The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community • Hacker News Board

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#121

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 3:33 AM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #116

jeremyarussell wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the price of patent filing was to increase it would increase the barrier for people that don't have a lot of money. Filing in the US starts at $390. http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee100512.htm . I picture a person without a job and lots of time on their hands coming up with something truly unique and amazing, only to be met with an even larger barrier to entry to make sure some big company can't rip o…

Okay, how about the lesser of 10% of the patent owner's monthly income or $10,000 to file? From there, it would be another $10K for the first 5 years, and $50K for 3 5-year extensions? Then the filing can be modest.. and upon approval, will be about the same to cover 5 years, and have to re-up at a higher cost.. assuming the patent is actually worth keeping active by then.

[deleted]

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#122

Post by michaelt » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 3:34 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #105

raquo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this situation is an issue of patents, really. A company that is decidedly keeping its prediction technology secret to gain an edge in a market which is entirely about being better at prediction than the other guys is not going to patent and therefore open source their technology no matter what happens to the patent system.

Patents exist to encourage inventions to be published, in exchange for exclusive licensing rights of the invention. Their entire purpose is to be an alternative to trade secrets. So it is fair to say that effective patents are those that are best at convincing people that they should publish their work instead of keeping it secret, and that there will be no financial impact to them doing so.

Patents only offer you protection against detectable infringement. If it's possible for company A to keep their algorithm secret, it's possible for company B to keep their infringement secret.

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#123

Post by YokoZar » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 5:01 AM UTC

If you would like to attend one of these meetings and make a point while making everybody laugh, I suggest telling a fictitious story about the time you wanted to learn how to implement a software technology by looking up an expired patent on it.

The fact that this idea is a literal joke should be quite revealing. Patents are supposed to be comprehensible. They're supposed to be the alternative of trade secrets. They're supposed to be a means by which the public learns how to do non-obvious things once they expire.

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#124

Post by bjustin » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 5:19 AM UTC

mbell wrote: post #112

jandrewrogers wrote: post #21

There are (at least) three valid perspectives on the patent situation within the software community but part of the reason so little constructive progress is made is that many people with strong opinions will often flat-out deny or reject the validity of the other perspectives because it is outside their experience. Three perspectives of which most people ignore one or more: - Computer technology is over-run with fri…

I don't disagree with your premise per-say, but, I do think its pretty easy for me, personally, to dismiss some of these positions wholesale. 1) I agree with 2) Computer technology moves at such a breakneck pace and is generally so hard to reverse engineer that this point doesn't hold water for me. We know that google's search algorithm works, ok, but can we reverse engineer it from the outside? The answer seems to b…

We know how Google's algorithm works in no small part because Larry and Sergey came up with it as part of their graduate studies at Stanford. Stanford owns the patent(s?) on it and made hundreds of millions licensing it to Google.

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#125

Post by chrisbennet » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 5:27 AM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #38

whatshisface wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For software-as-a-service, trade secrets are easily kept. Not so much if google published a desktop version of their fancy product. And no, making saas the only viable platform is not a good outcome. (then we wouldn't have to worry about trusting the user, but we would have to worry about trusting the provider.)

'jandrewrogers makes a very cogent point above when he points out that the patent system was put into place precisely to stop all information from being hidden. Without any legal protection, you have to create all sorts of ugly things (like guilds) in order to protect the things you develop. We may have lost some of Shakespeare's plays because he had to be so secretive with his work, since he had no other legal prote…

I just read how Shakespeare borrowed/stole heavily from other artists of his time.[1] Today he would have been sued for this and you wouldn't have those plays at all perhaps.

[1] Last chapter of the recent book "Imagine" by Jonah Lehrer

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#126

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 5:44 AM UTC

coopdog wrote: post #120

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>R&D into new computer algorithms is a non-trivial investment, frequently requiring years and millions of dollars. There is a tendency among programmers to discount the level of effort required to develop a new computer algorithm that materially extends the state-of-the-art even though most could not develop such algorithms themselves and have never been involved in such R&D. Organizations that make this investment d…

The litigation is very damaging, it's also true however that research is being doubled/tripled/etc as it's done in private by multiple organisations and kept as trade secrets, which is inefficient when you consider the world as a whole. It's just that we can't presently see any regulation based solution for that.

I understand that duplication is inefficient, but how is the patent system doing anything productive whatsoever to address it in the software industry? If something with market value can be kept as a trade secret then the incentive will be to do so notwithstanding the patent system, and then to patent various other things for legal defensive purposes which are less valuable in the market but more valuable in the courtroom. And things which can't effectively be held as trade secrets won't be wastefully duplicated anyway because the first to produce such a product is by stipulation unable to keep the secret.

More than that, if we were at all concerned about the use of trade secrets causing wasteful duplication then we cannot consistently allow the law to protect them as something of value. If we are so keen on disclosure and reducing duplication then industrial espionage should be fully legal as an efficient means of distributing knowledge to other market participants, and holders of trade secrets should be directed to the Patent Office as their sole means of protection. But I think we are not so keen because the problem of duplication is not so large, and the incentive provided by the patent system would not compare well with the incentive provided by the alternative.

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#127

Post by pcl » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 6:10 AM UTC

fghh45sdfhr3 wrote: post #71

pcl wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, a lot of the FPGA and vector calculus stuff that financial-services companies are doing is leaps and bounds ahead of the published materials. But I'm not under NDA in any related projects, so that's just hearsay.

I'm pretty sure we have Wall street quants here, unless one of them offers a convincing argument that yes, they are well ahead of academia, I don't believe it. In my anecdotal experience, the financial industry is light years behind most post-graduate level mathematicians and physicists. Finanical math is kind of scary for anyone who knows more math than the average banker.

But that's the thing, right? Most of the people working on this stuff are disincented from discussing it, both contractually and in terms of their own profit motives.

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#128

Post by mbell » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 6:21 AM UTC

bjustin wrote: post #124

mbell wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with your premise per-say, but, I do think its pretty easy for me, personally, to dismiss some of these positions wholesale. 1) I agree with 2) Computer technology moves at such a breakneck pace and is generally so hard to reverse engineer that this point doesn't hold water for me. We know that google's search algorithm works, ok, but can we reverse engineer it from the outside? The answer seems to b…

We know how Google's algorithm works in no small part because Larry and Sergey came up with it as part of their graduate studies at Stanford. Stanford owns the patent(s?) on it and made hundreds of millions licensing it to Google.

You know how it worked ten years ago. Do you really think that has much to do with how it works today?

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#129

Post by iskander » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 6:31 AM UTC

bskap wrote: post #44

iskander wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Academia is already facing difficulties in computer science because much of the state-of-the-art research is being done by private companies...As a consequence, there are a number of areas in computer science where the leading academic papers are literally a good half decade behind the state-of-the-art that is buried in NDAs. Can you elaborate on which areas of CS academia you think are more sophisticated in the cor…

That's because you never hear about what's going on outside of the research centers- they're all under NDA.

...but doesn't this sort of argument reduce to "you can't disprove the existence of unicorns?". Eventually this cutting-edge stuff has to come out from under NDA, so we should at least know of major advances from the 90s which were only revealed later.

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#130

Post by iskander » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 6:35 AM UTC

mbell wrote: post #128

bjustin wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know how Google's algorithm works in no small part because Larry and Sergey came up with it as part of their graduate studies at Stanford. Stanford owns the patent(s?) on it and made hundreds of millions licensing it to Google.

You know how it worked ten years ago. Do you really think that has much to do with how it works today?

As of four years ago (last time I had any meaningful contact with search quality people at Google), it was a very convoluted layer cake of diverse signals and carefully tuned heuristics.