PG's patent on Continuation Based Web Servers (as used by Arc, Seaside etc) | Hacker News Reader

PG's patent on Continuation Based Web Servers (as used by Arc, Seaside etc)

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42 pointsnickb51 comments

Software Patents are a sham.

Software should be copyrighted, but not patented.

I wonder what would be if a writer could patent story lines: "It is like a like a novelist, patenting all action thrillers, that involve a guy saving a girl, who is kidnaped by the bad guys.

Watch out, any other books that have a bad guy kidnaping the girl, can be infringing this patent."

There are many industries that flourish without the needs of patents. How did we end up in this mess?

Software should be copyrighted, but not patented.

So physical stuff like valves can be patented, but not software? That seems arbitrary. After all, it's usually the design of the valve that contains the invention. What difference does it make if you print one out? If you mean "nothing should be patented," just say that. One could make a case for that argument. But there's nothing special about software.

How did we end up in this mess?

What evidence do you have that we're in a mess? Have you ever been prevented from doing something you wanted to because of patents?

The fact is, for all the noise people make about them, software patents just don't matter much. Large companies accumulate patent portfolios to protect themselves against patent suits. Startups file for them because investors and acquirers are impressed by them. But they don't decide which startups win.

"Have you ever been prevented from doing something you wanted to because of patents?"

1. Every year at CMU's Human Computer Interaction Institute, it appears someone reinvents something patented though not deployed by Xerox PARC.

An example is a "looking glass" feature for something like photoshop, where you can preview the result of an action like a filter -- or something like that.

From the anecdotes I've heard, PARC just sits on it, doesn't deploy or license it, and acts to block others from using it.

2. SIFT is a new object recognition technique built upon years of research. A recent patent on the best implementation has restricted groups from using the techniques. They grant exclusive licenses on the level of "for all robots in America", but that's pretty useless for a startup, isn't it?

I'll say it: nothing should be patented. Trade secrets, in the literal and legal sense, make much more sense. If a system can be reverse engineered and copied, you don't have a secret, and it isn't in the best interest of society to block copy cats from beating the originator.

The idea that makers wouldn't create due to the fear of competition is just wrong -- though it is the most often used argument to defend patents.

[edit: And another thing: people respect and fear patents, so despite my opinions, I'm going to act in my best interest to acquire any patents possible on my work. My goal is notably against the best interest of society as a whole: create unfair advantages for my company.]

The case against patents is getting stronger as time goes on.

The rate of innovation constantly increases, and for patents to keep working as they should, the term should get shorter and shorter. Even if the system is made to be "fair" in this way, eventually the term will be made so short as to not be worth the effort of filing the patent. Maybe we are past that point already.

Have you ever been prevented from doing something you wanted to because of patents?

I've had to take software out of production and replace it with non-infringing software.

What evidence do you have that we're in a mess?

EOLAS v Microsoft, Amazon v Barnes&Noble, Sun v NetApp..

Notice in all three cases the guys on the receiving end of the patent suit were big companies. Big companies have lots of money, so they get sued over patents, and when people slip and fall in the parking lots, and when they fire people. Big companies getting sued over something doesn't mean it's an actual problem.

If you don't mind my asking, where were you working when you had to replace this software?

I see. It's ok as long as it's someone else getting screwed.

As far as my own situation, the details are here: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39194883,00.ht...

Ironically it was another "ARC" patent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Replacement_Cache

I didn't say it was ok. More like inevitable. Big cos get sued. It doesn't mean much.

From the article, it doesn't sound like you were required by an injunction to remove any code. Someone just read in the news about some newly issued patent and panicked. What's the plan for dealing with the 1000 other patents PostgreSQL is violating?

No, thankfully the issue was delt with quickly. There were also other good reasons to upgrade.

The PostgreSQL project tries to stick with things for which there is plenty of prior art and thankfully most of the best stuff in databases is old enough so that patents aren't a big issue.

Unfortunately some of the things people do with PostgreSQL's extensibility aren't as old. I'm sure there are some people out there using custom UDF/UDA functions that may infringe on patents.

Didn't mean to downvote this. I click randomly sometimes.

Seems that something that doesn't matter shouldn't be legislated. Do patents matter in other industries? If patents drive innovation in some industries, but have no effect on others besides putting money into lawyers' pockets (and out of taxpayers', entrepreneurs', and corporations' pockets), that would be a case against software patents but not all patents.

"One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general." http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html

Btw, your writer analogy is a poor one, since prior art exists for that story line and thus it would not be patentable. There are also industries that would collapse without patents (pharmaceuticals for one).

I assume pg is referring to http://www.gamespot.com/news/6117964.html when he writes

The one example I've found is, embarrassingly enough, Yahoo, which filed a patent suit against a gaming startup called Xfire in 2005. Xfire doesn't seem to be a very big deal, and it's hard to say why Yahoo felt threatened. Xfire's VP of engineering had worked at Yahoo on similar stuff-- in fact, he was listed as an inventor on the patent Yahoo sued over-- so perhaps there was something personal about it. My guess is that someone at Yahoo goofed. At any rate they didn't pursue the suit very vigorously.

I can't help but wonder if pg thinks the same way about software patents now that there is a very real chance that his own patent could be used against him at the whim of someone at a company he's been publically bad-mouthing for some time.

What makes you think there's a very real chance of that? Microsoft already has patents on practically everything to do with software. What difference has it made?

Here are some more lawsuits, some of which involved injunctions.

Tivo v Dish - http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1201779834291

Forgent v Audiovox, ePlus v Ariba, Immersion v Sony/Microsoft, EMC v HP, USA Video v Movielink, BroadVision v Art Technology, Electronics for Imaging vs everbody .... http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=492018

Well... your own essay suggested that the motivation in Yahoo v Xfire was personal.

If someone comes to YC with an idea you like but is incumbered by a technology and/or business model that you know infringes on specific patents held by a company like Microsoft, do you just fund them anyways and tell them it doesn't matter?

Are you saying it would have made no difference to Yahoo if Microsoft somehow patented the continuation-server idea Viaweb depends on before you did?

Yes, we completely ignore patent questions in funding decisions. So do most software investors.

And yes, it would have made no difference to Yahoo. As far as I know, they didn't do any patent searches prior to acquiring us. In fact, I've never heard of patents torpedoing an acquisition. Acquirers (rightly) have a fatalistic attitude to patents.

Curiously enough, Yahoo did get sued by a patent troll over Viaweb. It was after my time, but it was something to do with shopping carts. A totally bogus claim, but I believe Yahoo settled, because they were able to pay them out of the money they'd held in escrow for us. (We were not that unhappy though, because the money held in escrow had increased something like 15x.)

I'm not against patents per se (they're a necessary evil, I believe that shortening their length and/or adding a forced licensing clause could improve them), but the problem is that software patents too often do the opposite than what they're intended - stifling innovation in a rapidly evolving market - and the patent system is currently too-often used on things that are likely to be reinvented and become popular independently rather than the actual purpose which is share knowledge with the world in exchange for a temporary monopoly on your invention.

Phamaceuticals wouldn't collapse; half of their current expenditures go into advertising, half into research. But that only accounts for half of the actual research costs: the rest mainly comes from the NSF. We could just have the NSF give them a 100% handout and cover all the research.

Get your stats right, do your research before you comment.

Pharmaceutical research in the US 2005 34.8B USD federal funds 41M USD. Thats less than 0.12%.

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf07335/

The NSF isn't the primary fund granting organization for medical research, the NIH is -- with a funding level (28.7B) that eclipses the NSF (5.9B). In 2003, NIH is estimated to have funded 28% of the overall medical investigation costs: http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/HealthPolicy/...

Pharmaceutical research in all likelyhood includes the cost of bringing drugs to market, currently around $800M per drug. Because of this high barrier, much of the Pharma energy goes into 'me too' drugs of a higher risk/reward ratio, again inflating the true spending on new research: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/what-dont-w...

Yes the NIH is a major source of funding for pharma, although not as big as you think, medical investigation includes a lot that is not pharmaceutical research

The me-too phenomena is a problem but only because of two factors, pressure by pharma reps and the fact that the US is the only country I ever heard of that allows advertising of non over-the-counter meds.

"Advertising" includes training doctors, not just "ask your doctor about erectinol" commercials.

Hiring doctors to travel the country, give lectures explaining how it works, renting conference centers, providing lunch, etc adds up. Learning how to use a new drug is not easy like learning software; trial and error doesn't work.

A drug is worthless if your doctor doesn't know what it does.

I know some pharmaceutical reps - they say without irony - that they push (in the drug dealer sense) whatever drug their company wants them to.

America is the one of the only countries that allows pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to consumers. http://tinyurl.com/27y5df

Considering how arrogant doctors are, and how powerful the placebo effect is, it might make us healthier if we had more advertising directly to consumers and less to doctors.

So in other countries, they simply spend the same money trying to bribe doctors instead of consumers.

Because who would pay for RnD if you can't go exclusive at least for a dozen or so years! Well I hope that someone would, that the human social structure have evolved enough to create all what's necessary for it's survival and that the pharmaceuticals industry wouldn't collapse, it would just restructure and medicines will be cheaper!

The sad truth is, I really believe this would what would've happened!

"evolving human social structures" is just hand waving. What would the economics of your patent-less pharma world look like? Research dollars are a scarce resource - how will they be allocated and by who?

I hope that is what would happen as well. Unfortunately, humans are, as a group, most strongly motivated by money.

Sham or not, they're a reality and we have to deal with it. Just ignoring them is not going to solve anything.

>How did we end up in this mess?

Politics, money and special interest is a dangerous confluence.

Actually just ignoring it is probably the best thing to do.

That's what we advise startups, at least about software patents. If you've developed something very novel, it doesn't hurt to file a provisional patent application. But don't spend a lot of time on it, or waste any time worrying about other people's patents. That's not what makes startups win or lose.

He also appears to have made advances in birdfeeder technology.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=Sl0gAAAAEBAJ&dq=%22paul...

This one's a lot more interesting: http://www.google.com/patents?id=jTkLAAAAEBAJ&dq=%22paul... "Remote web site authoring system and method" how Viaweb works/ed...

My god! He's going to sue everyone who answers the... birds.... uh..

And these will belong to Microsoft in a few short months...

My god! He's going to sue everyone who answers the Arc Challenge!

It's a trap!

Claims 4, 6, 8 and 9 are pretty specific and from a cursory examination of the current challenge solutions none of them work that way.

Could it be that at the moment the only system to worry about a lawsuit is Arc? Yahoo (not pg) is the patent holder.

And soon it may be held by the Beast.

... and on the First Day of the Second Month of the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Eight, the Beast issued forth from his Vile Abode and laid Charge to the Land of Light, burying their Heros with irresistible Seductions and Temptations of False Fame and Glory. The Heros of the Land of Light did hold council, and after many a deliberation decreed that the Battle was to be met with full conviction and the aid of Macro Expansions. And the Battle was fought for twenty and three days and on the morning of the twenty and fourth day, the Beast was slain by a mighty hero of the Light, whose Karma was without parallel - Sir Paul Graham, Marshal of the Closure, General of His Magesty's Symbol Tables, Diviner of the Continuation, and all other Titles held and to be granted by Our Lord Almighty - Lisp - and His Son Who Walked On Earth - Arc. And so ended an Age of Heros and Villians, the likes of which shall never walk the Net again.

Upmodded for "It's a trap" usage.

Yawn...

First of all it's not PG's patent. Its Yahoo's.

Second, if anyone ever goes after you on a software patent, celebrate! It means you are a success. It means you have deep enough pockets to be considered worth the trouble.

Third, as much as software patents are a joke, see them for what they are: A little side show for the lawyers and MBAs to leach off the big boys and feel like they are holding important cards. Hackers are wasting time/energy if they get too worked up about software patents.

Patents may be a joke to hackers but they aren't to the investors who fund them.

Of course if you don't need investors for what you're doing in order to be successful then more power to you.

Sure, it's OK to pretend that they mean something... If you feel it helps make you look stronger, apply/get patents. Just try not to pay through the nose to do it... be careful with those lawyers.

Just don't worry about stepping on the other guy's patents. They are just paper really.

And as we know in this economy there is a lot of phony paper out there that people just want to call valuable/meaningful.

Are software patents evil? Yes, I don't really believe that RnD is software is that much of a big deal, or that costly to justify patents.

For how many years was windows vista tested on real humans before its being release? No, software testers don't count, they ain't real humans!

The patent appears to predate PLTaEURXs work.

"The patent appears to predate PLTaEURXs work."

Boy, that extra character support sure would've come in handy. :P

It was an apostrophe, but since Arc doesnaEURXt support Unicode, fuck it.

What kind of keyboard do you use that has an actual apostrophe on it? Or do you go out of your way to use Markdown (or something) to clean your input before submitting? Just curious...

I'm scared to think, but there might be a Firefox extension that embeds Word into text fields...

there is, its called "its all text". It works for any text editor, actually.

option-shift-] on the Mac does a proper apostrophe.

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