Comment by voidpointer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by voidpointer | Hacker News Reader

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This is not how it works. In the patent application you have to describe how your invention works.

In software patents, the implementation is described in such general terms that a lot of the time, any implementation can be said to use the method described in the patent. This is my biggest problem with software patents: once you abstract your solution enough, it isn't of much use to anybody, hence the value of the patent to the general public is null while it still allows you to block out competitors that want to find a solution to the same/similar problem although your patent is of no help to them actually solving the problem.

It is this skewed relationship that drives me crazy. Licensing a software patent only allows you to come up with your own solution a lot of the time, it does not save you the development cost.

If you license a patent for some industrial process it saves you huge amounts of research cost so licensing the patent is actually attractive.

Software should only be patentable if the patent provides actual value in solving the problem it claims to solve. Since useable software implementation are so specific, this may rule out patenting software at all.

Microsoft is currently suing Apple over the page turn on the iPad's ebook reader. They have a patent on the idea of using a page turning gesture to go to the next page in a book on a computer, together with the idea of showing a page is turning.

No code, no description of how to render it - just the idea of taking an everyday action (turning over a page) and using it to do the same thing on a computer

http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...

Not in the US, although implementation patents are easier to defend you can write very broad patents.

You can have a business method patent, eg look at the prices charged by various retailers and buy the lowest one, or even a patent on the plot of a novel. Both of these have been patented in the US.

Your 'invention' no longer has to be workable for it to be patented nor do you have to demonstrate a working implementation.

That's the issue with a lot of software patents on things like H264 - the patent can simply be on the concept of compressing video, you don't have to invent a particular encoding scheme.

But the law was not intended to work that way. This is why bilski has gone so far. They were trying to do exactly what you describe and they probably won't get the patent in the end. The supreme court will probably find some way to not revolutionize patents by making the decision so specific that only this case will be affected.

The supreme court decided to let people fight it out in court.

What this means is that patents only work for cartels of large companies forming a patent pool to keep a technology (eg. H264) to themselves and patent trolls who have no other business so can't be violating any other patents.

For anyone else - even if you have a patent on a real invention, and can afford to defend it in court, you are likely to be violating dozens of the large company's patents (how could you know) and so are going to lose.

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