Spotify Sued For Patent Infringement Just Weeks After Entering US Market

If you have a patent, you MUST have a product or be working on a product using the technology in question or you cannot litigate others using your idea.

Patents are required to protect the truly innovative individuals and groups from huge corporations who can, as you said, just steamroll them and steal ideas.

I'm afraid it will get a lot worse before we finally get this fixed, though.

Me too. I'm thinking that the Apple/Lodsys one has the best chance of making a change, as for Apple so much is at stake.

I don't know how it is over in the US, but here in the UK the whole issue isn't really high profile, even with stakes as high as they are. (IE. HTC not being able to sell mobiles if the patent decision is upheld in December.)

One thing is for sure, I for one would not put any app in a US app store, which is a shame for me and my potential customers.

Essentially, a competitor that could steamroll you without a patent would be able to steamroll you with a patent.

The one case I can think of where it would be reasonable for a patent to protect you is if a company offers to buy your product, looks at the code, and then has its developers create a knock-off based on your code. And even then copyright law is probably sufficient (analogous situations arise in other industries where copyright is the only law).

Historically, the alternative to patents is trade secrets. For example, you have Coca-Cola's closely-protected formula. In the example you gave, it's just as likely that Skype would instead protect its technology as a trade secret, and reverse-engineering it would fall under current laws.

It might be possible to consider the rapid development cycle in the software industry and simply shorten the period of protection granted by a patent on software to something like 2 years, which seems long looking forward but is pretty short in retrospect. Companies like Lodsys would be forced to spend a lot more money acquiring new patents on a regular basis -- enough extra to continue their litigious cancer on the industry -- but wouldn't manage to substantially halt development or production in the software industry.

Even then, I think I'd still prefer to see patents abolished altogether for non-mechanical and non-chemical inventions.

Obviously, Trademarks and Patents are two different beasts, but the mechanism for enforcing and protecting trademarks i think is usually along the lines that most people consider fair, which is that the trademark is used to protect an interest for as long as that interest is active (and semi-vigilantly policing its mark) and is using that trademark to protect its own notoriety.

Obviously, trademarks and patents are two different beasts. But (and this is why i'm repeating myself) my point is that you don't have to get rid of these sorts of laws. Trademarks are equally nebulous, but their model seems to me a huge success in the world of intellectual property management whereas (software) patents seem to be a stickier situation altogether.

just my two cents, because again, i don't think we should necessarily get rid of software patents, but i think that thinking of them using this old framework has been problematic in a way that trademarks haven't been (despite similarly ridiculous, yet defensible, use cases, i.e. trademarking 'tiffany blue').

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Maintaining_rights

There's your problem right there.

Look at Zynga for example, how they've ripped off many other smaller developers, and they haven't really "paid" for it. The other commenters are right. Small developers can't afford a big lawsuit either way.

But I think copying each other leads to higher quality products, even if it's done by the big companies. How small companies can stay ahead is with "disruptive innovation". The way disruptive innovation works in general is that the big companies don't want to copy you, because it means dramatic changes to their company and the way they do business.

It also usually means lower revenue (per unit) which they don't like because they think it can't sustain their much higher cost structures. Adopting the new disruptive innovation that is cheaper also means cutting into their own profits from their more expensive products.

Take Intel for example. It's not that they can't build ARM chips or don't realize the potential of ARM chips. It's that they really don't want to do it. They've tried it before and it presented them with a huge conflict of interest and it gave them revenues they didn't think were appropriate for a company like theirs. So they'd rather continue to try building an x86 chip to compete with the ARM chips, which is Atom, even though they keep failing coming up with a good alternative. I don't think Atom will ever be able to keep pace with ARM chips in all 3 of these factors: performance, energy efficiency and price, or by the time they do it, it will be too late.

The answer, I have come to realize, is no. It will always be no. Ridiculous examples do not drive change. The only thing that will drive change is a direct attack on John Doe (aka patenting the mRNA polymerase gene and demanding licensing fees from everyone) or collaborative effort that has a direct effect on John Doe- for example, a "strike" by a large number of significant companies, or a "dark knight" who uses patents to completely shut down a very popular company like Apple and thus incite the people.

I am a pessimist, I know, but honestly if you've paid attention these past few years, you'll have noticed that obscene patent stories just keep coming.

To be honest I don't see the difference. For any given complicated piece of hardware, you can build an equally complicated piece of software. For every simple software patent out there, there is an equally ridiculous non-software patent (e.g., foot-pedal washing sinks)

I think whatever your stance on the issue of patents is, you shouldn't treat software as a special case.

Way too much money has been poured into buying massive patent portfolios by the big boys, from Apple & Co. to Paul Allen. If some upstart Congressman suddenly tried to pass a law to invalidate them, you can bet multi-millions would be spent to prevent that and get him/her unelected.

A compromise that protects startups in some way may be the best we can hope for at this point, I'm afraid.

Now, I can agree that it's conceivable that there could be a benefit for allowing such ideas to be patented. For instance, I've always thought that it would be convenient to have a foot-pedal to turn on your kitchen sink so you didn't have to use your hands to turn on and off the water while you washed dishes. In my imagination, the everyone would immediately realize how great these pedals were if a single company started to produce them. And, in that case, everyone would enjoy a huge boost in utility.

However, there's no way for me to capture any of that surplus because I can't patent a foot pedal for a sink under the current definition of a patent. If I started a company to sell these foot pedal installation, and it became popular, a million other companies could enter the market and sink me. And, all things considered, it's probably better that way.

http://www.zappa.com/whatsnew/news/FZ-Proposal/index.html

The way we did it was pretty trivial: just piping into rsh from and to /dev/audio. However it was certainly streaming of music by anyone's definition.

[1] Making the admins of said network mighty pissed off in the process -- I believe the whole campus was on 10 Mbps at the time.

Makes a neat argument that software patent arguments are finally entering the mainstream.

It's kind of a "put your money where your mouth is" type solution, which actually helps the little guy, too. I like it!

It doesn't help against granting stupid patents in the first place (e.g. Amazon's one click checkout), but limits their impact, I suppose.