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Interestingly, I think this is a big part of why patents were invented in the first place. The idea was to give companies incentive for publishing their methods in detail because doing so benefited the industry as a whole. You show the world how you are doing what you do and you get to control that process for a while but in the end it becomes part of the common practice.

And the problem with applying this to software - as alluded to in the article - is that software is advancing at (disputedly but ostensibly) exponential paces.

If software patent timeout was geared towards progress instead of hindrance, it would follow the inverse of the path that copyright has taken: shortening the enforcable term instead of lengthening it.

That rationale was invented after the fact, as I understand it. The actual reason was royal revenue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law#England

One is to do what Google does and keep the knowledge of your best stuff to yourself.

Any suggestions on how to do that with a product as opposed to a service?

Don't file patents, which often make it much easier for competitors to see how you solved a given problem. If they reverse engineer your product, that means they are late to market. You will always have a competitive advantage if your rivals are trying to build today what you built yesterday.

Google also sell search as a product - Enterprises can buy "google black boxes" that index their corporate network and make it easier to find stuff (supposedly... I haven't seen one at work yet, but the bar is pretty low, considering how shitty most enterprise search engines are).

These are basically rack-mounted boxes (the one I worked with was bright yellow and looked pretty awesome) that quite literally are, under contract, not allowed to be tampered with besides providing power and plugging in cables.

They do work, though I wonder whether it is worth the cost. I can't recall exactly, but I think it cost in the region of $10,000/yr. There's also a baby version for significantly cheaper that indexes less docs.

I'm sure their search technology is significantly different as well. A large part of Google's success is being able to crawl well (their index is incredibly fresh), sort through spam and SEO gaming and then raw speed over many billions of documents. It's a lot easier to efficiently crawl and search an intranet.

Or how to do it with a UI.

Patents where created to replace trade secrets.

If an idea is so fucking-obvious in hindsight that you don't need the patent's description to re-implement it, than that shouldn't be patentable.

Yeah, Apple did a great job designing the UI ... but sooner or later somebody else would've done it anyway.

10 years ago I owned an HP iPaq ... with a big screen, a stylus, wifi, sound input/output and no physical keyboard. Sooner or later somebody would've thought to add GSM capabilities to it and replace that stylus with fingers.

Apple did it first, and they have a great sense for aesthetics ... but this whole suing stuff is ridiculous. I was kind of feeling sorry for them when Nokia sued (and I'm pretty sure Nokia has patents more enforceable than Apple does).

Apple did it first, and they have a great sense for aesthetics ...

Nope, Several other manufacturers did this somewhere in 2003. QTEK/HTC had a few of them early on, HP introduced the iPaq H6300 (I could get one in europe early 2004)... Apple came with the first iPhone in 2007 (that's three years later).

Of course you could argue that they understood the problem better than (most) other manufacturers (I'm pretty sure they do) but Apple being 'first' is definately not true.

Patents where created to replace trade secrets.

Bullshit.

If an idea is so fucking-obvious in hindsight that you don't need the patent's description to re-implement it, than that shouldn't be patentable.

That's painting with an absurdly broad brush and probably covers thousands of things that you might otherwise regard as patent-worthy.

I have an ice cream scoop with two hinged handles like a pair of scissors with two halves of a scoop for 'blades'. When you squeeze the handles together, the scoop scissors together so you can scoop, and when you let them apart, the scoop opens, loosening the ice cream. Works great.

"Duh!", right? http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6474974

Oops, I guess the guy that thought that one up shouldn't have a right to profit from the value he's added to my ice-cream scooping experience, seeing as how it's so obvious in retrospect. I guess we should all have an equal right to make our own copies of that scoop--which we hadn't thought of but surely we would have all thought of eventually seeing as how it's so obvious now. If he had wanted to profit from his invention he should have made it more complicated.

Or, maybe obviousness-after-the-fact is not a good way of judging patentability.

Yeah, Apple did a great job designing the UI ... but sooner or later somebody else would've done it anyway.

Can you relate that to the things patents that Apple has actually claimed to be infringed?

The primary problem with your argument is that (hypothetically) there were not shaved ice scoops (double the size) similar to the ice cream scoop you own previous to the invention you cite.

Inversely, there were inventions (Microsoft Surface, Jeff Han's touchscreen) previous to iPhone that had multi-touch capability and exploited much of the same ideas. They just weren't phones. The obviousness is that creating a smaller form factor and putting some phone capabilities in it were no-brainers for this tech _eventually_ since the technology did exist.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_tou...

The primary problem with your argument is that (hypothetically) there were not shaved ice scoops (double the size) similar to the ice cream scoop you own previous to the invention you cite.

I don't understand what you're saying.

Microsoft Surface, Jeff Han's touchscreen

Both of these use completely different technology that does not scale down to phone sizes--they're notable because they scale up so well and can sense effectively any number of points, and can sense objects, not because multi-touch was new. FingerWorks, for instance, predates both, and a dozen things predate FingerWorks. See: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

There is no one single technology called "multi-touch" and nobody with any sense is claiming that Apple has a patent on the concept as a whole. While they do hold patents on their touch technology (via FingerWorks), those aren't the patents Apple is suing HTC over. The whole angle is a red herring.

"The sad part is it maybe too late for them to reverse course."

I think you're correct. Now the cards are on the table - I have a feeling if they were to withdraw this, it would hurt the countersuit against Nokia - who could then point at Apple's selective/questionable enforcement.

My understanding is that enforcement only affects trademarks, not patents.

Enforcement affects perception of validity and enforceability which can matter both at negotiation and court. To quote a non-neutral party, note the phrase "lax attitude":

> "Neglecting stick licensing [enforcement] has two problems. First, it results in a loss of potential royalty and damages revenues from infringed patents. Second, it undermines carrot licensing of both infringed and noninfringed patents. If an industry perceives a lax attitude on the part of a university in enforcing its patents, it will think it can infringe with impunity. Under these circumstances, taking a license would be tantamount to making a charitable gift, which few in this economic climate are inclined to do." -- Alexander Poltorak of General Patent Corporation in http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Thars+gold+in+Tham+thar+patent...

Thank you; you're probably right. Some part of me thinks it would still harm the case. I need to go find a lawyer.

If you do those 2 things in conjunction, I doubt you'd have to worry about people "stealing" your IP.

And yet Google is potentially pulling out of China due to having its IP stolen.

I'm pretty sure el_dot wasn't claiming that his strategy protects against sophisticated cyber attacks on the nation-state level.

Regardless, anything on the nation-state level is not worth debating about because other nations are not obligated to respect US patent, trade-secret, copyright, or any other law. It doesn't matter whether a US company patents its stuff or keeps it a secret, companies in China will do what they want.