And then there are the tech giants, they do not notice you until you get real big yourself.
So yeah, the situation sure is depressing, but then again at the end of the tunnel is money and fame, it is only reasonable the path shall be difficult.
This isn't a valid use of the patent system - it's an abuse of that system. This is very clear to both people that suppose software patents and that oppose them.
If someone can show a valid, nontrivial patent that Android is being attacked with, I might change my mind.
Lawsuits over trivial patents scare me because I might be the next target. If I found another startup some day, and develop all my own technology, I can still be sued over trivial patents. If it can happen to Google, what's to stop it from happening to any of us, if we become successful enough to be targets for this sort of thing?
But legally speaking, none of us have the authority to determine what qualifies as trivial. Google certainly has the fund to battle it out and demands re-examination of every patents involved. Just recently Apple got USPTO to declare several S3 patents invalid.
Just do it.
Technically we can be sued and the court will decide what is 'trivial'. But that is completely messed up. We, the software engineers, know what is trivial or not in our field - software engineering.
If lawyers decide what is trivial and what isn't in software, then every software engineer founding a startup needs a lawyer to go over all the code he or she writes. That's a horrible burden on innovation!
The question remains to what extend do we protect IP so the system yields net benefit to the society, not the opposite?
I have no answer, but I'm Chinese, I've witnessed a complete disregard for IP in practice facilitates intellectual cesspool and general lack of innovation. I hesitate to join the chant for total software patents abolishment.
And should not the professionals in this case - software engineers - be the right people to make that determination?
> What's obvious and trivial after the fact may not be trivial at all before someone come up with it in the first place.
Yes. But in practice, no one reads patent filings. So the act of filing patents doesn't spread information that makes an idea seem trivial later on. Of course the act of making a successful product might do that.
> The question remains to what extend do we protect IP so the system yields net benefit to the society, not the opposite?
That's a tough question. But it is clear that suing over trivial patents is detrimental to innovation. Software patents of actual substance, on the other hand, are a debatable issue.
None of the patents being sued over in the mobile space so far appear to have any substance.
Note that I don't count the Java patents here - Oracle isn't a mobile company, and the patents aren't mobile in particular. Oracle's lawsuit against Google isn't of the same category as the other anti-Android lawsuits. The other ones come from competitors in the mobile space.
Regarding the Java patents themselves, I haven't read any, so I can't say I have an opinion.
And really the merits of various patents these companies holds are not the focus of my argument, I understand you feel quite differently.
I can't disagree more.
Should common sense be how we decide what medical option to pursue? Or whether a mathematical proof is valid? Or even whether a legal argument is allowed - in the US judges determine that in many case, not juries?
What possible reason is there for common sense to determine whether a software patent is trivial or not? The only question should be whether it actually is trivial or not. The people who know that are software engineers.
We let doctors do whatever they suggest a lot, we also have the right to refuse medical help if deemed mentally capable. Random people with common sense decide for theirselves.
and in most of microsoft's existing licensing agreements with android vendors, that haven't even disclosed what patents are being licensed. there's just some vague threat that they have a claim, and you're expected to pay up if you don't want to get sued.
I'm not happy with the current system either. But I do not see IP legal actions as all evil, the purpose can be purely to set road blocks for competitors. But as long as it is within the bound of law. After all Android's price barrier is also pretty insurmountable.
I'm very skeptical that HTC does not know what Microsoft's been licensing. Others do not, sure.
and yes, i'm sure HTC knows what they are licensing. but they've signed NDAs as part of their agreement, and microsoft refuses to publicly disclose what patents they think they hold. if google could learn what patents microsoft is charging license fees for, they could potentially write android in a way that didn't infringe on those patents. microsoft doesn't want this. they want android to infringe, so they can continue to collect money off it. this is a malicious abuse of the patent system. there is no other way to describe it.
The core idea of Free Software is the notion that one's own creations have every right to be free. If I create something independently, it is my right to give it away for free. Why should some other company I've never heard of and/or never done business with get to charge license fees for something I created myself, without their help?
Same with Java. Name one feature of Java that hasn't been done 100 times in one form or another in some other language
This is why software patents are absurd. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants.
In the tech industry, 20 years are couple of lifetimes long. I'm in favor of shorten the period too.
Oracle is another matter entirely, and arguing that case requires discussing whether an unoriginal programming language and associated virtual machine should be patentable. Oracle gets no sympathy from me because of the way they've treated the various communities that built up around Sun's products, but beyond that, I think a rational case can be made that Google's independent implementation of a register-based VM should not be seen as infringing patents on Java's stack-based VM, and/or that Java's patents cover things that are obvious or non-novel.