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Comment by windlep | Hacker News Reader

I remember when I saw a presentation by the macaroon authors a few years back, there were pending patents that Google filed around them. While the authors claimed Google wouldn't sue anyone, I'm always a bit skeptical about such claims. I thought macaroons would be helpful for some of my use-cases, but since I now knew there were patents that'd be wilful infringement so I didn't bother.

I can't find the patents now, so perhaps they were rejected or withdrawn. I had assumed that was why macaroons hadn't caught on more widely.

Edit: Found the patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9397990B1/

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There are so many stupid patents out there about everything we could possibly work on, it is actually reassuring to see that Google is assigned to some of them, rather than to some storefront in Marshall, Texas.

Google has an open pledge to not litigate open source uses of its patents: https://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/pledge

What does a "open pledge" like that realistically mean, in case they someday broke that pledge? Would the court-case 100% surely get thrown out? Am I legally protected because of this pledge?

Just look at their litigation record. They have been around for long enough to have a meaningful track record.

That doesn't mean things won't change in the future.

Their track record in other places has shown a significant decline (perhaps related to DoubleClick completing their reverse-acquisition of them).

That's my take on the death of don't be evil. Doubleclick was the worst kind of company and the merger with google seems to have diluted enough evil into google that google's immune system failed to kill it.

> Just look at their litigation record.

I guess if one looks at those, it'll look like they won't sue you?

But my hypothetical case is what about if they do sue you, does this actually protect you, or not? Does a "pledge" have enough meaning that it could change the outcome in a court case?

Yes.

The patents page (https://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/patents/) does not include the macaroon patent. Maybe they forgot to update it?

Meanwhile, fly.io is not open source. Some of their software is, but not all of it. Same likely holds for the SaaS you're thinking of starting.

maybe this is similar to google's patenting of dropout for neural networks? you can never know but so far there haven't been many adverse effects and they claim that they patent it so others can't maliciously patent and enforce it.

dropout patent link: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9406017B2/en

That was what the authors claimed when I asked them about the macaroon patent. It'd be nice if Google had a legal document associated with patents they never plan to enforce, or the constraints around when they might enforce them (e.g. only against patent trolls) that a company could rely on.

I don't disagree but maintaining an arsenal of defensive parents is Enterprise IP legal 101. All the big companies do this. The goal is to avoid litigation by mutually assured destruction. At least that's what they tell you. Many projects grant you patents as part of, for example, an OSS project's license.

It's not unusual to include a clause that voids any such terms of you litigate over your own parents, for example -- hence the mutually assured destruction. Can you imagine what would happen if Google and Facebook tried to duke out some dumb software patent in court? A waste for all parties.

Lastly Google has a wealth of resources here: https://google.github.io/opencasebook/patents/#patents-in-op...

The Pythonish pseudo-code, rendered to an image (figure 7) -- is that common nowadays? Though the patent I see is dated 2013.

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