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Comment by thinkcomp | Hacker News Reader

Based on your response, I'm guessing you didn't take the time to read the complaint. And why bother when you can spew factually incorrect vitriol at someone over the internet?

Not to mention that Square's fundamental innovation, its credit card reader, is premised on intellectual property theft. See http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/lawsuit-questions-s.... So in addition to holding a hundred more patents than my company, Square isn't even being honest about who deserves credit for theirs. Yet you argue that they're the pro-innovation good guys, and non-VC backed independent inventors are actively destroying innovation, because they hold patents? I have to disagree.

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> Based on your response, I'm guessing you didn't take the time to read the complaint.

You were right at the time, but I just flipped through it now (the meat seems to be in attachments 4 and 5 at the bottom of the original link) and it doesn't change my argument.

What service did you render to Square to earn the payment you claim to deserve? Did they get the idea for their product from your patent? Did they learn how to implement their process from patent?

Are you just trying to get a slice of the pie because of some childish "I thought of it first" garbage, and because our broken patent system allows it?

I suspect it's that last one.

> Yet you argue that they're the pro-innovation good guys

I never argued that. I argued that you are trying to extort money out of Square despite providing them with no real service or benefit, and that this does real harm to innovation.

The "'I thought of it first' garbage" is part of the U.S. Constitution, and if you don't agree with it, that's fine, but generally speaking reactionary and incendiary (and often libertarian) arguments like yours are part of the problem. Like it or not, the system is run by patent lawyers, both inside and outside of government, who are not receptive to that kind of language (e.g. "extort"). What they are responsive to is carefully constructed, specific reasons why the system needs to be improved.

If you have any of those, I'd encourage you to file a public comment with USPTO, as I have repeatedly. Otherwise, yeah, in this case I thought of it first, and I filed a patent on it, and I added a number of important limitations, and it was granted.

I'll remember that next time I'm having a discussion with an official and not some patent troll on an Internet forum.

> What service did you render to Square to earn the payment you claim to deserve?

the service rendered was he made public the details of the invention. Whether Square read or did not choose to read the patent is beside the point.

> Did they get the idea for their product from your patent? Did they learn how to implement their process from patent?

You are assuming that Square did not read his patent - which if true suggests that Square inefficiently re-invented the wheel. You know, that whole standing on the shoulders of giants thing.

However, what we find happening lately is the concept of efficient infringement where large corporations have found it more cost effective to infringe and fight with their lawyer muscle than to pay inventors their due rights.

> the service rendered was he made public the details of the invention. Whether Square read or did not choose to read the patent is beside the point.

I completely disagree.

what is:

1) http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...

2) www.google.ca/patents/US8396808

3) http://pat2pdf.org/patents/pat8396808.pdf

if not publicly disclosed?

THIS got downvoted?!? People were either too lazy or couldn't come up with a rebuttal

The idea of facial recognition as a form of security has been around significantly longer than the technology itself. It's in sci-fi and spy movies dating back to the 80s. The idea to use it as a means of authorizing payment should have been considered obvious by the clerk that granted your patent, but it wasn't, and that's where software patents are failing hardest today.

I think a lot of folks would agree that face-based payment authorization as an option would have come along eventually, just as every other biometric and security device will eventually get applied to everything anyone might want to secure.

The patent itself is not about facial recognition. It's actually broader than that.

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