Goliath v. David, AAC style | Hacker News Reader

Goliath v. David, AAC style

niederfamily.blogspot.com

50 pointsinetsee11 comments

Looking at the app's video, it appears to be a directed soundboard with a tree structure, parts of speech, and queueing of words:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpafqM1kiNo

Even if the app got sued out of existence, implementing the same functionality would be fairly trivial.

I'm assuming that the unique, patentable portions are a lot of "when used in this way" clauses, and the speech research to come up with the contents of the soundboards.

The end run around this would be an generic soundboard app with a bunch of silly noises but with the ability to load other soundboards and rulesets in a set data format that would implement the functionality.

Yes, because personal anecdotes are exactly what was missing from a reasonable and unbiased re-evaluation of patent rights on a planet-wide scale.

Nothing against you or your daughter (hey, make sure you have the ipa file, IOS app cracking instructions, a copy of AppSync, and a jailbreakable device or three - and you're set for YEARS) but this isn't the kind of discourse that is likely to get anyone's ball rolling in any direction it wasn't already - touching though it is.

Best of luck to you and your family.

You may not like it, but to most people a story with a cute kid in it is worth a thousand reports produced by a team of legal and technical experts. We here may not like the appeal to anecdote and emotion, but these things would not be common logical fallacies if they weren't effective.

So this might be just the story that will stick in people's craw about what patent reform could mean to them.

On a related note: One of the least popular things about patents is the ability to patent something relatively obvious and then sit on that "invention" for years waiting for someone else to "copy" it. Patent trolls have taken this to an art form.

As a way to fight patent trolls who produce nothing, it's been suggested that a requirement be added to attempt to actually CREATE and MARKET the technology. That you can't just sit on a patent and wait for someone else to stumble on it by accident; in fact, if someone else DOES stumble on it by accident, it should be considered de facto evidence that the patent isn't novel.

How is this related to the article? If you DID have the requirement that a patent owner actually produce a product, then you could add on the additional restriction that the patent would only apply in the market that the patented product is being sold to. If they can but won't sell an iPad version of their product, and they are notified that someone wants to use their patent that way, then (after a reasonable grace period) the patent would lose its ability to prevent competition in that realm.

Remember the Flip video camera? Super cheap video that anyone could use? They were allegedly working on a new version that would allow you to use the camera as an ultra-cheap video conference device. They were bought by Cisco for $590M, and then just before releasing this new product, Cisco shut them down. The Wikipedia article [1] suggests that maybe the purchase was to acquire patents, but since the company was still profitable and they made no move to divest their ownership of Flip, it seems more likely they shut it down rather than allowing the consumer device to compete with their expensive enterprise video conferencing devices.

It's when patents are used to PREVENT a product from existing that they should be null-and-void. That doesn't help "...promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." [2] IMO, it's only when a patent is used to grant you a temporary monopoly on a product to help you recoup your R&D expenses through sales of the product that it should be valid.

And in the case of an iPad app being able to do the work of a large $9000 piece of hardware -- if they won't produce an app, they should lose patent protection that can be used against someone who CAN produce an app. Protecting their market for $9000 hardware devices shouldn't be done at the expense of "Progress of Science..."; it would be like blacksmiths using a patent portfolio to prevent cars from being manufactured, holding back progress rather than promoting it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_Video

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

There are a lot of "shoulds" in this comment. I'm no fan of the patent protection racket we have going, but what you lay out would be infinitely worse. All those "shoulds" are decisions that would be made by beurocrats with little real understanding (who really knows whether the $9000 device can really be substituted with an iPad and app?).

Patent reform is tough. The obvious one (no pun intended) is that patents really should be non-obvious. Beyond that, I vacillate between killing them and severely neutering them. I think they could have some value if they protected inventions that were two or more steps ahead of the current technology. Being able to patent the place everybody would put their next foot is inane.

i think the simplest and easiest solution to patent reform would be to just scale back the term. 20 years is garbage, i'd say that patents should be granted for a maximum of four years. their purpose is to give innovators a chance to use their invention to build a business, and if you can't build a business in four years you aren't going to. in a fast moving industry like software, the term should be more like 6mo - 1yr.

also, it'd be great to kill licensing of patents. it would turn patents from an IP marketplace to a use-it-or-lose-it incentive for inventors.

>what you lay out would be infinitely worse. All those "shoulds" are decisions that would be made by beurocrats with little real understanding (who really knows whether the $9000 device can really be substituted with an iPad and app?).

I can't say that I have all the answers, but neither are you providing any alternatives.

Can you make a suggestion as to how to prevent patents (or for that matter other IP protections) from being used as a tool to prevent innovation as opposed to promote it, as it was intended?

"in fact, if someone else DOES stumble on it by accident, it should be considered de facto evidence that the patent isn't novel."

You have industry support for this idea:

“The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.” ― John Carmack

There is a serious problem that this is the tip of the iceberg for, though. Certain types of technology essentially become part of you, either cognitively or physically, such as this. It is particularly cruel to install something into somebody or allow someone to effectively incorporate their software into their brain, and then yank it away because of patents or some other property issue. Does the company's societally-manufactured right to their IP fully trump this girl's right to speech? This question will become more important over time, but it does cover only a small subset of the Great IP Conflict.

To play devil's advocate, her right to speech is also societally-manufactured. Without our social expectation that we should use technology to make the world accessible to people with disabilities, she would have had to get by without a voice. Even the ADA is a relatively recent addition, at the expense of a lot of architectural freedom (like the necessity of designing around ramps and elevators).

The nature of patents leads to situations like this pretty frequently in medical technology, with the iPad app seeming analogous to generic drugs. Should we let the patents run their course and make assistive iPad apps eligible for insurance coverage? Limit the patent terms in cases like this? Abolish software patents altogether? There are a lot of arguable positions on IP, but issues like this one make it far more personal than most.

All you need is the ipa saved and in iTunes. I have a copy of VLC for iOS saved from when it was available and I can run it just fine on my devices. You just have to load the ipa from within iTunes.

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