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IBM sues Airbnb for patent royalties

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Re: IBM sues Airbnb for patent royalties

#161

Post by btilly »

mjevans wrote: post #86
freejazz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true some of the founders were skeptical, I never said otherwise and I never said it was "uncontested. What I said was that it's inclusion in the Constitution is for a clear reason, whether or not the reasoning is valid is a different debate. As I pointed out, the constitution grants congress the EXPLICIT AUTHORIZATION you refer to, for the very purpose of promoting the PROGRESS of the arts and sciences. I guess…

That seems like an unsubstantiated claim. Does the current set of systems promote the progress of "science" and "useful arts" as they would have been known by those signing those laws many lifetimes ago? From what I remember of other parts of the constitution and amendments offhand they generally don't include an explicit directive about why something is there. It's extremely implicit as an often obvious effect of wh…

That seems like an unsubstantiated claim.

It is substantiated by the text of the Constitution itself.

From what I remember of other parts of the constitution and amendments offhand they generally don't include an explicit directive about why something is there. It's extremely implicit as an often obvious effect of what the law expressly allows or forbids.

They generally don't. And therefore the statement of intent for this particular clause should be given more weight, not less.

Re: IBM sues Airbnb for patent royalties

#162

Post by TwoBit »

edge17 wrote: post #27
vikramkr wrote: post #7

I recall an article a while back about how IBM is so innovative because it had the most patents filed per year on tech or something. I think we can see now that their patenting is less about innovation and more about patent trolling. Quote from the FT article on this below does not seem to show to me that this is the sort of patent that promotes real innovation - "improved navigation using bookmarks" does not seem li…

IBM files a lot of patent because (at least when I was there many years ago), employees and their management chain have strong economic incentives to file anything. Even interns were encouraged to file patents, and as a student it's a great way to beef up your resume. Ironically, even between technology professionals, the patents one files at IBM are great marketing material on the resume. IBM marketing itself as 'th…

They may seem to beef up your resume, but whenever I saw resumes with IBM patents I would ignore the pstents or give them much less weight than any other patents.

Re: IBM sues Airbnb for patent royalties

#163

Post by ksec »

triceratops wrote: post #98
jbay808 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you justify the claim that Amazon is mostly software? Is it because they hire a lot of well-paid software developers? Microsoft produces a lot of value from software, but how much new technology are they producing? Some for sure, but how much? I don't think your metrics prove the claim... Facebook has developed a software product, and earned a lot of value from advertising. They've also developed several new tech…

> Can you justify the claim that Amazon is mostly software? For starters, Amazon derives most of its profits from AWS.

>For starters, Amazon derives most of its profits from AWS.

Amazon has over $200B of revenue from e-commerce, $1 Profits. AWS Generate ~$25B revenue, $1M Profits.

Here is the headline. AWS ( Its Cloud Division ) Generating 1 Million times more profits than Amazon Retail!.

Or AWS Generate more profits than all of other Amazon Department combined!

What this mean is that Amazon is a vertically integrated Retail company ( Where Retail here includes Online ), with logistics, and transportation. Amazon is mostly software / AWS is a Silicon Valley / I.T / Tech view bubble.

Forgot to mention AWS is actually lots of hardware, land cost for DC, etc. i.e Not Software.

Re: IBM sues Airbnb for patent royalties

#164

Post by yourapostasy »

Can someone with patent law domain expertise please describe the "novel" patent criteria to laypeople here for software patents?

To my simple lay mind, I apply a "not-novel" test criteria to patents. If I can describe a software patent in non-software terms, and apply a "...then a light-speed fast homunculus does this all...", then I'm already skeptical of the novelty of the software patent. In this specific instance, change "interactive service" to "newspaper, fetched from a vast library...by a very, very fast homunculus", and "advertisement" to "advertisement cut out and replaced by another advertisement fetched from a vast library...by a very, very fast homunculus".

So obviously my lay understanding is way off, and I'm seeking to rectify that flawed understanding.

Re: IBM sues Airbnb for patent royalties

#165

Post by mjevans »

btilly wrote: post #161
mjevans wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like an unsubstantiated claim. Does the current set of systems promote the progress of "science" and "useful arts" as they would have been known by those signing those laws many lifetimes ago? From what I remember of other parts of the constitution and amendments offhand they generally don't include an explicit directive about why something is there. It's extremely implicit as an often obvious effect of wh…

That seems like an unsubstantiated claim. It is substantiated by the text of the Constitution itself. From what I remember of other parts of the constitution and amendments offhand they generally don't include an explicit directive about why something is there. It's extremely implicit as an often obvious effect of what the law expressly allows or forbids. They generally don't. And therefore the statement of intent fo…

You cut out the very next sentence which describes the element that I am claiming is unsubstantiated.

Though you do understand the further elaboration of why I too feel it is __extremely__ important that there is a clause about why this power is reserved to Congress and a described intent / limit within which that power is to be used.

Re: IBM sues Airbnb for patent royalties

#166

Post by riazrizvi »

ergothus wrote: post #155
riazrizvi wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is working exactly as intended. The point of the USPTO is to provide a mechanism for carving up the universe of ideas into plots of land where ownership is clear and backed up by the force of the state. You can charge rent on it, you can develop it yourself, you can leave it idle, it’s yours. Software innovators are a bit like wholesome farmers who just want to labor in the fields, beat the elements and gr…

> The point of the USPTO is to provide a mechanism for carving up the universe of ideas into plots of land where ownership is clear and backed up by the force of the state. You can charge rent on it, you can develop it yourself, you can leave it idle, it’s yours. The point of patent laws is to encourage the spread of knowledge. To put it another way, it's NOT yours, but we'll let you act like it for a bit in order to…

> If we've created a situation where the "land of ideas" is remaining fallow, then the process isn't working as intended.

I think you mean, ‘has fallow spots’. It seems to me that writing law is similar to building software systems; you always want a perfectly effective and economical system but you never have that ideal. So good engineers don’t stand up and say this system isn’t perfect, it’s obvious. What’s the proposed improvement? That is interesting.

Re: IBM sues Airbnb for patent royalties

#167

Post by jariel »

IBM is a patent troll. They'll come in and threaten to sue on a patent, and then indicate they have a zillion patents, that they'll 'find some infringement' and then exhort. They have a cadre of lawyers incented to do this.

It's fair that people can defend their IP, but it goes too far in many cases.

Re: IBM sues Airbnb for patent royalties

#168

Post by triceratops »

ksec wrote: post #163
triceratops wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you justify the claim that Amazon is mostly software? For starters, Amazon derives most of its profits from AWS.

>For starters, Amazon derives most of its profits from AWS. Amazon has over $200B of revenue from e-commerce, $1 Profits. AWS Generate ~$25B revenue, $1M Profits. Here is the headline. AWS ( Its Cloud Division ) Generating 1 Million times more profits than Amazon Retail!. Or AWS Generate more profits than all of other Amazon Department combined! What this mean is that Amazon is a vertically integrated Retail company…

> Forgot to mention AWS is actually lots of hardware, land cost for DC, etc. i.e Not Software.

Cool, yeah, so you're saying if I go buy a bunch of servers and land I too can compete with AWS? It doesn't matter what software it runs?

The hardware and datacenter stuff is commodity. Table-stakes. Everyone has to have it. That's why they don't even manufacture the servers themselves. Software is where the value add is. This goes for any cloud provider, BTW.

Re: IBM sues Airbnb for patent royalties

#169

Post by jariel »

zackees wrote: post #115
Mikeb85 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's the truth. There's literally rentals on there, right now, in the town I'm currently living in, that are illegal according to local laws. Airbnb doesn't de-list them, they just pretend they don't know.

Laws pushed by large companies so that others can't compete against them and they are able to price gouge the customer. There is a large supply of housing that is available to customers that want to purchase it. The idea that two people can't make a consensual exchange of value is antithetical to a free society.

Laws are laws, your insinuation of general corruption isn't really fair, the onus would be on you to prove that.

Both Uber and AirBnB knowingly break the law as part of their business model.

Zoning doesn't allow the kind of business that AirBnB has, they just don't care.

One could very well argue that maybe the laws need reform (as I do) but that's another story; the inherent ethos of YC et. al. is to err on the side of breaking the rules.

Re: IBM sues Airbnb for patent royalties

#170

Post by ska »

bubblethink wrote: post #154
ChuckMcM wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer, I've contributed a couple of patents to IBM's hoard of patents, but I no longer work there. #1 is fairly straight forward, a simple script that uses the USPTO search function and searches for the Assignee field being IBM and the date range being the last 30 days gives you the patents issued that month to IBM. You can do that with a simple cron script, curl, and some script code. #2 is somewhat more diffic…

Tangential question for everyone. I recently had to file a small claims case by myself (i.e., no attorney). It's still in the pipeline, but the process made me realise that the legal world is a different universe altogether. From the tech perspective, everything is stuck in the dark ages. I had to create a pdf, print it, then go to the court, only to scan it again on a windows 8 computer with silverlight that would k…

There are startups in this space, but there are also people who value the friction (and not all for selfish reasons).
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