Ask HN: Tech journalist asks, What prompted this fuss over patents?
I am a dogged Hacker News browser, a startup founder, and a contributing editorialist at a small Chicago-based tech news blog, Tech.li. I've noticed, over the past two to three months, that intellectual property matters (particularly software patents) are a "trending topic", if you will, on HN.
If I were more adroit with code, I'd us the HN Search API to get all the instances of the words "patent" "software patent" "patent troll" and "intellectual property", and come up with a nice graph showing, as of late, a precipitous increase in these words' occurrence on HN. I invite someone to undertake this little project. (I can do all of the data, I just need the data.)
But, I'm not here to suggest an interesting data visualization project.
I come to the community asking a couple of very simple questions.
First, what precipitated all of this attention to software patents, and intellectual property in general? Granted, I've been living under a rock for the past few months (startups tend to do that, even for people on the "business side"). It could be that I missed the big event which prompted this debate.
My second question has two parts: Why is the US government so recalcitrant when it comes to changing an obviously broken intellectual property system, especially as it relates to science and technology? And, other than writing vitriolic blog posts and inveighing against the USPTO and so-called "patent trolls", is there anything else we–innovators, technologists, hackers, artists, and what have you–can do to change things?
A third question goes out to those in the HN community who hold patents, whether hardware, software, or (as is often the case) vaporware. Why did you patent your thing? Was it on the suggestion of a lawyer, your investors? Did you file a patent application without any advice, just because you wanted to? I'm curious.
Anyways, just a few questions. It'll be interesting to see how the discussion unfolds.
Best, Jason