Apple v. Samsung - Meet the foreman of the jury • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple v. Samsung - Meet the foreman of the jury

#51

Post by monjaro » Sun, Aug 26, 2012, 2:35 AM UTC

nirvana wrote: post #10

jlgreco wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how patents don't grant a type of legal monopoly? This seems non-obvious to me, and poking around on Wikipedia has only served to reinforce my suspicion that they are.

They do grant a type of legal monopoly... but on an invention, not on a feature. So, in my example, Jeff Han demonstrated pinch to zoom using cameras photographing your hans, while Apple has a patent on an invention that lets a screen figure out where your fingers are. They both could be patented and have a legal monopoly on their inventions even though they are the "same thing". If your objection is to there being a…

Do you honestly believe that people couldn't figure out how to implement bounce-back without reading a patent?

Re: Apple v. Samsung - Meet the foreman of the jury

#52

Post by vagrant » Mon, Aug 27, 2012, 12:16 AM UTC

nirvana wrote: post #16

jlgreco wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a categorical opposition to patents, so the monopoly aspect of them does not particularly concern me. To what extent do these patents actually benefit the technical community though? As you seem to know, a technically inclined person that actually reads other peoples patents seems to be a rare animal.

I'm sure they are rare among startup founders, but not rare in the wider realm. But it is not the fault of the patent system that people don't read them. I already mentioned one benefit that doesn't require reading the patents, and that is there is less incentive to obfuscate designs or lock down products. Secondly, for situations where there is a major break thru, patents give companies caught flat footed a chance t…

I am an engineer at Google. No, we don't read through patents to figure out how to do something. We are not idiots. If I wanted to implement a pinch/zoom system, I would just do it. It's not rocket science. In fact, I believe I did do it, before I worked at Google. I was writing code for an iPhone app on a version of IOS that did not have the gesture recognizers available in the public API. It's not that hard to recognize two points moving away from each other.

Re: Apple v. Samsung - Meet the foreman of the jury

#53

Post by anamax » Mon, Aug 27, 2012, 6:32 AM UTC

jlgreco wrote: post #24

anamax wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To what extent do these patents actually benefit the technical community though? As you seem to know, a technically inclined person that actually reads other peoples patents seems to be a rare animal. I like to get paid for my technical work. Patents have some effect in that area.

Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean that patents benefit the technical community because they grant legal monopolies and allow companies sell licensing?

Do you really think that selling licensing is the only financial benefit to a legal monopoly?