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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

”sat through a presentation on why I should file patents”

Some years ago, I worked for Red Hat. I remember them saying the same thing about patents. There was even some kind of reward scheme if you filed one with your name on it.

(in hindsight, I guess I should have held on to those employee stock options!)

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I've seen RedHat (via JBoss) knowingly patent work they read in a research paper without referencing or funding them. I was positive it was for a reward, as there was no additionally novel ideas in their descriptions and similar work was already open sourced. I knew it wouldn't hold up so it didn't bother me as impacting my projects, but I was disappointed over the ethics of them doing that. I do wonder how many patent rewards are given for someone else's work by farming from the research community.

It's been my experience that engineers are quite poor at judging the "patentability" of ideas. I'm not saying that you're wrong, just that the patent field is quite opaque and difficult to understand, which is why patent lawyers do quite well.

It's been my experience that non-engineers are really poor at judging novelty. Plenty of patents are the equivalent of making a new widget and holding it together with screws. It's not a screw patent or a widget patent, the novelty is in holding the widget together with screws. Someone invents a new fastener and suddenly every product in existence can get a patent by redesigning what they have using the new fastener. Substitute "algorithm" or "data structure" for screw and you have a large slice of the world of software patents.

I've seen plenty of seemingly dumb patents myself, but most of them are legal because an application of a known technique to a new field is considered novel in patent law. So if you design an amazing new zipper for jackets, I can probably copy that, put it on a backpack, and get a patent on that and there would be nothing wrong with that legally.

Well, there's legal and there's right. They are not not always the same.

Your backpack example is a perfect illustration of my point. Thanks for that. It is a matter of degree of course, but the bar for patentability is really low IMHO. The new zipper may have been worthy of a patent, but every new instance of its use where another zipper was previously used should not be.

You are completely right, but it does highlight the incongruity of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_having_ordinary_skill_i...

Based on the above phrase you could almost be forgiven for thinking somethings "patentability" would actually be defined by how engineers typically judged it, rather than how specialist lawyers judge it.

You usually can't hold on to options for longer than three months after you leave a company, right? You'd have had to exercise them.

Depends on the company, but this is the status quo in most. Some startups (including ours) now offer 10 years exercise period, but it's not common.

Right. What I should have said was “should have hung onto the stock that I got from exercising the employee stock options”.

Red Hat does incentivize patent applications, but the purpose has been defensive. The entire process makes that clear as does the licensing.

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