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Comment by jakobegger | Hacker News Reader

I was about to complain loudly about bullshit patents, but then I took some time to read the actual patent (make sure to look at the images too!), and it turns out that this patent describes a method that is very similar to what Moom does (judging by screenshots). This is not a case of the overly broad patents that we usually complain about, this is a very precise patent.

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Being similar doesn't justify it as a patent. A core foundation of patents is that the invention be novel and non-obvious to a practitioner. If countless people independently -- without learning from the claims -- derive exactly the same "invention", it is an invalid patent. Of course then you have to actually get it invalidated, at great time and expense.

It is completely a bullshit patent. The patent office got their fees, and then they'll get their fees again to re-evaluate it.

My main beef with patents (from a layperson's perspective) is that due consideration isn't adequately given to the effort taken by the patent owner to provide some sort of value to society in general.

What use is a novel invention if the patent owner does nothing with it. I would argue that Moom or other apps have provided more value to society at-large as compared to the patent owner.

One could argue that securing the patent puts the innovation into the public domain. Otherwise it might have stayed inside one person or company's domain. Then died with them.

When was the last time you actually read a patent to learn about a novel technology? As opposed to an article, published paper, conference talk, random blog post, or a thousand other sources? They're not particularly good forms for conveying information; they exist primarily to stake a claim on a pile of territory.

That leaves aside the liabilities that reading patents to learn about technologies can open you up to, in the form of "willful infringement.

Yeah, this is currently a huge problem with the patent system as a whole, and can be summarized in one word: lawyers. I believe the patent system has been hijaked by lawyers and has veered off course from the original intent (even though i hate that term). The solution to this is to rewrite the written description law to reduce the burden on patentees to add in a bunch of verbosity and at the same time require more in the claims. And while we're at it to simplify the whole damn claim construction process. I'd advocate for putting examiners at the forefront of construing claims, and requiring statements by the examiners on the record of what the claims mean at the time of examination and why they are being allowed. A mini memo on claim construction at the time of allowance. This will never happen, of course.

It's only a bullshit patent if you have pockets deep enough to take them to court over a patent issue. And, the patent holder is considered "Right" until otherwise proved.

From a qualitative perspective it's a bullshit patent, full-stop. But yes, the legal process is prohibitive, but if you demonstrate prior art to the USPTO you can request a re-examination that allows them to save face.

If this patent were filed in 1988 it might have a hope of standing. It was remarkably filed in 2008, years after countless grid-based Windows manager had come and gone. It stands no hope, and the EFF will make quick work of this.

The USPTO needs to be held liable for this sort of nonsense, or alternately people who file spurious patents need to be penalized. This is legalized extortion.

And since this always comes up - someone is going to say "read all the claims...this is novel only in its entirety". The claims of a patent, unless specifically cross-referencing, hold independently.

I'm not giving any assessment of said patent. It appears to be bullshit from other commentors here.

I am approaching this as, "You had better be rich, and prepared to throw 500K at lawyers to defend or attack a patent lawsuit. And even then, has no guarantee of any good results.

For future reference, anythng patented in 1988 is long-since in the public domain. ;- )

Well, a number of comments here point to the success of the product due to that feature. If it was so obvious why didn't someone do it before?

Precise, and still obvious. So, still a bullshit patent.

I disagree. I feel that patents should exist to help companies recoup the cost of expensive R&D. Designing a window manager of this kind doesn't fall under that umbrella. Any reasonably competent software designer could come up with UX like this without a large time investment. Different companies should be able to iterate and refine these kinds of designs. This only has the effect of reducing the size of the software economy and does not provide the intended benefit of helping anyone recoup expensive development costs.

This patent was granted in April 2013 (see http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=08434019&IDKey=...), and does indeed pretty precisely describe Moom's "drag across a grid" window repositioning method. Which... first appeared in April 2011. See this old blog post, describing the brand new grid-selection feature of Moom 1.2: https://manytricks.com/blog/?p=1297

So that should be interesting.

This patent may also cover the window arrangement widget in Adobe's products, which seems to date back to at least 2011 (google for 'adobe application frame'): http://egypt.urnash.com/media/blogs.dir/1/files/2017/05/Scre...

...but somehow I doubt they'll be suing Adobe until they've successfully gone after all the other folks who independently invented something similar to their patent.

Here's Divvy doing this in 2010 [1], the question is if Divvy is related to the patent or if they too received a letter.

[1] http://lifehacker.com/5715221/divvy-window-organizer-lands-o...

Agreed. I read the patent before checking out what Moom was, and I'd say Moom is a pretty good implementation of the invention described in the patent. I think they might be stuck here.

It's an obvious software patent, therefore bullshit.

but it was completely not novel at the time of the patent

What other tiling WMs had the same gui menu to select layout?

Window Tidy had it as early as 2011.

http://lightpillar.com/window-tidy.html

Isn't the patent from 2008?

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