Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcromartie | Hacker News Reader

Obviously it's not just patenting regexes. It's patenting using regexes to highlight phone numbers and email addresses in plain(ish) text presented in a UI.

This sounds exactly like the iPhone feature that allows you to tap a phone number in text and call it. What else could it possibly describe?

View on HN

It could describe features in a CMS that do the same thing with things like ticker symbols or how the NYTimes auto-links Times Topics the first time they are mentioned in an article.

They would not infringe this stupid patent.

Why not? If you look above, you'll notice the initial implementation was on a Power Macintosh, which suggests that the claims are made very widely.

My Sony Ericsson from 2005 does this, why have Apple patented it?

They patented it in 1996.

I thought they filed in 1996.

You're probably right, but that's irrelevant here: a 2005 phone isn't invalidating prior art for a patent filed in 1996. In fact, for some forms of disclosure, there's a cushion of 12 months prior to filing, meaning that conceivably a phone could have been disclosed in 1995 that wouldn't invalidate this one.

No, but you made it seem silly somebody would even create the 2005 phone when the patent had been granted in 1995.

If the patent explicitly mentions its use in a touch screen phone (as opposed to simply highlighting it and adding it to a menu option, like dumbphones did before the iPhone) then this is a fine example of why US patent law needs reform.

Except the patent doesn't. Why do you comment on something that you don't know about, and have not bothered to check?

The patent was written in 1996. The description above is correct. The question is, was it obvious or not. Was there prior art (some people mentioned some agenda software from 1992, that's worth looking into).

In my book, it's quite simple: either people were doing it before the patent was written, in which case it's obvious and deserves to die, or it was never done before, in which case it doesn't matter how obvious it seems in retrospect.

html was done in 1990, and way before that hyper link systems were done. Things resembling html were done in 1986.

Many a perl script has been written pre 1996 to create linked things from plain english text. Automatically turning email addresses in plain text into html links is very common. So have many text adventure games been made which parse english text to present links. Wikis came out pre 1996, and those presented links based on the patterns of english text.

Not to mention text adventure games.

http://www.podgoretsky.com/ftp/docs/Internet/Web%20Publishin...

It is easier for me to believe that you haven't looked at the patent description at all than it is to believe that you actually think HTML or text adventures are prior art for it.

A wiki seems to be a pretty good example. A wiki processor parses data (text) looking for "structures in the data" (camel-cased words), which it then converts to a UI element (hyperlink) that a user can take action on (click it to cause the browser to transition to a new page). At first glance to me it appears wikis violate this patent, so if you can show a wiki as prior art, the patent can't hold.

"either people were doing it before the patent was written, in which case it's obvious and deserves to die, or it was never done before, in which case it doesn't matter how obvious it seems in retrospect."

This isn't necessarily true.

There is also a general concept that if something is obvious to a general practictioner, then it should not be patentable. Does anyone believe that minus the iPhone or that 1996 patent submission that someone else in the computer field wouldn't have "invented" the concept of linking distinct types of text? Now I know that there is plenty of prior art, and this patent will be invalidated, however just discussing the concept that it really was the very first implementation.

Remember the idea of a patent is that you are granted a government monopoly in return for revealing, essentially, your secrets. Who thinks this is a secret? Or the vast majority of patents, for that sake. The current situation is not one where people are actively stealing techniques, but instead it's one where many independent teams of developers inevitably end up at exactly the same end result. That is clear evidence of the farcical, not-as-intended patent system.

Stop and brainstorm for a couple of days about every nuance and variation of wearable or implanted computer. File patents in the hundreds. In a few years you will be a trillionaire.

The technical term is not 'a general practitioner' but 'one ordinarily skilled in the art.' And that ordinary skill is in the directly relevant art. So the proper question is 'was the invention novel and non-obvious to one ordinarily skilled in the art?' And here we run into endless problems because one of the best tested psychological phenomena is the 'hindsight effect.' Once things are invented and become part of popular culture or of the culture and lore of a technical sub-group they are (remarkably quickly) considered to be 'obvious.' Hordes of people who have never invented anything in their lives moan about how 'obvious' this or that patent is. If it is so easy, they should just stop moaning and go make those billions you so mistakenly believe are so easily to be earned by inventing things that are blindingly obvious. This is an absurd argument. It really is time to put it to bed. If something is blindingly obvious at the time, it probably won't get a patent. The USPTO and other such agencies are not perfect but they are not total imbeciles. Will some bad patents get through - yes. But if you want to spend your whole life focusing on edge cases why spend it on patents? Why not do something useful and campaign for prisoners' rights? After all, we know that some prisoners are innocent? So the whole penal system must be abolished, right? If we are going to have sensible discussions about patent reform we have to get some of the basic facts straight. And one of those basic facts is that what is 'obvious' now wasn't necessarily 'obvious' then and no amount of whinging from today will make that act any different. It has been 'obvious' now for some time that if you have HIV you should take antiretrovirals but it wasn't in 1982 when we started to identify AIDS. That's just 28 years ago. 'Obvious' is a slippery term - get used to it. There are no useful discussions about patents without getting over it.

There is no hindsight effect about the notion of identifying classes of text in a string of text. I fully and completely anticipate that patent being invalidated.

"If something is blindingly obvious at the time, it probably won't get a patent. The USPTO and other such agencies are not perfect but they are not total imbeciles."

The USPTO has shown, time and time again, to be willing imebeciles. They have habitually approved virtually all patents, opening them for review only when contested. I have zero expectation that they are doing any serious review of these patents, and they most certainly are not consulting any industry experts to gauge the true novelty of a patent.

You may or may not be correct about the fact that there was prior art in the case of the Apple suit. That however does not refute my key point which is that time and time again discussions include endless statements about how obvious something is, not a discussion about how obvious it was then.

As for your statements about the USPTO that is just a rant. It doesn't contribute anything to a real discussion.

So the only reason you aren't a trillionaire is scruples?

No, the reason is that the time to file all those thousands of patents, and the filings fees, makes it infeasible for normal people.

But very feasible for IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc. - companies with many laywers and engineers, and lots of money.

Of course - it's so easy that only someone of high moral character wouldn't do it.

Aside from what azakai mentioned (it tends to be large companies that are the biggest culrpits for laying patent minefields), I have no doubt that a lot of people are doing exactly that. The now obvious value of software patents -- artifacts that for decades were literally little more than harmless curiousity -- has led to an explosion in filings.

> Except the patent doesn't. Why do you comment on something that you don't know about, and have not bothered to check?

Why do you comment on a comment you haven't bothered to read properly? Your attitude stinks.

For one, I said 'if' - I simply don't have time to give a patent the full reading it deserves to make an firm assertion, unlike most people in every patent-related post who read the abstract and make BS claims about it.

In addition, I mentioned a previous examples which makes you wonder (1) why this should be an issue now and not a decade ago e.g. with HTC's previous phones (2) how patentable such a thing should be.

I would not be surprised if this kind of thing appeared in the Psion PDAs, either - but it has been a very long time since I used one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com