201–210 of 222 posts
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.
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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 cla…
If you eventually sue someone, the claims are used, but they will often be challenged if they go beyond the scope of the spec.
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> 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…
Eh, this is like "first draft of a design document" level detailed. The big issue is that it's a protocol, not a system. I.e. it's detailed only because it specifically _does not specify how to build anything_. Were they required to actually specify how to build something, i.e. a server that implements this protocol rather than the protocol itself, this would be woefully insufficient. How are the mappings stored on d…
A lot of research papers are written the same way. They will go into great detail on a specific thing like a protocol or a storage format and then say something along the lines of "bolt this onto Redis" before presenting their data.
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> 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 pe…
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 first patent was issued in the 1400's — it is exactly how humans have progressed technologically and sociality. Let's stop being so absolutist about these topics. The problem here isn't that patents exist, intellectual property protection is critical to investment and research. The issue here is two fold: 1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imita…
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My read of patent one is that they basically created DNS for storage. But DNS was invented in 1983 so I'm not really sure what was novel here other than pointing it at data, which uses a few extra headers, ala my comment. Even if there was nothing closer to this than DNS I don't think this patent should be valid.
I think that in general, "use solution A to problem X to solve problem Y instead" is, in principle, a valid patent - assuming that it's not obvious that solution A would help with problem Y. After all, patents are about "how do I solve problem Y", not about the general algorithms themselves. However, the "it's not obvious" part is very important. Not working in the field, it's not at all clear to me if using DNS for…
This sounds to me like the web. You make a connection, you request a resource, it returns content and references to further resources that are required to get the full content of the resource you originally requested.
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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 portfol…
If an inventor keeps (can keep) their technology secret, it is better for them to not patent it - and they can keep exclusive use of it as long as they can keep it secret.
Trade secrets laws are far more brutal than patents iirc.
This is why I am undecided, there are no easy answers.
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Why do we cling to this idea of patent trolls? The patent system is the problem. None of this should have been granted but when you really try to define what software patents are novel it becomes incredibly difficult. Just because you think this is trivial does not mean a layperson does. Is an encryption algo novel? What's novel about it, it's just a hashing function with some new parameters. The reality is, software…
While I agree with you, I can't see how we could ever fix the issue. The same patent holders are the biggest backers of our politicians and will absolutely never allow any reasonable fix to the system itself. All I read is how we should vote and yell at our representatives, completely ignoring the fact they were only elected because of donations from those benefiting from this system in the first place.
NZ abolished software patents years ago, literally nothing bad happened as a result, companies didn't even notice.
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Not reading the patents, having a metadata server separate from the stored object data has been around for a long time. For example: IIRC, Lustre does this and was around well before the cloud (to the point where any patents that may have applied would have expired). Many HPC storage systems work with split metadata and object storage nodes, I’m just not sure how long others have been around. But, I’m sure AWS tried…
According to Wikipedia, Lustre was released in 2003, while these patents were filed in 2000 and 2001 (they were only granted much later, in 2007, but the filing date is the most relevant), so that's not a good example. The patents are expired today, but they weren't in 2018 when this suit was filed. Still, even if the patents were in some way novel at their time, I think the details are far more important, especially…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustre_(file_system)
Also, depending on the feature set listed in the patent, GPFS (which I remember using around 2000) was definitely around earlier than 2000. It was/is a clustered file system from IBM that had distributed storage nodes. Not sure how it did metadata though, which might not make it relevant to the patent, but the same ideas were definitely at work here.
(And it being IBM, you can be sure those were patented too)
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Eh, this is like "first draft of a design document" level detailed. The big issue is that it's a protocol, not a system. I.e. it's detailed only because it specifically _does not specify how to build anything_. Were they required to actually specify how to build something, i.e. a server that implements this protocol rather than the protocol itself, this would be woefully insufficient. How are the mappings stored on d…
Patents are usually narrowly tailored to a specific part of a design document of a complex system, not the entire thing. The idea is that a "person of ordinary skill in the art" can implement the normal stuff ( ie the current state of the art) around the new innovation, and the new thing gives that system a non-obvious benefit. A lot of research papers are written the same way. They will go into great detail on a spe…
> The idea is that a "person of ordinary skill in the art" can implement the normal stuff (ie the current state of the art) around the new innovation, and the new thing gives that system a non-obvious benefit.
Why specify a protocol at all then? Im sure a person of ordinary skill in the art can also come up with a protocol without an implementation. Takes like 15 minutes if you don’t have to worry about pesky details like having a working implementation.
There is no benefit, obvious or not, because there is no implementation. Whether it is safer or faster or whatever would be defined by an implementation. They’ve patented the digital equivalent of letterhead while positing that it will make mail more efficient.