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Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#171

Post by somewho »

radicalbyte wrote: post #26
DarkmSparks wrote: post #14

Im still very undecided on software patents and have been since they were first awarded software patents in general are a bad idea imho, go trade secret and never let the ideas enter the public domain. otoh society benefits a lot from good ideas entering the public domain, and the patent system is fairly effective at stopping everyone keeping their secret sauce a secret. Since the US has them, and this decision seems…

I've yet to see a software patent which wouldn't have been reinvented by someone else looking at the same problem. The thing with software is that the cost to experiment is extremely low compared to other fields so we can, and do, "just try it". At this point in my career for example everything I do is basically tweaking or adapting patterns I've seen in other systems to the ones I'm working on.

Cost to experiment being low doesn't make non-obvious ideas obvious. As a trained researcher with patents I'm no longer surprised by how often simple ideas have remained undiscovered for decades.

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#172

Post by somewho »

I innovated and hold patents. I still don't know how I feel about patents and copyright.

At the end of the day, patents and copyright didn't lead to me being rewarded for innovating. I wish there was a better way.

Sometimes I wish AI could read everyone's claims and report who should be rewarded for what and by how much.

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#173

Post by psds2 »

riskable wrote: post #162

Amazon should just pay a bunch of people to write down a working implementation of the patent using a pencil and paper. It'd be a LOT of paper but it would meet the, "if it can be done with a pen and paper" criteria outlined in CLS Bank. It wouldn't even be complicated or difficult... Just tedious.

How would pencil marks on paper interact with data in the cloud and storage devices like in the patent described ?

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#175

Post by everforward »

marcinzm wrote: post #156
michaelt wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patents are in principle supposed to be non-obvious, and detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the description. I can assure you that in practice they are neither. There are merely a lot of people in the legal profession whose jobs depend on ignoring that fact.

> I can assure you that in practice they are neither. Having written some patents that has not been my experience. For example, this is one of the patents in the lawsuit: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/67/67/7c/1299b0c... This patent includes network diagrams, actual C data structure, technical terminology galore, etc, etc. It's got a ton more implementation details versus, for example, a scientific publ…

Eh, this is like "first draft of a design document" level detailed.

The big issue is that it's a protocol, not a system. I.e. it's detailed only because it specifically _does not specify how to build anything_. Were they required to actually specify how to build something, i.e. a server that implements this protocol rather than the protocol itself, this would be woefully insufficient.

How are the mappings stored on disk? Does this entire protocol genuinely lack authentication? How is this meant to fail over when a server dies? If it's distributed, how do the nodes reach consensus?

You can't just jam stuff like this into a doc:

> Also, each update is preferably performed atomically > to avoid creating an inconsistent state in the string Store.

They're just handwaving away how the data gets stored. Y'know, the part of the patent that's actually useful and does something.

What's left over after you discount the parts they don't specify is basically just a wire protocol for a KV store that doesn't exist. They might as well try to patent a method for making imaginary mittens for imaginary friends, because that's basically what this is.

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#176

Post by michaelt »

marcinzm wrote: post #156
michaelt wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patents are in principle supposed to be non-obvious, and detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the description. I can assure you that in practice they are neither. There are merely a lot of people in the legal profession whose jobs depend on ignoring that fact.

> I can assure you that in practice they are neither. Having written some patents that has not been my experience. For example, this is one of the patents in the lawsuit: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/67/67/7c/1299b0c... This patent includes network diagrams, actual C data structure, technical terminology galore, etc, etc. It's got a ton more implementation details versus, for example, a scientific publ…

> it's got 20+ page of this technical implementation details

Yeah fantastic, like an entire page devoted to showing requests that have numerical identifiers. Groundbreaking stuff.

And it's all completely irrelevant noise because you can infringe on the patent even if your implementation in no way depends on any of those details

The only thing that matters is the claims, and they're written so broadly and interpreted by the courts so creatively that a subject matter expert cannot read the document and determine if something does or does not infringe on it.

Seriously, how does Claim 1 not cover 99% of HTTP requests ever made given that people were using reverse proxies and passing requests between backend servers for decades before this patent was filed?

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#177

Post by runako »

TrackerFF wrote: post #48
Jochim wrote: post #35

The concept of intellectual property is antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia. It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape and hands control of our culture over to those with the financial mean to claim to own it. The day we wrest back that control will be a good day.

It would be an interesting experiment - a world where no patents exist, only production (though corporate espionage / theft is still illegal). Some argue that this will effectively kill R&D, because the second you've created something - others would start reverse engineering, and copy the product. In some areas, like pharma, R&D is notoriously expensive, and the pharma companies have only that many years to recoup al…

The other aspect of patents that folks are omitting is that in order to get a patent, the applicant has to publish their recipe. In most cases, this will be strictly better than simple reverse engineering because more participants can then use the IP once it expires (as opposed to those with the means and desire to reverse engineer it).

Patents are a two-way street where society gets something in exchange for granting a limited-duration monopoly.

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#178

Post by runako »

riskable wrote: post #159
MRtecno98 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were no patents most of them would just be kept as secrets, and you would, for the most part, get right back where you started(if not in a worse position)

What you're talking about is a very specific area of patent law: Patents on manufacturing processes. The assumption is that without the patent the knowledge necessary to reproduce the products made with the method would be extremely difficult or impossible. This is nonsense in this day and age. Modern engineers of varying sorts can reverse engineer basically any process and underpaid employees who know the secrets ca…

> Modern engineers of varying sorts can reverse engineer basically any process

This is in part because they are steeped in a society where essentially all innovations are published, and have been for hundreds of years. This would not be the case if each engineer could only draw on a single career's worth of exposure to actual practices.

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#180

Post by TulliusCicero »

Jochim wrote: post #35

The concept of intellectual property is antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia. It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape and hands control of our culture over to those with the financial mean to claim to own it. The day we wrest back that control will be a good day.

So if I make a game or write a book, someone can just copy+paste it onto another digital store and make money off of it, immediately?
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