Victory Lap for Ask Patents
joelonsoftware.com
Victory Lap for Ask Patents
1–10 of 155 posts
Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents
#2Good lord, it's actually working! Full steam ahead, boys!
If only we'd done this a decade or two ago. How about some reevaluation of granted patents?
edit: The original title, "Joel Spolsky, patent killer", was better :/
Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents
#3Wow - crowdsourcing the removal of ludicrous patents. This could be the killer app of StackExchange. Well done!
Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents
#4Congratulations to the stack exchange team for getting this going. It's an incredibly good idea, maybe you could patent it?
Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents
#5Trouble is, what killed the patent was prior disclosure from the researchers.
The same thing has happened to friends of mine; an undergraduate's summer research presentation may have betrayed patentable inventions. An effect of the 1-year prior art rule is to force researchers to keep mum about what they're doing and to generate greater numbers of incremental patents.
If you're interested in the free flow of information, using a researcher's own publications to kill patents may not help the cause.
Prior art from other work in the past? Bring it on!
Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents
#6Congratulations to the stack exchange team for getting this going. It's an incredibly good idea, maybe you could patent it?
The patent trolls are already on it, patenting crowd-sourcing as a method of patent defense. This will inevitably result in the shut down of Ask Patents in a stunning fit of irony.
Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents
#7Trouble is, what killed the patent was prior disclosure from the researchers. The same thing has happened to friends of mine; an undergraduate's summer research presentation may have betrayed patentable inventions. An effect of the 1-year prior art rule is to force researchers to keep mum about what they're doing and to generate greater numbers of incremental patents. If you're interested in the free flow of informat…
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "prior disclosure" here. They filed a patent application: those are supposed to be public. The prior art Joel used was the documentation of the Win32 API from 5 years previously (and I'm pretty sure we've been using variable-resolution apps since earlier than 2008, and not just in Windows -- this was just an example). Could you clarify what the problem is?
Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents
#8Brilliant! Too bad however that so much energy needs to be wasted on SHIT like patents.
Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents
#9Trouble is, what killed the patent was prior disclosure from the researchers. The same thing has happened to friends of mine; an undergraduate's summer research presentation may have betrayed patentable inventions. An effect of the 1-year prior art rule is to force researchers to keep mum about what they're doing and to generate greater numbers of incremental patents. If you're interested in the free flow of informat…
I didn't think from reading it that the two groups at MS were the same - I assumed they were independent parts of the org, in which case it was fairly clear that this was an idea that various people have had without direct communication, and thus throws serious doubt on "non-obvious". I'm pretty sure that you could find plenty of other people who've had the idea.
Companies like Akamai used to (probably still do) have image resizing proxies which took something like a multi-resolution TIFF file as part of their extended CDN features. I can't remember when I first saw that in action, but I'm sure it was pre-2011.
I'm also not sure why using a researchers own publications to kill a patent would be bad in your eyes. If you think something is really, truly patentable you'd keep it under wraps until you did so, as far as possible. If you only decided later, once you'd published research and people were productizing that research - and you then patented and sued them - well, that's exactly the kind of thing that should be stomped on!
Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents
#10This is really, really cool.
Its actually some part of governing delegated to the public. A part they can be good at. I wonder if the crowd can be authoritative, rather than just helpful. That would let them tackle obviousness, not just prior art I could see a stackexchange-like. It might be that they can tackle it now, if good methods/guidelines exist for objectively determining obviousness.