Comment by blackrock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blackrock | Hacker News Reader

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Patents have reached the level of stupidity.

For example, the recent patent granted to Samsung, to use an emoji-like representation of your face.

https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-ar-emoji-video-call...

I had the exact same idea for this, but I thought it was just a cute little feature. I didn't think to patent this. And I'm sure thousands of other people had the same idea too.

But since Samsung was the first to patent it, now, if you make a little program that uses this same idea too, then you are liable for patent infringement. And you will be sued by Samsung.

Patents were originally devised as a means to protect the small players, from being dominated by the larger and richer players. In the 1700s to 1900s, the American patent system may have had the original idea to protect their small inventors, against the richer inventors in Europe. This was to help give them a fighting chance.

But today, with all the patents being filed by the large and dominant Fortune 500 companies, the purpose of the patent protections to help the smaller players, are now largely irrelevant.

Nowadays, the purpose of patents is for nationalism, to protect against other countries.

The other egregious patent that was granted, was the Swipe Left and Swipe Right, that was granted to Tinder.

In general, the way patents are supposed to work is that you can't patent doing a thing, but you can patent the means by which something is done. So, for instance you can patent a new kind of shovel, but you can't patent the act of digging a hole. That's kind of an important fine point that is usually glossed over by the technology press and in Internet discussions.

That isn't to say that there aren't a lot of dumb patents granted (and I don't care to investigate the video emoji patent sufficiently to venture an opinion one way or the other), but I think the problem isn't quite as bad as it seems, since many patents are actually quite a bit narrower than they appear and that their owners would like everyone to believe.

In this particular case, I can assure you that there also is prior art in the research community going back at least 10 years. I wonder what aspect of it they are patenting (the bandwidth savings perhaps)?

Got a link to that patent? The article and its source don’t bother to include one.

Did you actually implement it?

Having an implementation is not a requirement for getting a patent.

Maybe not, but coming into a thread complaining that you "thought of the idea first" when talking about something fairly new, it's a reasonable question to ask. I "thought of" eBay before they started up, too.

Since the 5th grade, I and others have turned fellow students and teachers into cartoon characters on paper. Automating it shouldn't make the very act of cartoon-ifying a person itself patent-able. Slapping "via computer" or "via the web" on a process should NOT be a means for legitimate patents on acts, but this does keep happening in various forms. Patent a SPECIFIC algorithm, okay, but not the mere act of achieving something.

The question is still interesting.

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