The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by magicalist » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 10:08 PM UTC

prodigal_erik wrote: post #69

neumann_alfred wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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...

Sort of. That's really part of the Federal Circuit's ever-expanding scope of patentability, which the Supreme Court has made some moves to hem in (as noted in the third paragraph in the section you cite), and is a somewhat recent development. The Supreme Court in fact ruled exactly the opposite to the Federal Circuit's test that you paraphrase, ruling that "obvious to try" is a valid obviousness test. In other words, even if encountering a totally novel problem, if a person with ordinary skill in the art would have also tried the same solution as yours, it should not be patentable. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KSR_v._Teleflex

The fact that the decision was unanimous has a lot of us hopeful that the new patent cases that the supreme court is taking on will see more of the federal circuit's nonsense cut back. It won't be patent reform, but it will be progress.

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

#82

Post by switch007 » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 10:08 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #29

When I was younger and far more innocent I would do things because of the sheer love of doing, learning and discovery. I'd spend hours, no, days, wiring chips together, writing code, testing, soldering, dreaming, inventing. In college I even published a paper on some work I did in robotics when pushed my my prof's to publish. It was great. I'd like to think I "invented" a few things in the process too. Then I was "bo…

I thought I felt constrained by clauses in the "IP" section of my contract, but then I remembered: patents.

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

#83

Post by fghh45sdfhr3 » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 10:10 PM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #77

fghh45sdfhr3 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pub…

> "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." No, that doesn't fully explain the situation. They're worried about far more than their competitor knowing how many ALUs are on their GPU. Graphics drivers have to solve several hard problems : optimizations for shader compilers, scheduling, and memory management, and that's…

I not disagreeing that they do include core CS problems, I just don't believe their solutions to the core of those problems are that far ahead of academia.

In terms of the vendor specific features, sure, neither academia, not anyone else knows much about them. But in the fundamentals of scheduling, binning, etc, I don't think anyone is very far ahead of all of academia.

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

#84

Post by fghh45sdfhr3 » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 10:12 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #78

fghh45sdfhr3 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of your examples sound like variations on fundamental CS problems, and most CS undergrads should have been exposed to them and to their solutions. Are you saying industry is leaps and bounds ahead in the fundamentals of CS theory? Or just that there is a lot of vendor specific detail in the hardware and infrastructure? Because the latter is not CS.

They're not just variations on fundamental CS problems because the complexity of the problem is dominated by physics + hardware + infrastructure. E.g., while most CS undergraduates are exposed to control theory, a power control loop isn't a simple application of a controller. It has to deal with the physics of signal propagation, knowledge of the kinds of environments users encounter, the characteristics of the under…

Sure, but that's not CS is it. It's physics and hardware engineering, which just happens to be codified in software.

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

#85

Post by barrkel » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 10:14 PM UTC

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.

That isn't horrifying at all; one person loses (you), but the consumer wins big time. On a utilitarian basis, this is great.

What would be more horrifying is a dearth of innovation for fear of other people copying it. Is that realistic? Is first-mover advantage enough? What about prize funds (e.g. Netflix prize, X prize, etc.)? Would the inefficiency costs of those mechanisms be larger than the coordination, government regulation, litigation etc. costs that patents cause?

Are there any kinds of innovation that definitely would not happen under alternate schemes, that we absolutely need patents for?

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

#86

Post by kkowalczyk » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 10:14 PM UTC

jackowayed wrote: post #51

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…

Databases. Oracle, Microsoft, etc. have figured out a lot about how to make high-performance query execution engines and transactional storage systems and written about very little of it. Research has caught up some, but it definitely lags.

You're confusing solid engineering with research.

SQL Server started as a fork of Sybase (Microsoft bought Sybase's source code and started hacking). Sybase, in turn, was based on Ingress and "Ingres was first created as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley, starting in the early 1970s and ending in the early 1980s" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_(database)).

SQL Server is literally based on technology for 70s.

Ingress was started by Michael Stonebraker, who then did PostgreSQL (which added novel, at the time, extensions to relational model), who then did Aurora, C-Store and Vertical (column-oriented databases), them Morpheus, then H-Store and then VoltDB.

Stonebreaker did more research (as in: creating novel things) than Microsoft as a whole in SQL Server.

SQL Server is a great database but it's a result of Microsoft paying an army of programmers for 24 years to work on improving a single product. It's a result of running a profiler often, not some unknown-to-the-world algorithms.

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

#87

Post by wtallis » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 10:15 PM UTC

fghh45sdfhr3 wrote: post #83

wtallis wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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." No, that doesn't fully explain the situation. They're worried about far more than their competitor knowing how many ALUs are on their GPU. Graphics drivers have to solve several hard problems : optimizations for shader compilers, scheduling, and memory management, and that's…

I not disagreeing that they do include core CS problems, I just don't believe their solutions to the core of those problems are that far ahead of academia. In terms of the vendor specific features, sure, neither academia, not anyone else knows much about them. But in the fundamentals of scheduling, binning, etc, I don't think anyone is very far ahead of all of academia.

Just because a grad student somewhere has discovered an algorithm doesn't mean their knowledge is on par with the company that knows when that algorithm is actually useful, and has shipped code using it. Writing a textbook on matrix decompositions and factorizations doesn't mean you would be able to create a Google-quality search engine given a large enough server farm and a few months to crawl the web. The state-of-the-art is far more than what's theoretically possible, and the really abstract stuff like proofs of bounds on the asymptotic running time of a solution to a problem have never been the kind of research that is patentable. Even if the equation is known in academia, if a company spent years and millions of dollars to find the right coefficients, then the company is ahead of academia in a non-trivial way. Reduction to practice matters.

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

#88

Post by Kim_Bruning » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 10:18 PM UTC

gwillen wrote: post #5

Unfortunately, I suspect they will not get nearly a proportionate amount of input saying 'software patents delenda est', because the people who feel that way also know that the USPTO is not likely to take their input seriously.

we have a chance to find out.

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

#89

Post by Silhouette » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 10:18 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #12

Silhouette wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask software developers who work in defense, aerospace, medical devices, telecommunications, video/audio processing, and other capital-intensive, R&D-intensive fields. I've worked in several of those fields, and I have yet to meet these proponents of software patents you're talking about. Any advantage to having a patent on the results of your own R&D seems to be far outweighed by the persistent threat of being sued…

> If something was useful enough and available enough for multiple parties to invent/discover/exploit it independently What makes you think the technologies in question are invented independently? Take the Motorola Mobility patents, for example. Most of the patent licensees aren't in a position to hire all the experts and do all the R&D it took Motorola to develop that technology. They just use the end result of all…

What makes you think the technologies in question are invented independently?

What makes you think they aren't? That's the problem with a lot of software patents: people can just run into them (or be accused of running into them and subject to the resulting legal proceedings) without even knowing they were there. Then, suddenly, possibly after years of their own R&D, they get hit with paying royalties on something that had nothing to do with their own development work.

If there was no patent system, they would just use the end result without compensating Motorola for all the work of developing the technology.

Perhaps, but if they're really only trying to make carbon copies of what Motorola were doing, then Motorola have a huge first mover advantage anyway. Specifically, they have as long as it takes to commercialise their R&D work before they have to disclose it, because the work is a protected trade secret like any other up to that point. So as long as they keep innovating in significant ways that others couldn't, they will remain years ahead of their competitors in the market. That seems like a natural and compelling commercial incentive to me, without any need to add artificial benefits via patents.

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

#90

Post by calpaterson » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 10:19 PM UTC

fghh45sdfhr3 wrote: post #73

jackowayed wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Databases. Oracle, Microsoft, etc. have figured out a lot about how to make high-performance query execution engines and transactional storage systems and written about very little of it. Research has caught up some, but it definitely lags.

I am sure they have a lot of tiny performance improvements. But since when is CS research about tiny performance improvements? It's not like Oracle or anyone else has any secret algorithm which runs in linear time when all of academia only knows of exponential time solutions for the same class of problems.

If "CS research" includes "Software Engineering" then yes, query plan optimisers are definitely currently researched.