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

reuters.com

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

#191

Post by Draiken »

svieira wrote: post #184
Draiken wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

You're right that corruption is not exclusive to capitalism. All systems will have that in one way or another. That was something the person I was replying to brought up. I don't think it matters for capitalism specifically. Any system worth considering should accept that corruption is unavoidable.

As for a solution... I don't know. I truly wish I had a ready answer to something as big as this, but I don't. The best I can come up with are multiple systems with checks, and we have some governments that attempt this, but inevitably someone ends up with unchecked power.

Today the power that goes unchecked is capital. It can corrupt other systems that don't account for it. Lobbying, donations, media time, etc. It's all affected by it, as systems like democracy were not designed to deal with external influence that is then used to consolidate itself.

That's why it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

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

#192

Post by cycomanic »

marcinzm wrote: post #182
michaelt wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

You ignored the fact that the "innovation" is really embodied in the claims not the rest, because that is what will be covered in the end.

Apart from the fact that even this somewhat better written example makes claims much broader than what was actually done, giving one example does not invalidate the fact that many (and I argue most by a large margin) patents are much more vague.

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

#193

Post by freejazz »

tsimionescu wrote: post #12
chessgecko wrote: post #5

Links to two of the patents that were infringed https://patents.google.com/patent/US7103640B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7233978B2/en I really hope Kove loses, I don't know too much about networking, but a few header fields don't really seem patentworthy to me.

This doesn't seem like a few protocol fields, but about the entire mechanism of distributing the information and how to get from a request to any one server in the distributed network to the one that actually stores the information you requested (at least looking at the claims in your first patent). I have no idea if there was prior art or how close the procedure they describe was to known storage algorithms in 2000…

>Of course, if indeed AWS came to a very similar implementation themselves, as the jury found, then that further suggests that the idea is not that novel.

That wouldn't matter if AWS came to the very similar implementation on their own, after the Plaintiff's patent was issued (and became public information). Patent, unlike copyright, does not allow for independent invention/creation. If you come to, on your own, something already covered in a patent during its term, then you infringe.

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

#194

Post by [deleted] »

tsimionescu wrote: post #20
nulbyte wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped after claim 9 on the first patent linked. It had, up until that point, described: peer-to-peer routing, downloading data and programs, running downloaded programs using downloaded data, redirection, and variable length strings. The next of claims seemed to begin to regurgitate the previous ones with some indiscerbable minute difference. None of this sounds novel. I read another of their patents where they i…

Another poster I think put it better: what the patent is describing is essentially building a DNS system for data. Claim 1 describes how DNS forwarders work (the "client" is a DNS client, the "server" is a DNS forwarder, and the "data location server" is a DNS authoritative name server). Claim 10 then describes how a DNS recursive resolver works (the "client" is the rescursive resolver, and the "data location servers…

[deleted]

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

#195

Post by cycomanic »

nness wrote: post #85
cycomanic wrote: post #72

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…

> Discoveries of R&D that was done anyway Not sure I agree — That's still investment. All that time spend doing research, even if for a completely different goal, doesn't come for free. Discovering two things in a process intended to discover one doesn't half the value of both things. > None of the successful technology companies made their business by patenting > written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent…

FYI, I am in a hardware field and the companies I'm aware of (having had direct discussions with on CTO or senior engineer level) largely did patents to have something tangible to justify R&D to investors and financial analysts. They would never put know how that they considered crucial into a patent and considered patent litigation pretty worthless, especially against direct competitors, as they knew that everyone was violating everyone else's patents, because everyone working in the field comes up with the same solutions (so much for patents being non obvious to a subject expert).

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

#196

Post by mrguyorama »

jampekka wrote: post #60
TrackerFF wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be an interesting experiment - a world where no patents exist, only production (though corporate espionage / theft is still illegal). Some argue that this will effectively kill R&D, because the second you've created something - others would start reverse engineering, and copy the product. In some areas, like pharma, R&D is notoriously expensive, and the pharma companies have only that many years to recoup al…

R&D can be done without profit motive. Most R is done in universities without profit motive. Some argue that nothing gets done if somebody doesn't get capital gains for it. This is of course empirically flat out false.

Everyone lionizes the 1900s as this massive period of innovation. Part of the way we got here is by INVALIDATING PATENTS

When the world beat Germany (twice), part of the reparations for the world wars was basically invalidating most of Germany's intellectual property. The second world war we went above that and basically claimed human beings who were working on that intellectual property.

When America was struggling to get useful radar to work, the British brought us the cavity magnetron, and the US was able to utterly industrialize that into a million allied radar systems. When the US thought jet engines were a dead end fuel hungry fad, the Brits showed us theirs, which was way more advanced and helped the US get on the right track for future development.

When everyone was basically inventing computers as a real thing, the allies benefited greatly from massive cross-pollination, including people who are now considered grandfathers of modern computing literally meeting in a train station and chatting about the computers they were building which helped them work together to build bigger and better machines.

You don't advance innovation and invention by limiting an idea to the six people working R&D on this specific concept in GE, you advance innovation by letting every smart person and their friend dick around with the concept in freedom.

The entirety of the modern internet is basically built on this fact, and moved so damn fast, yet people will STILL insist "no, to encourage innovation you have to not let people innovate!"

How much did Tim Berners-Lee make off of HTTP?

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

#197

Post by mrguyorama »

maratc wrote: post #181
McBun wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

>This system is not as ridiculous as it sounds.

It's so not ridiculous that Amazon was able to prevent the entire ecommerce industry from implementing anything even close to a "one click purchase" flow because of a patent. Not because you couldn't see Amazon's source code for the feature, or couldn't come up with your own completely different implementation of the idea, but because as long as you can convince a completely unsophisticated and inexpert jury members that a paragraph of extremely vague text can be read in any way to apply to anyone else's system, you are violating their patent.

Imagine being able to patent addition, or the very concept of a cake, such that nobody could make a product that was bready and/or sweet without paying you a protection fee.

Remember that the US patent office had to expressly ban any patent for "perpetual motion machine", not because it is literally impossible by physical reality, but because they kept granting patents for physically impossible perpetual motion machines

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

#198

Post by fuzzfactor »

akira2501 wrote: post #4

Kove owns three data storage patents that it alleges AWS has infringed: U.S. Patent No. 7,103,640 (the '640 Patent), entitled "Network Distributed Tracking Wire Transfer Protocol"; U.S. Patent No. 7,814,170 (the '170 Patent), entitled "Network Distributed Tracking Wire Transfer Protocol"; and U.S. Patent No. 7,233,978 (the '978 Patent), entitled "Method and Apparatus for Managing Location Information in a Network Sep…

"Method and Apparatus for Managing Location Information in a Network Separate From the Data to Which the Location Information Pertains."

IOW the Dewey Decimal system, but with a computer.

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

#199

Post by constantcrying »

Jochim wrote: 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.

The problems aren't patents. The alternative to patents are company secrets, which are much less conductive to innovation.

The point of a patent is that a company can share something without it being immediately used by their competition, who didn't have to do the RnD, and now obviously can undercut them.

The problem is that the patent system is largely gamed and exists to a significant extent to drag your opponents and random companies into multi million dollar lawsuits over the most flimsy excuse of a research result.

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

#200

Post by riskable »

psds2 wrote: post #173
riskable wrote: post #162

Amazon should just pay a bunch of people to write down a working implementation of the patent using a pencil and paper. It'd be a LOT of paper but it would meet the, "if it can be done with a pen and paper" criteria outlined in CLS Bank. It wouldn't even be complicated or difficult... Just tedious.

How would pencil marks on paper interact with data in the cloud and storage devices like in the patent described ?

> How would pencil marks on paper interact with data in the cloud and storage devices like in the patent described ?

Have them do it on a plane.

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