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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This isn't even a single claim! It's one element of the body of a claim extracted without context. Geeks have lacerating ignorance of how patents actually work. And fine, why should they understand them? Except that now we get to have our BiMonPatentFreakoutCon on HN about them.

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At the end of the day though all software patents are bogus, trivial, and stupid. (And I'm listed as inventor on a dozen).

We should spend energy abolishing them rather than debating how they work.

just my 2c

I agree with this, but, as a nerd, I have a hard time letting go of people who construct arguments like the one that roots this comment thread.

You can start by just saying "No, thanks," to those $1000 patent bonuses at your company.

That's nice. You'll be out the $1000, and with some likelihood you'll still be forced to help file a patent; the boilerplate IP clause in many (most?) California employment contracts requires patent support, as I found out the hard way 11 years ago.

I feel for you dude. Keep fighting the good fight, but you're probably wasting your breath.

This is a continuing source of confusion for me, how a group of people who generally can't rest until they understand something can be so willfully ignorant about patents.

Good fight? I'm fairly sure at this point Ptacek realizes that he was wrong. So wrong that Apple's own self-serving explanation of the patent is identical to the root explanation that caused so much of this discussion.

You insult this community while offering absolutely nothing to counter any complaints about this patent except for, as others have tried, vagaries. Patents are public, so if you've actually got something, let's see it. Otherwise it's just noise.

Wait, where did he say anything that was wrong? He's the only one in this clusterfuck that seems to know what he's talking about.

Where he suggested that people who were accurately describing the patent were wrong because they were...you know....missing a claim or something. Yet those interpretations were entirely right, and are mirrored by Apple's own interpretation of their patent.

Simply responding to every patent comment with vagaries and innuendo is not enlightened or helpful. It's unhelpful noise meant to short-circuit discussions about the very, very broken patent system.

Do you have a link to a specific comment? Because all I remember is people saying "this patent covers x", where "x" is only a single element of a claim. He was right to tell them that they were missing something. If you don't have every element of a claim, you don't infringe the claim.

His very first message in this discussion!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2777338

That _IS_ essentially what the patent claims. Ptacek tried to add specificity by pointing out that Apple essentially added the disclaimer "on a computer", which is of marginal usefulness.

His original response was wrong, and was the classic alluding to some deeper (but never stated) meaning to the patent. There is no deeper meaning. That is it.

No, he was right. The comment he replied to was discussing a single element of the claim, and implying that anything that does just that element is enough to infringe.

What the patent claims is a device that has every element of a claim. Not just one element, or some elements. If it doesn't have every element, it's not an infringement.

No he was not right. The comment he replied to quoted an example of an infringing implementation based up all claims and dependencies in the patent. It was 100% correct, and remains 100% correct. Someone didn't cherry pick one elemtn of a claim and that was it, they found a specific infrginging activity, and having read the patent in detail, they are dead on.

More handwaving, however. This is why we can't have nice things.

You are wrong. Ptacek is wrong. AND APPLE AGREES. How is this nonsensical side discussion still occurring? The specific example is one that Apple used, so...what is going on here?

Repeating yourself doesn't make you right. Actually go read that fosspatents article. Then read the comment that links to it. The article discusses entire claims, but the comment focuses on a single element that's discussed in the article. Apple is not claiming that matching a regex infringes their patent.

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