The Silencing of Maya

This is irrelevant to this discussion as long as none of the knowledge used was a trade secret. An employee is free to use expertise developed while at a previous employer.

Patent claims get thrown out because that's how patents are designed. The idea is to break your invention down into an onion of claim layers so that when it comes to court, if a claim is thrown out as being partially or totally invalid, it's just like peeling as small a layer off the onion as possible. The point is that you can't be sure exactly where the court are going to stop peeling, but by breaking it down into layers you can be more sure that there'll be something useful left when they do, and you minimise the risk of their going too far. I don't think that strategy is dependent on which direction the burden of proof lies.

I agree that these were historical arguments for the patent system. But I don't think those arguments were entirely valid then, and they're even more suspect today.

The end of trade guild secrecy had far more to do with the advent of mass production than with the patent system. Highly trained craftsman could be organized into a guild. But large numbers of easily replaceable workers necessarily couldn't.

As for the elimination of generic drugs, the drug makers themselves argue that figuring out how to copy most new molecules is so cheap and easy that they need strong patent protection to recoup their research costs. Reverse engineering drugs is cheap and getting cheaper.

Software is not going to get more secretive without patents. It's hardly possible that it could -- almost all commercial source code is already treated like trade secrets. The implication that software developers actually utilize techniques gleaned from patent applications is pretty far-fetched.

Security-by-obscurity is orthogonal to the issue of patents. All the peer-reviewed security algorithms that actually get used are unencumbered by patents, which is precisely why they actually get used. (The slow adoption of elliptic curve cryptography has been blamed on the existence of certain patents.) There's no incentive to design your own crypto algorithm and keep it secret -- that's unnecessarily expensive and stupidly risky. People share these techniques out of self interest, not because they enjoy patent protection.

The cost of spreading information continues to plummet. Conversely, the cost of keeping secrets continues to increase. I don't think the premise of a permanent monopoly of secrecy is remotely plausible. Even military technology (which of course relies only on secrecy, not patent protection) seems to proliferate on time scales shorter than patent lifetimes, though this is a hard contention to prove.

I could be missing something here, and I certainly do not mean to negate the importance this family feels by "hearing" their daughter speak or the indisputable harshness experienced as a result of a patent dispute. I know I would certainly feel the same way if one of my sons had this problem.

However, despite the convenience and awesomeness of being able to do this on an iPad, is there anything preventing the girl (and her parents) from using written or some other method of communication? Can the girl not write out "I love you, Daddy" and anything else she thinks? Is there something I missed in the article? I've looked at the app, and you can't tell all the intended words just from the pictures (as much as I can see how those would help a young child).

I'm not disputing that this doesn't royally suck; I really have little compassion for software patents. I think Apple could have taken a different course of action in this case, sure. However, I have seen some legitimate praise for Apple (even here on HN, if I'm not mistaken) where they've removed apps that have grossly violated other people's work (though that may have been egregious copyright violation, as opposed to patent violation).

Maybe I'm too rational a parent (though I have plenty of emotion where my kids are concerned), but I just could not buy this:

    My daughter cannot speak without this app.
    She cannot ask us questions.  
    She cannot tell us that she’s tired, or that she wants yogurt for lunch. 
    She cannot tell her daddy that she loves him.

That's where the article went too far for me--we've gone from validly pulling at my heart strings, both as a compassionate person and as a parent, and now we're swimming about in hyperbole.

Yes, the iPad is a lovely device. Yes, the app does wonders for getting to hear "a voice" in place of the one the author's daughter cannot use on her own. Yes, that is fantastic and convenient and helpful because we're such auditory beings. But to make the claim that one's child cannot communicate without the aid of an electronic device and an application just goes too far in my view--especially when you read throughout the rest of the blog all the various ways in which they've worked with Maya to enable two-way communication, with varying (but definite) degrees of success. The claim simply disputes the other stories told.

I don't want to seem like a dick or have no compassion--again, as a parent, I can totally empathize with how devastating losing more fluid and convenient communication would be. I'd love to have an iPad helping my child along if s/he wasn't able to speak. But if the alternative is my child not being able to communicate with me at all, fuck the iPad and patents and all that shit. I'll grab a pen & paper and teach my children how to write what they're thinking, or go back for more ASL, or one of the other various methods the author has used ... something that doesn't need disputed technology (you still have to know language and have the device to use this app). Yes, this situation and its impact on this family sucks. Yes, it is totally shitty every which way. But hyperbole isn't the right tactic.

What appears to be truly lost in this story is the convenience of two-way communication introduced by the help of Speak For Yourself's app. Not the ability to communicate at all.

Blaming the patent mess on the Chinese is misguided. If a company felt harmed by a cheap version (that is branded clearly) then that might be a good time to reevaluate there business strategy. After that, go to the ITC for an injunction to protect their lack of market success.