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Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

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Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#181
post #101
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL but there was a patent describing a USB-powered vibrator. While the idea of a vibrator is not new, and the idea of powering devices via USB isn't new either, the combination of these two non-new ideas was new. The patent was granted, and when someone (not the patent holder) produced a USB-powered vibrator, they were found in a violation of the patent in question. Similarly, if someone made a patent about "build…

That sounds ridiculous to me... By the same logic, I could patent a car that is charged by USB (not very efficient, but eh, it's new !) and then nobody could build a car charged via USB ?

> I could patent a car that is charged by USB

If you paid the filing dues (a significant sum), and nobody has patented that before, then yes.

> nobody could build a car charged via USB?

Anybody could build a car powered by USB, and you could then sue them for the infringement of your patent. It could then go in many directions, from you becoming very rich, to your patent being invalidated and you found responsible for court fees.

This system is not as ridiculous as it sounds.

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can assure you that in practice they are neither. Having written some patents that has not been my experience. For example, this is one of the patents in the lawsuit: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/67/67/7c/1299b0c... This patent includes network diagrams, actual C data structure, technical terminology galore, etc, etc. It's got a ton more implementation details versus, for example, a scientific publ…

> it's got 20+ page of this technical implementation details Yeah fantastic, like an entire page devoted to showing requests that have numerical identifiers. Groundbreaking stuff. And it's all completely irrelevant noise because you can infringe on the patent even if your implementation in no way depends on any of those details The only thing that matters is the claims, and they're written so broadly and interpreted…

You claimed:

>...and detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the description. I can assure you that in practice they are neither.

I provided a counter-example. I'm going to take the the fact you're not responding to the counter-example but rather changing the argument as acceptable that you were wrong.

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment implies that most of the massive technological innovation since 1400s came around because of patents. That's far from the truth. Patent systems that old were local and very different from the modern variant. Besides, most regions didn't have patent systems at all. The Netherlands didn't really get patent law until early 20th century. That didn't stop them from innovating and inventing. Germany similarly.

No, they are questioning the parent comment's argument that patents are against the basis for modern technological development itself, which is obviously false if patents where present well before this development

[deleted]

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's almost like capitalism stifles innovation. It's not. It's nowhere close. "Capitalism" (which is a weasel word to begin with), has produced far more innovation than any other economic system. Even aside from the overwhelming historical evidence soundly disproving your point, your argument is designed to deceive: > It actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation. Strawman argument - very few p…

I hesitate to reply to people that hide behind throwaway accounts, but sure, I'll bite. >Even aside from the overwhelming historical evidence soundly disproving your point That has basically nothing to compare against it. The very few attempts that we had in modern times were ultimately sabotaged by capitalism. Maybe those attempts would not succeed even without the sabotage but regardless, of course it's better than…

> Regulators that are corrupted in search of capital.

Isn't that the same thing that happened in every socialist attempt in the modern era? Isn't the cause the fact of original sin not the particular economic structures? To put it another way, how do you propose to solve the issue of "[sabotage] by capitalism" the line between good and evil that runs, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says, "right through every human heart"

https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/notable-quotations#:~:tex....

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#185
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, it turns out last 600 years saw many orders of magnitude more innovation than the years prior.

Correlation ≠ causation. The printing press came around the same time and probably contributed to this development, not patents. If he was greedy maybe he would've patented the technology and normal people wouldn't learn to read.

Also, much more importantly, the invention of the scientific method and science as a philosophy of epistemology.

Common knowledge of physics for a thousand years was that heavier things fall faster, so spoke Aristotle. Nobody actually "fact checked" that because "duh, of course heavier things fall faster, this feather falls so slowly, everyone knows that" and so knowledge could not advance.

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#186
post #35

The concept of intellectual property is antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia. It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape and hands control of our culture over to those with the financial mean to claim to own it. The day we wrest back that control will be a good day.

So if I make a game or write a book, someone can just copy+paste it onto another digital store and make money off of it, immediately?

Well for many reasons. Also, what you could do is take an existing book, rewrite a few passages and then publish it. Almost like ... open source.

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#187
post #35

The concept of intellectual property is antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia. It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape and hands control of our culture over to those with the financial mean to claim to own it. The day we wrest back that control will be a good day.

Then again, Amazon likes to take open source projects and monetize them so cheaply via aws at scale that it drives the creators out of business. And authors need ip protection to keep some random Amazon like printing press company from stealing almost all their revenue from books they write because they just have better distribution and marketing

(unless authors are supposed to make almost 100% of their incomes from touring and live shows, as the overwhelming sentiment on hn is towards musicians)

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like capitalism stifles innovation. Paradoxically it's one of the most common arguments people use in favor of the system: it pushes innovation! It actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation. When real innovation happens it's mostly by coincidence on the small intersection of the Venn diagram. Edit: It's interesting that the patent system was created, in theory, to allow people to pro…

> It's almost like capitalism stifles innovation. It's not. It's nowhere close. "Capitalism" (which is a weasel word to begin with), has produced far more innovation than any other economic system. Even aside from the overwhelming historical evidence soundly disproving your point, your argument is designed to deceive: > It actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation. Strawman argument - very few p…

> It's not. It's nowhere close. "Capitalism" (which is a weasel word to begin with), has produced far more innovation than any other economic system.

This is like saying Earth has produced far more life than any other planet: where's the competition? We don't have a non-capitalist control society to test against ever since Colonialism exported Capitalism to every corner of the globe.

> Strawman argument - very few people believe or claim that "capitalism" directly incentivizes innovation - the "side effect" of innovation happening as a result of chasing profits is literally how "capitalism" is designed to work - and does so extremely effectively. Unless you've been living under a rock the past century, it's not hard to see the incredible technological advances that have happened purely as a result of "capitalism". The "small intersection of the Venn diagram", while small in relative terms (and there's nothing wrong with that), is a large absolute amount.

This is a whole lot of words that says precious little. Also, you'd be hard pressed to find any technological advancements especially that don't have their roots in defense projects, grant money, other such institutions. Tons of the massive tech companies we have today that feel older than time itself were products of university and government grants, notable in that they didn't have to make money. Huge innovations like GPS that basically any product can use for damn near free started life as ways for the military to track deployed assets. Flat panel LCD screens, lithium batteries, like I said, it's hard to find a product so ubiquitous now on this level that ISN'T in some way funded by the Government.

The corporations role in turn is to take those expensive new technologies and make them cheap, and in THAT regard, they are very good at their jobs. But it doesn't translate well to every product.

> It's also the case that it's completely infeasible to directly incentivize innovation - the best that you can do is attach it to some other measurement - which is exactly what "capitalism" does.

Horseshit. The entire open source community disagrees with you. Massive volunteer organizations like the internet archive disagree with you. Food pantries disagree with you. Humans have worked for one another for things besides money since long before money existed, and that very much includes innovation. If innovation required financial benefit, we'd have never left our caves.

> Patents have become rent-seeking because of corrupt regulators - corrupt regulators that anti-capitalists would happily put into greater positions of power and give more power to meaningfully decrease the quality of human life.

Would love a citation on this.

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> go trade secret and never let the ideas enter the public domain. If you rely on trade secrets, then you can't sell your software without protecting it using a dongle or whatever; your "customer" might in fact be your competitor. It's not that hard to figure out how a piece of software works, and to write your own code that works the same way. It's not hard to figure out how some novel machine works either; but how…

thats mostly why most software is SaaS now. No need for a dongle, the end user never gets near the actual software.

Hmm. A dongle was used to protect trade-secret software in the days before software patents. Now SaaS is used instead; therefore software patents are still unnecessary?

I used to work for a firm that rented all its premises. My boss explained to me that the company's assets were its software, and nothing else. The patent portfolio is the physical manifestation of those assets - you can borrow against a patent portfolio, but not against a vault full of trade secrets.

You'd think he'd have mentioned staff; but staff can leave, and you can't secure loans and investment against employees.

Anyway, it looks as if that firm at least was using patents not as a way of preventing unfair competition and the stealing of inventions, but as a financial instrument. That's not what they're supposed to be for. And the fact they are used that way makes it horribly difficult to reform the patent system; if patents are like (e.g.) bonds, then reforming the patent system carries the risk of crashing the financial system.

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first patents were not about innovation at all but essentially government guaranteed monopolies similar to guilds. > 1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cov…

> Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering. That's pretty false. The requirement for a patent in the US is that it is detailed enough that a…

> > Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering.

> That's pretty false. The requirement for a patent in the US is that it is detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the patent. Doing so efficiently and at scale is a different issues. Having dealt with patents personally, lawyers very much stress this point as a requirement for a patent that is not easy to overturn.

I have dealt with patents myself as well and in every instance the lawyers told me ok give me all the other ways of you can think of how to do things, no matter if it works or not. Also keep what you did sufficiently vague.

> You're confusing a patent being broad with it not being detailed. They are both. A patent is a detailed reproducible description that includes a ton of language to also cover other similar things. For example, "in one embodiment of this invention a silver coated aluminum substrate is used for part N." This is very specific in that it says what was used to make the invention (a silver coated aluminum substrate) but also broad enough to cover other substrates (one embodiment).

This is actually a great example. Often the implementation will only work with a specific thickness and quality of silver and the substrate has to be prepared in a specific way to get the correct properties. None of these would be mentioned in the patent, and would typically require large amount of experimenting (costly) to find out what actually works.

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