These patent trolls stifle innovation. Literal parasites.
All software patent litigation is trolling. The patent system is broken.
Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
81–90 of 222 posts
Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>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. I agree with the gist of your comment, but a fundamental issue with patents is that your investment in research can be destroyed if someone else independently did overlapping research and filed first.
Which you mitigate by keeping an eye on competitors and avoiding overly saturated market spaces. This in turn incentives a broader research focus and also incentives publishing paper in saturated areas to make sure there's documented prior art. There's also an incentive for multiple smaller inventions spread over time. This all seems like a positive and not a negative for society as a whole.
Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are you supposed to not infringe on patents that were not granted yet?
You have to show that you were already working on it independently which is effectively establishing prior art and you are literally it. How do you do that? beyond my pay grade.
Simple - You keep a notebook, or send yourself emails.
If you want more definitive timestamping, there are services that will do that, like OpenTimestamps, an actually a decent use case for blockchain.
Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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. I agree with the gist of your comment, but a fundamental issue with patents is that your investment in research can be destroyed if someone else independently did overlapping research and filed first.
Yes, that's an interesting problem — the more capital you have to invest, conceptually, the more you can invest in talent and the faster you can research compared to smaller competitors. Great for the rate of technological advancement, not so great for fairness.
Now image if there weren't patents. The larger entities would simply wait for their smaller competitors, copy their products and then use their capital to more efficiently/cheaply manufacture/market them.
edit: While also maintaining massive private documentation stores that further give them a moat. Patents are public so you at least know what someone did 20 years ago even if you're a one person shop. Without them you'd be in trouble unless you had access to a large companies massive and very private internal invention documentation store.
Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 any newcomers from entering
I agree — software patents are ridiculous, too broad, and stifle the intent of IP rights. But parents protect other industries. My point is that a blanket "get rid of intellection property protections" statement is not realistic. It's nuanced.
Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This comment implies that most of the massive technological innovation since 1400s came around because of patents. That's far from the truth. Patent systems that old were local and very different from the modern variant. Besides, most regions didn't have patent systems at all. The Netherlands didn't really get patent law until early 20th century. That didn't stop them from innovating and inventing. Germany similarly.
I did not read any such implication.
Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#87Haven’t got a huge amount of sympathy since Amazon patented 1-click checkout.
Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
> Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them
My father used to work for Pilkington's Glass. Pilkington invented the float-glass process, which made better, flatter glass than the plate-glass process. Yes, it was patented; but the main protection was control of know-how. When you licensed the process, you got several engineers onsite to make it work.
This is similar in some ways to the mediaeval Venetian glassmakers; they didn't have patents, but they did have assassins, who would hunt down runaway glassmakers and silence them.
Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Universities are incentivized to research things that will score grant money.
Grant money is not profit.
Yes, it's more like VC. But, the point is university research is not some magically altruistic thing. It is driven by grants either from the government or someone who made a lot of money.
Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet, it turns out last 600 years saw many orders of magnitude more innovation than the years prior.
We’d expect this regardless of intellectual property laws. I think the overall innovation follows a logistic function. Early in history most people were primarily engaged in subsistence (hunting or agriculture). It took a really long time to develop the basic tools and infrastructure to get to the point where people could start to specialize in jobs not immediately related to food production, storage, or defence. Non…
Even ignoring education, the compounding effect of innovation and how most people didn't have the preconditions for innovating at all, you would expect us to have vastly more innovation right now just by virtue of having more people. We now have 20 times as many people on earth as in 1400, 40 times as many as in the year 1, and 200 times as many as in the year -4000.