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Comment by jrhurst | Hacker News Reader

It does look like IBM does own a p2p instant messaging patent[1]. So I think this checks out.

- https://www.google.ms/patents/US7675874

There was just a comment thread (on the slack outage article) recently discussing why there are no good p2p chat programs.

This might be one reason why. Fuck software patents.

It is more that without centralized servers, if that's what you mean, you have a lot of ux disadvantages.

and offline delivery, which is a big big thing.

Are there any European p2p instant messengers that don't accept non-EU customers? That patent obviously wouldn't apply and it would be a good move to capture a nice market.

Edit: There's https://tox.chat but I have never used it/always forget it exists. Antidote/Antox fas clients for iOS/Android.

The claims in that patent seem to be fairly easy to work around.

And then you get to risk defending that in court against Intel’s lawyers, who are on retainer.

Pedantry: There is only one independent claim, making it even easier.

It's remarkable that companies can "own" things so fundamental, and obvious in computing--even if they don't actually utilize their IP's.

"Hey guys, I've got a patent for talking from one machine to another over a connection." (Don't give SCO any ideas.)

The purpose of patents was to foster innovation, not squander it.

What if Issac Newton and Liebniz had a "foundation" that owned the rights to every mathematical construct they discovered? How would the world function if we had to pay that foundation fees every time we used Newton's method, or Calculus? It'd be complete bureaucratic hell.

And further, coming from another angle, I bet you money there are prior implementations of P2P chat long before... 2005.

Skype itself was founded in 2003, so I doubt this patent is valid.

I was working for a large hardware company (I'm not going to name names) that typically files for hardware/firmware patents. There was a push for everyone to file more patents, even from the software teams.

I was working on an app that had graph-like data so we decided to use a graph database...nothing super innovative. My coworker, who apparently had a couple patents, said that we could probably patent this algorithm. I looked at him and said, how can you patent traversing nodes and vertices... that's graph theory 101?!

Big companies try to patent everything because its a metric they can use to show how amazing they are, and acts as blackmail (or cold war). If you sue me, I'll sue you.

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