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Comment by davemp | Hacker News Reader

The bar for novel/non-obvious seems really low if this patent has been successfully defended.

There is almost no bar now. The USPTO is derelict, and an ignorant ruling allowed what was supposed to be illegal: software patents.

Even worse is that Red simply ripped off JPEG2000 and got a patent on it.

The patent "system" has become a tool for exactly what it was supposed to prevent: the theft of people's work.

Thomas Edison Was a “Patent Troll” (2014) https://slate.com/technology/2014/05/thomas-edison-charles-g...

The only saving grace is the relatively short expiration of twenty years. if it was seventy years after the author's death progress would grind to a halt.

IP expiration dates are a "brain plasticity" parameter in society. Higher values mean lower rates of change, too low values mean too high rates of change. Twenty years is a sweet spot.

20 years is eternity in software. It may as well be forever.

If I remember correctly, the patent is simply compressing the RGBG bayer filter sub-pixels as separate R, G, and B images. That's almost the entirety of it, and some rubber stamper at the USPTO granted it.

Compressing it using JPEG2000. You can actually decompress the image using an off-the-shelf JPEG2000 decoder.

Here's hoping GPT-4 will be used to flood USPTO with trivially "novel" patents, until the right people are forced to admit that the system no longer works at all and needs serious reform.

Imagine an AI trying to defend it self from future better AI by jamming the patent system.

It’s wild (and scary) how many plot points from Accelerando have recently leapt into the realm of plausibility.

Sounds like an interesting book, I’ll check that out

AFAIK it costs something like $10,000 to file a patent, although most of that is legal fees that maybe GPT could reduce.

I imagine in this case a bulk discount would apply.

Do not need to register. Just generate a lot of text based on small derivations of existing patents and put them in a searchable public database (you will have good embeddings anyways) with a clear cryptographic time stamp on it.

Now if a new patent is filed the patent office cannot ignore it as prior work. While the bar for machine generated patents is high. There is IMHO no reason why prior art cannot be machine generated and if something very similar can equally generated by a machine it becomes even more questionable if something is patentable at all.

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