Coffee delivery drone patented by IBM | Hacker News Reader

Coffee delivery drone patented by IBM

bbc.co.uk

61 pointsleonagano76 comments

Perhaps I have become jaded or a conspiracy theorist, but I see this as the following:

- the drone space is increasingly easy to enter into - IBM sees non-tech companies might get into drones - they identify potential markets where drones would be useful - they spend minimal resources developing a "prototype" and file for a patent - Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts come along with coffee delivery drones ~3 years later - IBM shakes down Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts for $x.00 per delivery, now has new stream of extortion recurring revenue

No, you're not a conspiracy theorist, that's exactly how the patent system works. Many companies who won't admit it in public are knowingly engaged in exactly this practice. It's anti-competitive, it stinks, everyone knows it, and nothing is being done about it.

Would the patent system be better and less trolly if you were legally required to produce whatever you patent?

How many units? 1? 1000?

Could IBM make 1000 drones with a coffee cup attached?

maybe at least a prototype and expires after 2 years if you haven't commercialized it!

They would play around with the definition of "commercialized".

"Technically we offered it on sale for $500,000; nobody buys it so we've never made one, but it's still on the market!"

No, that would ensure only people with the means to produce things could secure patent rights to their inventions.

In the law we have the concept of "commercially reasonable efforts". Therefore we could in fact have a law which requires ongoing commercially reasonable efforts to manufacture and market the invention. This would empower a company who wanted the use a dormant/squatted patent with cause for action. In such a situation IBM would either have to make such an obvious go of it that nobody would waste the time attempting to prove a lack of commercially reasonable effort (subjectively interpreted by the courts), IBM could play act like they're making a reasonable effort and roll the dice in court, or relinquish the claim.

In IBM's case, is producing 1,000 units just to prove commercially reasonable effort sufficient? The GOOD thing about the subjectivity of "commercially reasonable effort" in the law is that one could argue 1,000 units is not enough for a company with the resources of IBM.

The hot mess that it the U.S. patent system is just a specific example of a much more general problem: a company benefits financially from a bad law, to the point where they make enough money that they can spend some of it to influence the political system to maintain this bad law and still turn a net profit. This positive feedback loop keeps the bad low in place despite the fact that it only benefits this one company. The Citizen United decision has made this problem that much worse.

You're not alone, my mind went here immediately too. Although I think my word association game response to the word "patent" at this point is always going to be "troll".

Note you don't have to develop the prototype to get the patent; you just have to dream this up while waiting for your coffee.

My evil(?) plan is to create a society of engineers that sits around and dreams up patentable ideas, and patents them, creating a portfolio which we could market to big companies ($$) as a defense against trolls, and to small companies (free) who want to build cool stuff and not worry about trolls.

I think you underestimate the size of the space of "patentable ideas" :)

I realize you may be saying this tongue-in-cheek, but that's such a hilariously compelling idea (speaking as an engineer pipe-dreaming about ideal jobs) that I'm making this rather unsubstantive comment to both encourage and say "give me a ping if you do"...

(the mental dissonance for me is that while I'm no fan of software patents, and even broader patents as they stand now, attempting to motivate that change in parallel with capitalizing on the existing state of affairs seems pragmatic, if hypocritical; I've had to bang my head against this due to filings through work already)

To be honest, the discussion started out as a hack so that we could use a 'company' to share health care costs rather than the exchanges. As the population in the Bay Area ages there are those who still like to talk about tech, draw on whiteboards, write code, and build stuff. While at the same time having accrued enough wealth such that actually working for someone isn't required. So we asked ourselves, "What are the good things about working at a company?" and the answer was smart people to exchange ideas with, facilities that you could leave "set up" while working on a project, and for some, an absence of interruptions by others. The "bad things" you don't benefit proportionally from your work effort, usually they want to own what you do and not let you share that, and if you take too many days "off" they ask you to leave.

From that the 'League of Extraordinary Engineers' was born :-). Basically membership dues covers the cost of the facility, patent filing, and healthcare, and as the patent portfolio grows (the 'endowment' if you will) those costs go down.

This is where I respond "And my axe."

The downsides you list resonate really strongly with me; compounded by the "all or nothing" nature of most employment in that I've noticed even negotiating a sabbatical for most of my line-engineer peers is a non-starter. (Story is different for those in management/very senior) God knows the pittance you get for filing at most bigCos doesn't align incentives/value, as well.

My only concern for feasibility would be as you say, "having accrued enough wealth such that working isn't reqired", seeing as the current healthcare/social safety net situation becomes prohibitive even to those who might be upper-middle, begging the question of potential conflict of interest for those who don't have true "fuck you money," to put it crassly. (Clearly I'm speaking selfishly here)

Completely understand. And it is within that discussion which is the 'hard bit'.The spreadsheets get a bit thick too. Understand this has been percolating for over a year at this point.

Feel free to contact me off list if you (or anyone else for that matter) is interested in the thinking that has been done so far on this concept.

Well you'd be disappointed to know that plenty of companies are doing exactly this with their R&D budget and manpower.

Not disappointed, encouraged :-) It suggests that once the portfolio (endowment) is large enough the idea could be self sustaining, then it gets really interesting.

Following Dan Shapiro's advice[1] for how to read patents,

”What is claimed is:

A method for delivering a drink to an individual, comprising:

connecting the drink to an unmanned arial vehicle (UAV);

flying the UAV, the one or more sensors connected to the UAV, the one or more sensors connected to an electronic processing circuit which identifies an individual among the people that may have a predetermined sleepy cognitive state including determining a confidence level corresponding to a probable desire of the individual for the drink including a stimulant which reduces a sleepy cognitive state, based on the sensor data and using sleep data pertaining to sleep experienced by the people when selecting the individual that may have the sleepy cognitive state;

accessing sleep data pertaining to the sleep cycle of the individual determined by motion detection of the individual during a sleep period, and adjusting the confidence level in accordance to the sleep data; and

if the confidence level reaches a predetermined level, flying the UAV to the individual that may have the sleepy cognitive state to deliver the drink including the stimulant to the individual.“

Headline should read "Sleep tracking coffee delivery drone patented by IBM."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11586448

Sorta wacky they want to deliver mostly hot water by air rather than caffeine.

Far smaller, lighter package would do wonders for flight time and reloading.

IBM pays employees a $500 bonus if their patent proposal gets past an internal review board, and another $500 if the patent office actually awards the patent. The internal review board's only concern is if the patent application is likely to be successful. They don't care if the idea is silly or has no bearing on the company's business.

A small subset of employees file the vast majority of IBM's patents. These are awarded the title "Master Inventor". Many Master Inventors earn more from the patent bonuses than they do in actual salary. In theory the title is an accolade but in practice Master Inventors are sometimes shunned because they spend all their time thinking up silly patent ideas instead of doing "real work".

Source: I used to work for IBM and collected a handful of those bonuses before I realized how silly it was.

>They don't care if the idea is silly or has no bearing on the company's business.

That's not entirely true. They do, perhaps approximately, require that the idea be within a market that IBM could consider moving into if they wanted.

I recall a coworker patenting something to do with sailboats.

Hence the usage of words like "not entirely" and "approximately".

I seem to recall being told at one point while interning there that you couldn't get on the management track within Tivoli with less than 5 patents to your name.

I was always super jealous of the patent plaques people would have made and hang in their office when one got approved.

> Many Master Inventors earn more from the patent bonuses than they do in actual salary.

So if we're being extremely conservative about pay at IBM, they're able to churn out 60+ patents per year? So more than one successful patent per week, every year?

Yes!

While the technology is great, I am not sure of its use case. People summoning for coffee is fine. But for people who look tired and distressed, I think coffee is just a 'quick fix' for that. How about drone reporting it back to the person's manager (as a feedback) to indicate if management rework needs to be done (sometimes one person in team ends up doing most of the work). Or drone sending an automated email giving suggestions to the employee to either take a break, go for a walk, drink water, or give recommendations of meeting other people who are in the same state. Maybe the drone can even take into account the project which the employee is working on and help him socialize with others who are working on other projects, which ultimately might give rise to a brand new project idea. Just my two cents!

Ok cool, but the patent is for the technology itself? They can use it for whatever they want, coffee is just a filler.

Actually it's not. The patent claims really are specifically about delivering coffee (well, about delivering a beverage containing a stimulant). And not just that, it's about delivering it to sleepy people, where sleepiness is determined by an algorithm. It's completely nuts.

An automated system reporting to my manager when I'm not looking cheerful?

This shows how idiotic the patent system is: you just generate a random combination of words, select 10 combinations that make remote sense and create some half-baked implementation on paper for it and suddenly you have the right to money from people who happen to actually implement it properly later.

If I were the CEO of IBM, I'd wonder what jagoff spent 10 grand (average patent cost, with lawyers and other services) to make a coffee drone joke.

Someone who gets a bonus for each patent successfully filed.

Yup, IBM begs employees to patent anything they can. They have entire patent groups to steward unfamiliar employees along the path, and they'll have presentations reminding employees about bonuses they get for successful filings and to try to get anything through because it's harmless to try.

Most people might say this is the defensive patent mindset we live in these days (IBM is not extremely offensive), but one wonders whether this deluge upon the USPTO exacerbates the problem. Granted it could be argued that unreasonable patents would be approved regardless of volume.

It got an article written about it, and we're here talking about it, so it may even have been a PR stunt (and of course, IBM does heavily encourage their employees to patent anything they can)

IBM is a law firm these days

This was my exact thought -- I'm stunned by how earnest the comments are here when my troll-dar is going off heavily right now. I guess I should be glad they didn't find some harebrained way to include the blockchain. There's nothing wrong with drone delivery, but the "innovation" of trying to address a people ops problem with coffee is so woefully wrongheaded that it really begs the question of whether it was intended seriously.

"System 100 can utilize monetary or digital currency bids, but can also enable the trading of coffee drinks." -pg.13

I mean, there is a f'n drawing of it lowering coffee with a string. That's clearly satire.

Clearly part of IBM's evil plan to take over the world with Watson. After replacing game players, retail associates, financial advisors, scientists, and doctors, the only challenge left is the office intern.

> IBM suggests the drone could be equipped with technology to detect blood pressure, pupil dilation and facial expressions and judge whether people are drowsy.

Why waste the time on brewing coffee? Just have it fly around and administer routine caffeine injections.

injections would require too much articulation, finding veins, etc

loading a tranq dart with caffeine and shooting them at drowsy people would be much more cost effective

If the dart is filled with caffeine I don't think it's called a 'tranq dart'.

that kind of detail isn't terribly important when you're trying to move fast & break things

Dartbucks

Dart powered by Jolt

Just have the police drones point their guns at the drowsy and scold them for not being productive enough.

I'd like to see the same technology be used to deliver alcohol to the least drunk person at a party.

Quick, file a patent!

Nobody else disturbed by the idea of a computer identifying under-performing employees and delivering them a shot of a stimulant? Coffee is rather tame, but this is a step towards many a scifi trope.

I fail to see what is novel about "delivering X via drone". Is delivering a new thing via truck patentable?

What, specifically, did they invent? Its the same patent landgrab as software patents where it is "do X, but on the internet".

I'd call this as IBM trying to lay down a patent minefield against those that would actually engage in commerce. In this sense, the patent does not advance the arts or sciences and should fail the sniff test for granting an absolute monopoly to a corporation on some action.

Have the figured out how to stop downdraft from the props to not blow away paper off people's desk?

Does the drone not embark with hot coffee payload if battery is not enough to complete the journey without spinning blades and scalding liquid crashing on people or computers?

Can they make it operate at >60dB so people can work?

If those questions don't have satisfactory answers, how could it possibly be that this invention "expresses a specific, credible, and substantial utility" such that it is deserving of patent protection?

what's the point of patenting technology and not really producing it? I think they just want to sue potential innovative companies and not taking any risk.

That, and ride patents to a seat at the table as a "key stakeholder".

Got a great idea? We love it! We'll take 40% of every unit sold. Good luck!

1) prevent anybody else from patenting it. 2) collect royalties of somebody else decides to build such a thing. 3) bump up their patent count.

At this point it's probably too early to say if they're going to produce it or not.

Yes. I'm ignorant of intellectual property law, but wouldn't requiring an intent to actually produce the relevant technology prevent some of the abuses of the patent system?

This is so counter intuitive when patents like this are awarded. So if someone wants to make a drone that delivers tea/coffee they pay royalty to IBM but is it ok if they deliver paper supplies or food?

In future this has total implications for drinks/soda companies and ironically IBM manufactures none. This is a perfect example of how patent system is totally broken and needs some kind of change.

It's as absurd as patenting one-click buying. Are drones the new website, in so far as the patenting of obvious use cases and meaningless marketing terms?

>is it ok if they deliver paper supplies or food

On the subject of paper, aren't the papers on my desk going to be blown around as a result of drones delivering compulsory coffee?

IBM is always chasing the latest hype, but their ability to execute is lacking. Just looking at how they are all over blockchain tech with so many talking heads. The same with drones I imagine. They truly believe with enough screen time people will start taking a notice of this Potyomkin village type company.

Ha as the owner of a few drones who has dreamed up a few ideas like this I think the biggest issue is noise. Can’t realistically have one of these flying in an office or social setting without irritating a bunch of people. Would be curious to see what can be done to make drones quieter though.

Having seen both sides of patents vs non-patents arguments. The only sane conclusion I have come to is, to have a validity for a much shorter duration for tech patents like 10 years or so. If the company cannot extract value from it in the next 10 years or less, then let someone else do it.

Flying hot coffee. What could go wrong?

It could burn someone and it could get cold.

future reddit threads

Link to the patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170174343A1/

Limitless human ingenuity being used...to deliver coffee to tired people.

SAP must be kicking themselves for not thinking of this one.

So, we gonna have a distinct patent for every X-delivery-Y where X is a kind of item to be delivered and Y is a method of delivery?

Is IBM just a marketing company now?

>marketing

you mean patent troll

does IBM even do anything anymore other than these stupid meme-technology ideas to generate headlines?

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