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Victory Lap for Ask Patents

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#31

Post by DannyBee »

ianterrell wrote: post #29
jasonkester wrote: post #11

Pure Awesome. Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to existing software patents. There are plenty (~40k/year according to the article) of bad, obvious nonsense patents already out there. It'd be nice if there were a simple process to appeal and invalidate them with similar demonstrations of prior art and obviousness. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some Wikipedia-level-OCD focused on this site to sto…

> Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to existing software patents. What's stopping anyone from crowd sourcing a database of prior art for existing patents that would invalidate them if it came to it? A valid defense against patent infringement is to show that the patent shouldn't have been issued in the first place, right? So a database of Ready Made Legal Defense sounds good. Am I missing something?

It's been tried.

Many times.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#32

Post by eliasmacpherson »

I had a bad attitude dealing with patents in my last job, refusing to take part on the basis that I hadn't come up with anything novel. I noticed a member of staff with views on patents in line with mine taking a more active role. He took part in the patent meetings, but instead of merely offering nothing up, took active part in finding prior art, thus preventing time wasting patents going to the office. He took special pleasure in finding prior art by current employees at the same company, preferably in the same arm.

I am impressed by Spolsky's positive attitude to do something about the problem, I bid ask patents continued good fortune!

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#33

Post by Guvante »

ianterrell wrote: post #29
jasonkester wrote: post #11

Pure Awesome. Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to existing software patents. There are plenty (~40k/year according to the article) of bad, obvious nonsense patents already out there. It'd be nice if there were a simple process to appeal and invalidate them with similar demonstrations of prior art and obviousness. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some Wikipedia-level-OCD focused on this site to sto…

> Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to existing software patents. What's stopping anyone from crowd sourcing a database of prior art for existing patents that would invalidate them if it came to it? A valid defense against patent infringement is to show that the patent shouldn't have been issued in the first place, right? So a database of Ready Made Legal Defense sounds good. Am I missing something?

Showing a patent clerk prior art is much easier than showing prior art in a courtroom.

For instance at the minimum you need to bring in an expert witness to explain the prior art. Then you have to contend with the fact that they will bring in their own expert witness to explain how your example is bogus and you both get to cross-examine. etc. etc.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#34

Post by maqr »

> The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two.

Any idea to which two he might be referring?

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#35

Post by Guvante »

silvestrov wrote: post #14
jasonkester wrote: post #11

Pure Awesome. Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to existing software patents. There are plenty (~40k/year according to the article) of bad, obvious nonsense patents already out there. It'd be nice if there were a simple process to appeal and invalidate them with similar demonstrations of prior art and obviousness. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some Wikipedia-level-OCD focused on this site to sto…

One thing missing in the patent system is that the patent seeker should pay a "fee" of $1000 if it is patentlyobvious that prior art exists. That would enable "Amazon Mechanical Turk"-style killing of most patents with prior art.

You would have to make the penalty too high for a small shop to afford to actually impact the big wigs' carpet bombing technique.

Similarly, what do you do about the "I was accidently too broad" cases, which are just as dangerous.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#37

Post by recursive »

maqr wrote: post #34

> The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two. Any idea to which two he might be referring?

My guesses are garbage collection and Carmack's fast inverse square root.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#38

Post by dmdeller »

willyt wrote: post #25
seldo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

App icons in OS X are interpolated between about 4 different sized images. I remember reading about this in the developer docs back in about 2002. I'd be surprised if Apple don't have pretty much the same patent on this already but registered 10 years earlier :-)

Mac OS has done this since much earlier. The classic Mac OS needed at least two different representations of the same icon, one for the desktop (32x32) and one for the application switcher (16x16). The application switcher, initially called MultiFinder, was introduced in 1987[1]. If memory serves, the various sizes of an icon were stored together in the ICNS resource of the app binary's resource fork. There was a developer tool provided by Apple called ResEdit which allowed you to view or change the icons of any application, in a nice GUI editor (of course).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multifinder

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#39

Post by spolsky »

maqr wrote: post #34

> The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two. Any idea to which two he might be referring?

I sort of like http://www.google.com/patents/US4464650 (Ziv/Lempel compression), which doesn't seem obvious to me
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