The Patent Pledge | Hacker News Reader

The Patent Pledge

thepatentpledge.org

23 pointstathagatadg13 comments

Looking at the names I assume these companies dont have a lot of patents.

Small companies with few/no patents have strong motivation to join (the possibility of limited protection for free) and nothing to lose by doing so, since they have few or no patent rights to assert.

Big companies with lots of patents have little to gain, since there are a very small set of patents on the list. They have lots to lose: the inability to use their big investment in IP in a competitive way.

So why would holders of large patent portfolios want to join this? Chicken, meet egg.

Btw, I detest sw patents too.

The hope is that if enough of these companies sign the pledge, so will the big companies; if they will or not remains to be seen. If several companies with a large enough patent portfolio signed it, I believe other companies might do the same.

They all honestly hope to be big though. So it is a significant step for them to commit to something like this.

A more general scheme might be, pledge to not assert software patent rights, against any other entity who as also taken the same pledge.

That seems less biased, more equally attractive to large patent holders.

This is a positive idea, but I think it should be done somewhat differently. I'm not sure the size of the company is the main factor. Instead, I would like to see something like

> No use of software patents against open source code

Companies could then protect themselves from patent lawsuits by open sourcing their code, which makes sense since everyone benefits from open source code.

>which makes sense since everyone benefits from open source code.

Companies (and people in general the last 30 years) have not concerned themselves with doing things to benefit everyone. I'm sure open sourcing code would be better overall, but I don't see that happening with most major software.

Corporations are legally required to act in the best interest of their shareholders. If something benefits the company at the expense of humanity, they are required to act against the best interests of humanity.

Companies could then protect themselves from patent lawsuits by open sourcing their code

How?

He's saying that _if_ the agreement was "no first-use patent lawsuits against companies who have open sourced their code," and _if_ that agreement was held to, _then_ those companies who open-sourced their code would be protected.

Signups may be slow as long as the app is requesting unnecessarily broad OAuth access to signees' Twitter accounts:

"This application will be able to: read Tweets from your timeline; see who you follow, and follow new people; update your profile; post Tweets for you."

Twitter only seems to give you three options to choose from: Read, Read and Write, Read and Write and access direct messages. I used Read and Write for this app. Is there a way to be more granular and just request permission to tweet and is that going to have a notable effect on the speed of the app?

I meant 'slow' as in 'slow to trickle in', not as in 'performant'. Concretely: I love the idea, would gladly have our startup sign the pledge, but I'm not enthused about giving a third party that level of access to the company's Twitter account.

I imagine many others will feel the same way, and more so the larger the company, which could be counterproductive. Perhaps you might consider accepting pledges with alternate means as well; the existing signees presumably didn't use the Twitter app for it.

I remember reading something about game theory and why things like this never work. Maybe someone more versed in game theory can explain better?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com