Patent: Electronic flashcards (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Patent: Electronic flashcards (2013)

patents.google.com

84 pointszadokshi51 comments

As with any patent, read the claims before making statements about what the patent covers. Patent titles are useless.

With that said, at a quick glance it doesn't appear that it claims a novel electronic flashcard method, but there could be something I missed.

> at a quick glance it doesn't appear that it claims a novel electronic flashcard method

I mean, there is no such thing. It isn't possible to create something like that. Computers only perform a specific set of actions, and it doesn't matter how you put them together to do the flashcard thing. Or anything. There's nothing novel to be found. It's just math.

We should not grant artificial exclusivity over categories of functionality that computers were designed to provide.

Destroy all software patents.

I'm with you on the sentiment. But comment on the rationale behind the sentiment..

> Computers only perform a specific set of actions, and it doesn't matter how you put them together..

More or less everything in this world is about understanding how 'elements' work and then how to put them together to invent a new thing.. Medicines (molecules), Design (lines and shapes), Art (colors and mediums), Yoga (Asanas), etc.

The nuance with software is that we made up the system in which all of these programs are put together.

Just like in math, we made up the constructs and rules that define what an algorithm or a theorem or a function can be. Because there is a human-defined limited scope of what even constitutes a valid construct (i.e. an "upper limit" of novelty - "this is everything mathematics can do"), anything that exists within this sandbox is therefore less novel. We establish the baseline novelty of the entirety of mathematics as "really powerful, and world changing - and too important to the common good to lock behind a patent." So if that is the upper limit, no individual piece of it can be more novel.

The patent office displays stunning clarity in correctly determining that therefore, any particular instance of maths cannot be patented.

Their failure to apply this same reasoning to software (which is, and always will be, reducible to math) baffles me.

And, don't read patent application publications and mistake them for patent publications. The USPTO labels the granted publication with a B after the number. In this case, the granted patent (https://patents.google.com/patent/US8595637B2/) has seen amendments to the claims during examination before grant.

Don't look at the title. At a glance, the claims looks like a very specific implementation of a flashcard application, which does not seem to be relevant to the current flashcard apps. Did I miss something?

The first three paragraphs of claim 1 describe every flashcard application ever made. As far as I can tell, the "novel" part of the invention being claimed is the fourth paragraph, namely the concept of displaying multiple cards on the screen at the same time.

IMO, that's still an extremely broad concept to be granted a patent on.

What does this mean for apps like Anki (assuming they’re not the ones who own this patent)?

If I understand correctly this patent is only active in the USA. Anki is based on SuperMemo-2 and they freely admit it. SuperMemo (based in Poland) has pretty liberal licensing:

https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/licensing-and-copyrighting...

I can't see this patent holding up unless it's for a very specific flashcard system. There is prior art on flashcards going back to the 19th century.

Once a patent is granted, it is very hard to fight the patent using prior art as evidence.

How much has Anki's handling of flashcards changed since it was first released? Anki was publicly released well before this patent's priority date, and so nothing Anki was doing then can infringe.

It's possible that newer feature of Anki infringe, and so worst case they might have to revert those, but the basic Anki functionality is safe.

If Anki or other existing flash card programs are attacked because of this I would consider that quite evil

I’d love to see a charity formed for the sole purpose of challenging these patents in courts. Crowdfunding can go a long way, and strategic legal wins can go a long way in shaping precedence.

Many organizations dabble in these challenges, but it needs a singular purpose.

It's not the sole purpose but EFF does do a lot in this area: https://www.eff.org/patent-busting

I love the EFF but they have their pokers in a lot of (important) fires. I’d ultimately like to donate to both causes.

These joke patents are relatively harmless. The real problem is the "good patents" which can actually be enforced and used to stifle competition.

Not an organization for challenging in court, but "crowdbrain" support for people who do: https://patents.stackexchange.com/

What is the recourse here? Would it be reasonable to contact the person that approved the patent with information showing that plenty flashcard systems precede this patent? I imagine there is some more formal system.

> What is the recourse here?

If you want to make a flashcard program, pray to gods Google will take pity on you and not enforce their patent. Otherwise, you better had set aside a couple of million dollars for the patent fight with Google. I mean, the patent will eventually get invalidated, but not before a decade in courts and millions of dollars in costs.

EDIT: Ignore everything I said. I got confused. I apologize. I am not going to change the original comment so the context of the replies would be preserved.

Why would Google pay to enforce a patent it doesn't own?

Somebody confused (Google's (patents search)) with ((Google's patents) search)

It looks like it's a person (not a company) that owns the patent too, so unless this person is a m/billionaire a court case doesn't even sound that bad.

Until a troll buys the patent.

All patents are granted to people not companies. The people may then assign to a company the right to enforce the patent.

Oh, I actually didn't know that. Thanks!

It's not a Google patent. The article link is just a link to patents.google.com, which is a Google search engine for patents not a list of patents owned by Google.

"A method of writing a patent application whereby the most trivial and non-patentable ideas are made to seem novel and patentable."

This patent was filed 2007 and granted 2012, so the title should say (2012).

The patent page states it the patent became active 2020-01-01

The patent issued November 26, 2013 (see http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...).

There seems to be a weird bug on the Google Patents site. I've noticed that the expiration date of a patent is always the day I visit the site, even for patents I know expired a while ago. This may be something like that.

It's not wrong but it is confusing – it's showing you what its current status is, which should be shown somewhere else than in the timeline.

Ah, thanks. As in Expired (date). Where date is every day from the day it expires until forever. Not Expired on date, but currently expired. Makes sense now.

The page says that as of today (2020-01-01) the status is active. The wording is confusing.

The lady who owns the rights is Vicci Tucci. Here is a link to her company's website: https://tuccionline.com/company/

Here is also a video on how her flashcard tech works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFOm9oM_-A4&feature=share

If you look under "Products", you can see that she has a flashcard app called Fluency. However, I can't seem to find the app on iOS or Android app stores.

Also, I still can't seem to find the novel aspect of this patent? The first claim literally denotes the functionality of every current flashcard application.

I imagine there's plenty of prior art available. Certainly by the time the Apple II was in schools if not before.

Unlikely to survive an Alice 101 challenge.

Hasn’t flash card software been around since the 80s or 90s?

The claims in this patent are too broad. It's likely that it will get invalidated with prior arts in the court.

I wrote a flash card program in 2011 to help me study French. I should charge licensing fees to anyone who uses this in a product.

How brain dead or just checked out are patent office clerks that patents like this are granted.

I'd imagine there's an art to making the application wordy and confusing enough to slip through.

If a patent clerk is confused by the patent, then it should be rejected not granted.

The whole premise of the patent process it that you disclose your invention for the good of the population and in return you are granted a temporary monopoly over your invention.

I would never, ever, reference a software patent in order to implement a patented invention. They do not serve as any usable guide for the so called "invention." Therefore they are a perversion of the patent process and should not be granted.

> If a patent clerk is confused by the patent, then it should be rejected not granted.

I think GP means so confused they don't know they're confused.

The language used for describing patents is not quite English, in some ways it's a bit like a programming language, you can sort of create variables, arrays (the first X, the second X, ...), subroutine calls (even recursive calls provided they don't recurse infinitely, though that pushes the cost up) some words have different meanings ("or" for example is always exclusive or) etc etc

My friend was a patent clerk. She is pretty sharp. She explained that rules make it much more time-consuming to deny an application than to grant it or coach the applicant on changes they need to make in order to win a grant. Something about needing to explicitly refute each claim. Further, clerks are given quotas on how many patents they must review a week. It’s a pretty crushing load, so the system favors grants.

This just pushes the validation of a patent into the courts, and at a much higher cost than properly researching its validity from the beginning.

> Something about needing to explicitly refute each claim

Seems like a wholly reasonable rule, no? We don't want the government to arbitrary grant or deny something without applying the same rules to everyone?

Sure, but to grant a patent, you just have to say “approved.”

The patent has not “become active;” the reason it says ‘2020-01-01 Application status is Active’ in the timeline is because its current status (as of 2020-01-01) is Active. It actually became active on 2013-11-26 when it was granted and published. (If you look at any active patent it will show the same date, and if you look at this patent tomorrow it will show tomorrow's date instead.)

This comes up every single time someone links to a Google Patents search; it's an incredibly misleading bit of UX design.

[Edit: I'm glad to see that the title has been adjusted to remove the “becomes active” bit. It should probably still have (2013) added on the end, though.]

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