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Congratulations to the stack exchange team for getting this going. It's an incredibly good idea, maybe you could patent it?
The patent trolls are already on it, patenting crowd-sourcing as a method of patent defense. This will inevitably result in the shut down of Ask Patents in a stunning fit of irony.
> The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two. Any idea to which two he might be referring?
My guesses are garbage collection and Carmack's fast inverse square root.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to think that the patent in Spolsky's example cost at least a couple grand to produce/submit. I also would love to see the cost per rejected patent produced by the USPTO that comes from US tax payer dollars.
As the Patent office generates net revenue for the US Government, you don't have to worry about that.
So, this sounds great and all, but I don't see any proof that it was ask patents that caused the examiner to find this, rather than the examiner's standard search? In fact, the search history, on PAIR (look for 4-11-2013 SRFW Search information including classification, databases and other search related notes) does not say ask patents was used, nor does the search strategy (document code SRNT). It could be the USPTO…
Trouble is, what killed the patent was prior disclosure from the researchers. The same thing has happened to friends of mine; an undergraduate's summer research presentation may have betrayed patentable inventions. An effect of the 1-year prior art rule is to force researchers to keep mum about what they're doing and to generate greater numbers of incremental patents. If you're interested in the free flow of informat…
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "prior disclosure" here. They filed a patent application: those are supposed to be public. The prior art Joel used was the documentation of the Win32 API from 5 years previously (and I'm pretty sure we've been using variable-resolution apps since earlier than 2008, and not just in Windows -- this was just an example). Could you clarify what the problem is?
The problem I think you are referring to is that researchers run the risk of shooting themselves in the foot by prematurely presenting their findings unless they file an application in the process. Doing so would ruin their chances of being granted a patent.
> The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two. Any idea to which two he might be referring?
Also, like Quora, does the StackExchange system allow one to register one's fields of expertise, to have questions suggested to you? (I'm not a big participant on SE but I know it may be hiding that feature from me, because it slowly reveals features based on karma).
Anyway I'm sure this has been thought of before, just curious if it's on the todo list.
Congratulations to the stack exchange team for getting this going. It's an incredibly good idea, maybe you could patent it?
The patent trolls are already on it, patenting crowd-sourcing as a method of patent defense. This will inevitably result in the shut down of Ask Patents in a stunning fit of irony.
I would think mipmapping would be the core prior art, and that's from 1983. But I suppose anything over a year older then the application is good enough.
Also note there is another technique for patent manipulation which is to provide a provisional patent application (to start the clock) which can't be granted, then continually refine and the application as time goes by. In a worse case scenario you could taller a general patent into a specific patent based on someone else work, and have a patent already in place that will predate the new invention.
> How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt. Wouldn't the result of this be that the company who finds out that they have the earliest implementation of…