Working on F1 '98, we had to scrap a whole training mode where you'd see your time compared to previous laps because lawyers were concerned it overlapped with the Atari 'ghost car' patent:
http://kotaku.com/270035/patents-are-interesting-ghost-mode
We spent a lot of time and energy trying to work around this, we weren't showing any kind of ghost car, just a time indication, but apparently the patent was broad enough to cover any kind of comparison.
The second was a patent on controlling any kind of video effect based on a sound input(!). This severely constrained what we could do on a major video-processing package, forcing us to avoid some features. They tried to extort independent developers out of a lot of cash, despite being a painfully obvious idea that had been around for decades before the patent was filed:
SIFT is a vision technique that is patented and works very well. Patents are getting in the way of commercial progress http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transfo...
Amazon Onc-Click is an absurd patent. If we grew to scale, Tipjoy would probably have had to pay them money, like Apple does.
"Reback often tells the story of how a team of IBM patent lawyers went to Sun Microsystems Inc. in the 1980s and claimed that the then start-up was infringing on seven of its patents. After Sun engineers explained why they were not infringing, the IBM lawyers responded that with 10,000 patents, they would be sure to find some infringement somewhere." The Washington Post
"One could be tempted to consider ever stricter IP protection regimes to provide ever more stimuli for innovation. This conclusion is wrong, however. A prime example is patents on software, which might at first sight be seen as a logical expansion of the classic technology patent. But creating software differs markedly from creating machinery and the like." Deutsche Bank Research
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." Bill Gates (1991)
"The world's patent systems need reform so that innovation can be properly rewarded. (...) It is becoming ever more apparent that the patent system isn't working." The Economist (11 November 2004)
"Building up a patent portfolio by engaging in defensive patenting cannot always protect against hold-up." Federal Trade Commission of the USA
"More patents in more industries and with greater breadth are not always the best ways to maximize consumer welfare." Federal Trade Commission of the USA
"The mild regime of IP protection in the past has led to a very innovative and competitive software industry with low entry barriers. A software patent, which serves to protect inventions of a non-technical nature, could kill the high innovation rate." PriceWaterhouseCoopers
"SMEs are crucial providers of pathbreaking innovations, but would be most adversely affected by patentability. The majority of them is deterred by the costs of patenting themselves, but would have to navigate around software patent portfolios of large corporations." Deutsche Bank Research
"Many large companies operating on a global scale, including European ones, seem to be in favour of a software patenting regime. But most small enterprises are strongly opposed." PriceWaterhouseCoopers
Microsoft Corp. warned Asian governments on Thursday they could face patent lawsuits for using the Linux operating system instead of its Windows software. Reuters (18 November 2004)
"A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors." Bill Gates (1991)
"Patent law provides to inventors an exclusive right to new technology in return for publication of the technology. This is not appropriate for industries such as software development in which innovations occur rapidly, can be made without a substantial capital investment, and tend to be creative combinations of previously-known techniques." Oracle Corporation Patent Policy
Guy A: "Doesn't Amazon get software patents mainly to protect themselves rather than enforce them?"
Guy B: "Here's a long, extensive list of actions by other companies proving that software patents are evil!"
Sometimes I think people need to drink less Kool-Aid.
A fairly decent alternative (although less resistant to rotation) is SURF which isn't under a patent AFAIK.
The cooling effect probably isn't significant for the mythical basement hacker who does it for love, but decisions about what research to pursue are made all the time in larger companies, and one of the factors is potential for legal trouble.
It is hard to find funding when you are immobilised in a minefield.
Instead of working on new features (whatever they may have been), TomTom must instead commit resources to working around the patent.
Many camera manufacturers faced similar obstacles, and ended up fragmenting the market with proprietary formats or paying the 'microsoft tax'.
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-Jun...
Patents are playing a large role in ensuring that what could be a wonderful thing for the web will almost certainly not be.
I'm being pedantic here, but I think it's very misleading to connect the spec issue with your conclusion that <video> could have been nice but somehow isn't. Had one or the other codec been made mandatory in the spec, the reality today would be exactly the same.
I mean, what was HTML 5 supposed to change? The fact that video (and audio) is broken on the web, leaving to flash as the closed de-facto standard. The whole situation that HTML5 was supposed to fix is, itself, a result of codec licensing/patent issues.
I'd venture that without those issues, the <object> and <embed> tags would have had a bigger impact.
Nothing. It was supposed to be, and is, a description of what browsers actually implement in common, just like every other HTML spec before it.
As a counterexample, Autonomy has a patent on Bayesian text classification dating from the late 90's. I've always wondered why they didn't say anything after Paul popularized it for spam filtering.
Though afaik the latter hasn't really been improved since ~1960 and were only patented after rediscovering them in 1993, and I have no clue whether progress in elliptic curve cryptography stalled due to patents or because they don't offer any practical benefits over RSA.
A more recent one is Acacias patent on video transmission via networks and this gem: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/04/acacia-claim...
Are there cases where software patents can be proven to have fostered innovation?
More formats = fragmentation = consumer confusion and problems.
Progress is not a single variable either, there are plenty of ways that you can define progress that are more or less orthogonal to each other.
Forward, sideways and 'up' are all movements that you can interpret as 'progress' depending on where you are and where you want to be.
From that point of view PNG was sideways and 'around' rather than forward.
Any kind of dataformat, any kind of protocol, anything that is not a completely closed box that performs a function (an 'appliance') should be as open as possible.
And that should be enshrined in law, interfaces and formats are automatically in the public domain, and have to be documented.
PNG as a GIF replacement is superior, for most applications. But if you think in terms of browser support then you could interpret it as a step back during the introduction phase as well.
Convert to .jpg and everything is fine.
http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invali... (2008)
If the patents hadn't existed I'm sure we'd now have much better widely available voice recognition, image recognition, and related data processing software than we do now.
"A week before the game's release, it became known that an agreement to include EAX audio technology in Doom 3 reached by id Software and Creative Labs was heavily influenced by a software patent owned by the latter company. The patent dealt with a technique for rendering shadows called Carmack's Reverse, which was developed independently by both John Carmack and programmers at Creative Labs. id Software would have placed themselves under legal liability for using the technique in the finished game, so to defuse the issue, id Software agreed to license Creative Labs sound technologies in exchange for indemnification against lawsuits."
I remember something about Carmack coming up with a workaround that paid a performance penalty so others licensing their engine could bypass the Creative mess.
Creative has also taken quite a bit of heat over the years for sitting on Aureal's IP and stifling innovation in sound technology, but I don't have specific examples to cite.
The potential "technological progress" doesn't exist because it was thwarted by software patents, so there really is no way of knowing what doesn't exist because it couldn't be created to begin with.
So, are you asking us what things don't exist?
http://brej.org/yellow_star/letter.pdf
Would be a nice example, in http://brej.org/yellow_star/ there is a bit that says "There are instructions which are patented by MIPS and have been removed.".
That's a clear impediment to progress, once the MIPS instruction set was documented and people started to write software for it anybody ought to be free to re-implement these instructions for the express purpose of interpreting MIPS object code.
By showing examples, preferably lots of them the magnitude will get at least a lower bound.
The original question may make sense in a limited fashion, but it frames things poorly as it's asking for specific incidents to illustrate a systemic effect.
I can't believe I just had to write that. This is why forums are such a time sink. If you were watching a football game with your friends and someone said "he would have scored if that guy hadn't tackled him" and you replied "how can you talk about touchdowns that don't exist?" everyone else would just roll their eyes and not invite you over anymore. But here in the world of text these subtly graduated social cues don't exist; all you can do is reply with more text. I wonder if there is some kind of solution to that.
+1 for common sense; however:
> This is why forums are such a time sink.
I doubt that you can realize the benefits of an open forum without paying what we might call the free speech tax - the inevitable disruptions of pedantry and/or trolling, which under the right circumstances are insightful and even revelatory.
Having said that, this is still by far the best non-trivial online community that I know of.
EDIT: Wow... downvoted in 4 minutes, for a mostly harmless comment. I guess we've become closer to Reddit than I thought. I normally hate elitist groups, but there's a part of me that would like to see every account newer than, say, 200 days just get nuked. <sigh>... I really loved this site.
What I'm saying is that real constructive critical debate requires strong-willed, pedantic, even curmudgeonly debaters. The marketplace of ideas doesn't work without the push and pull of challenges, refutations and even meta-refutations ('You're asking the wrong question').
If Paul Graham wants good answers to his question, the price he has to pay is an allotment of bad answers - answers that are revealed as such on the marketplace of ideas. You can't get the good stuff without also allowing the bad stuff (and having reasonable filters to distinguish them).
P.S. Not sure why I was downvoted for my comment above.
Second, I'm taking this from the perspective that we have a college professor (most likely) being asked by a student to cite examples of cases where software patents have stifled innovation.
So, does this professor just want his student to start making up random ideas that infringe on patents and argue that those random ideas don't exist because of patents?
Seems unlikely.
I'm arguing the question itself because I am trying to help this poor student who may be faced with more of a paradox than a fair assignment.
In society usually there are many forces acting in opposing directions and the outcome depends on how strong they are, which is a quantitative difference we currently have no way of estimating.
Summary - Small company receives patent, sues large companies for infringement, two years and more than a million dollars later patent is invalidated, technology moves on. All the gory details here:
http://www.legalmetric.com/cases/patent/utd/utd_206cv00115.h...
This is essentially every JPEG image on the planet. The standard provides for arithmetic coding, but no one implements it because of the patent. Wikipedia asserts that arithmetic coding saves about 5% of the files size.
So that is 5% of every flash card sold for a camera wasted and 5% of the bandwidth costs for images on the internet wasted.
If GATT hadn't tacked on three more years in 1995 these would have expired by now, but it looks like 2012 or 2013 is the date now.
The MPEG series of standards probably could also have benefited similarly from Arithmetic Coding.
But maybe YouTube could be saving 5% of their bandwidth bills if arithmetic coding weren't patented.
That is, there is an implementation in the libjpeg source tree, but it's disabled. I thought the patent had actually expired now, though.
Also, H.264's arithmetic coding mode saves ~20% bitrate; Vorbis or AAC could presumably benefit too, but neither of them use an arithmetic coder, even though AAC should have no patent problems. Maybe there's some technical problem I don't know about.
There's a "prospect" theory for patenting (which with this student is probably familiar), that a patent is like staking a claim to minerals, with a samilar effect: that it encourages others to stake claims nearby, and so explore that region. If others could use the same area as the patent, they wouldn't be encouraged to explore, and you'd get a technological monoculture (in another sense, this would be greater progress, in that it is more widely adopted).
I've been trying to think of an example, but I can't. I think the main way a patent can block progress is if the technology is not exploited well by the owner (like smalltalk being too expensive), and in such cases, we don't hear of it. When a patented technology is exploited successfully, money and time is reinvested in developing it, so that progress on it is accelerated.
[1] It's not easy to look through all the patents before building anything --- and may even be harmful to your legal position.
Correctional update: Microsoft holds patents in this area but Apple has a cross-licensing agreement on them.
What patents do achieve is exactly what they are there for. which is to protect the inventor of something usefull for a period of time.
If you want to use innovation that has patent protection, you should reward the person who invented it, OR invent something better youreself.
That applices to things like Ogg Thorbis, where new technologies were developed in spite of patents. If there were not patents on MPEG Ogg would not have been innovated.
Same with file systems, if there were no patentson NTFS or FAT, then why would ext3 and so on mabey would not be where they are now.
Fact is patents are there for a reason, (apart from it being law). They appear to work, and they dont appear to be affecting innovation to any degree.
Sure, there are groups who would be happy to ride the coat tails of others innovations and inventions. But that is only so they are not able to innovate themselves. They like something that works, and have a 'me too' attitude.
(why should someone else get rich, when I can copy that and get rich as well).
I don't know how measurable this is but it is patently obvious it is preventing progress.