not there (returns a 404 Not Found): http://thepatentpledge.org/favicon.ico

Re: The Patent Pledge

#189

Post by philipkd » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 4:10 PM UTC

Can someone clarify for me, what does "no first use" mean? Does it mean you can't sue a small start-up for being the first to use a patent you already own?

Re: The Patent Pledge

#190

Post by crenshaw » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 4:49 PM UTC

beagle3 wrote: post #111

crenshaw wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm not really afraid of Microsoft -- especially if I don't ship a product based on Linux or Android. And patent trolls aren't going to agree to this pledge. Patent trolls worry me the most. I'd like to see a pledge around having the tech community pool together against patent trolls. Not sure how you'd do it, but I'd like to see that.

you should be worried about Microsoft: see the chilling effect case of virtualdub, a Windows-only software.

That doesn't scare me much. They were trying to reverse-engineer a MS file format. If I'm doing things like trying to reverse engineer Silverlight DRM or get around PatchGuard, or find a way to circumvent some limitation in a Windows SKU (like installing Media Center on Starter Edition) sure I'd be worried. But if I'm just building product that infringes a patent they have, I'm not worried.