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The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

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Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#61

Post by rayiner »

anonymoushn wrote: post #60
rayiner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what's also artificial? This whole idea that I can file a claim with the county clerk to a particular area of the Earth, and from thenceforth I don't have to defend my territory like every other animal on the planet--other people will do it for me with government sanction and at taxpayer expense.

In my state we cannot own land. We must rent it from a gang. I believe the rent is called "Property tax."

Better than the state of nature, where you don't "own" land, just control it until another animal kills and eats you.

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#62

Post by wtallis »

iskander wrote: post #41
jandrewrogers wrote: post #21

There are (at least) three valid perspectives on the patent situation within the software community but part of the reason so little constructive progress is made is that many people with strong opinions will often flat-out deny or reject the validity of the other perspectives because it is outside their experience. Three perspectives of which most people ignore one or more: - Computer technology is over-run with fri…

>Academia is already facing difficulties in computer science because much of the state-of-the-art research is being done by private companies...As a consequence, there are a number of areas in computer science where the leading academic papers are literally a good half decade behind the state-of-the-art that is buried in NDAs. Can you elaborate on which areas of CS academia you think are more sophisticated in the cor…

One area that's heavily under NDA (though perhaps not quite the situation described) is graphics drivers. NVidia and AMD both have high-performance graphics drivers, but the open-source alternatives (reverse-engineered for NVidia, but AMD sponsors their open-source Linux driver) are far behind. They're reluctant to even share hardware specs, let alone the code from their proprietary drivers.

Part of the reluctance is that they don't want to compromise the DRM systems that their products are complicit in, but most of it is patent related. They already have to pay royalties to many graphics has-beens for things like S3TC, and the fear is that if the details of what their hardware and software is doing were publicly available, they'd be painting targets all over themselves. The people AMD employs to help with their open-source Linux drivers are constantly citing "legal review" as the hold-up for releasing new specs or code, but never that they're concerned about making it easier for NVidia to reverse-engineer their stuff.

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#63

Post by eweise »

rayiner wrote: post #17
powertower wrote: post #9

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." -- John Carmack

That's one possible narrative. Another would be: The idea that I can be presented with a problem, hire a dozen experts and spend millions of dollars coming up with a solution to the problem, and have someone come along and just copy the solution and use it in their own product to compete with me is horrifying.

The actual technology is only one part of running a successful software business and not the most important from my experience. Just copying someone else's solution does not necessarily mean that you can be as successful as the originator.

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#64

Post by ajb »

"The first topic relates to how to improve clarity of claim boundaries that define the scope of patent protection for claims that use functional language."

Or to put it another way, the patent database is a broken datastructure, how do we fix it?

I think it's important to take their question seriously, because if we give them serious answers it will bring home why the patent system is more broken for software than for other things.

The problem with boundaries is that in ordinary property, the incentives are to make boundaries precise. Each property owner may not mind if it's not obverious that the other guy's property is on the other side, but he wants to be sure all of his property is on his side. This doesn't work in patents. The pushback comes from overstretched bureaucrats, not other property owners. So, an interesting question is, is there a way of changing this so each patent filer has the incentive to police the boundaries of other patents?

Imagine that at a given point in time, the patent database included not just the individual patents, but a '20 questions' style index, whereby any patent could be located. Crucially, no patent could be enforced against anything outside the 'bucket' in which it is indexed. (A patent could be indexed in more than one bucket, but only by paying the fee for each.)

That would give patent owners the incentive to police the boundaries of the 'buckets', and it would allow people to more easily find patents they might be infringing. It would also make clear which areas of patentable material have endemic fuzzy boundaries, so a case could be made for reform. There are large areas where the questions would be things like 'does it contain an aldehyde group?' where a tree would work well.

There is a problem with this as a datastructure, though. Any binary tree has to be rebalanced for searching it to be efficient. Even assuming that everyone can be given the incentive to make the rebalancing happen, it's not obvious how to do this. I need a diagram, I'll use this one: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/Bin... Suppose we want to do the tree rotation as in the diagram. The problem is, we only know that the the patents descended from 'alpha' have the 'left' answer to the question in the light green node. We don't know how they relate to the question in the darker green node. So after the tree is rotated, we may need to ask that question of all the patents under 'alpha', an O(N) operation (in legal fees!) and then we may need to move some of them under the branch 'gamma', possibly triggering more rebalancing, so it's not obvious that the operation would even terminate.

So, question: Can a suitable datastructure be devised?

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#65

Post by anonymoushn »

Buttons840 wrote: post #50
bskap wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because you never hear about what's going on outside of the research centers- they're all under NDA.

Do companies want to profit from this computer science research being done under a NDA? Don't they have to release these advances in the form of a product to earn a profit? Then show me some products which demonstrate this "cutting-edge" computer science research.

A company could instead profit by trading using their results, and some results could belong to governments.

I'm reminded that my graph theory professor said that he could factor polynomials over finite fields in polynomial time, but that he could not tell me how to do it.

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#66

Post by wcarss »

Buttons840 wrote: post #50
bskap wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because you never hear about what's going on outside of the research centers- they're all under NDA.

Do companies want to profit from this computer science research being done under a NDA? Don't they have to release these advances in the form of a product to earn a profit? Then show me some products which demonstrate this "cutting-edge" computer science research.

They don't necessarily have to, and even if they did, it may not be obvious.

Consider a financial company working to improve prediction algorithms for their in-house use, hiring smartypants PhDs and giving them free reign and great pay. The result after ten years could be way ahead (or even just a little ahead) of the academic world's work and never release a product with a sticker for a big shiny new algorithm.

The firm wouldn't even have to stand out in its success; it could do reasonably well compared to others, and just attribute a lot of its modest success to its algorithmic insights.

Even in externally released products, really clever ways to get around things aren't necessarily visible. Just today I was reading about Jonathan Blow's work [1] on localised kriging [2] for his upcoming game The Witness. He's pulling from advanced geostatics academia for a little feature he wanted in a game, and if he didn't blog about it (and then discuss enhancements in the comments) no one would know it existed - even once the game is released. A small example to be sure, but I think it exemplifies the point.

[1] http://the-witness.net/news/2010/05/kriging-is-cool/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriging

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#67

Post by angersock »

rayiner wrote: post #27
dr_doom wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give me an example of how this would happen? If google spent millions solving a problem how would I copy the solution and integrate it into my product, considering I will never see google's codebase? Genuinely asking, a real world situation would be cool. It seems like this would happen most when ex-employees try to compete with the large company.

The fact that it's difficult to reverse-engineer Google's technology is an accident of the kind of products it makes: web services. You can access the product while the "secret sauce" remains safely tucked away in a data center. At the opposite end of the spectrum think of a company like Intel investing into WiMAX. Developing that standard was not cheap, but almost by definition it was something that required disclos…

You might think this kind of stuff doesn't actually happen, but in the 1990's American companies hated working with the Chinese precisely for this reason. They'd take an American product and copy it right down to the silk screening on the PCB's, and sell the result for cut-rate prices.

And the world is arguably a better place now that the Chinese can make super-cheap parts and clones of American designs and sell them to people who couldn't afford them otherwise.

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#68

Post by prodigal_erik »

neumann_alfred wrote: post #40
rayiner wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one possible narrative. Another would be: The idea that I can be presented with a problem, hire a dozen experts and spend millions of dollars coming up with a solution to the problem, and have someone come along and just copy the solution and use it in their own product to compete with me is horrifying.

No, that's not another way to describe the same situation; it's an entirely different situation. Was this a honest mistake or deliberate sophistry?

When "what's appalling about patents existing" is the emotional argument, "what would be appalling about patents not existing" is a good counter-argument. On the gripping hand, not having patents would only threaten big solutions that work as non-disclosed competitive advantages, where having patents currently threatens all solutions no matter how straightforward.

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#69

Post by prodigal_erik »

neumann_alfred wrote: post #42
manaskarekar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fallacy of this suggestion is in deciding where to draw the line.

"You can't patent obvious shit" is actually patent law, so that's not a suggestion at all... it's just not enforced very well, is it, and that's the whole "mystery".

"Obvious" in US patent law basically means you assembled pieces of prior art like Lego bricks. If you use something nobody ever wrote down, it doesn't matter how many of your peers would have immediately realized the same solution (i.e., whether your disclosure actually benefits anyone), you win the race just by having encountered the problem first.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn...

Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community

#70

Post by fghh45sdfhr3 »

wtallis wrote: post #62
iskander wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Academia is already facing difficulties in computer science because much of the state-of-the-art research is being done by private companies...As a consequence, there are a number of areas in computer science where the leading academic papers are literally a good half decade behind the state-of-the-art that is buried in NDAs. Can you elaborate on which areas of CS academia you think are more sophisticated in the cor…

One area that's heavily under NDA (though perhaps not quite the situation described) is graphics drivers. NVidia and AMD both have high-performance graphics drivers, but the open-source alternatives (reverse-engineered for NVidia, but AMD sponsors their open-source Linux driver) are far behind. They're reluctant to even share hardware specs, let alone the code from their proprietary drivers. Part of the reluctance is…

One area that's heavily under NDA (though perhaps not quite the situation described) is graphics drivers.

But that's not because the algorithms are new and awesome, it's mostly just because the exact specs of the hardware are not happily shared.

CS research is not about lack of hardware specs.

It is also not about protecting someones DRM.

It is also not about crappy patents.

And it is also not about how easy your published work is to reverse-engineer.

None of those are CS research problems.

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