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Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

It is irreparable harm considering they can't get back the monopoly/leading market-share effect at this very young stage of the tablet market.

i.e. Sales and profits now is a lot more important than Sales and Money later.

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Doesn't that just mean more money though? I'd agree that the analysis of the damages would get pretty fuzzy at best if you're trying to account for such factors, but it's still ultimately just a loss of money.

That's the problem -- how do you calculate the lifetime value of that? It's not just lost sales, it's a substantial shift in the position of a huge corporation.

Here's another example -- Imagine how different things could be today if the AT&T lawsuits hadn't temporarily paralyzed the BSDs just as Linux was also emerging.

I can't even begin to quantify the cost of what could have happened if the lawsuit hadn't been filed by AT&T.

Can you tell some more detail about this AT&T lawsuit against BSD?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi

This stalled BSD development/adoption for 2 years while the legal status was in question.

Yeah, but AFAIK this economic model (and the Constitution) was supposed to work by trying to break monopolies, not encouraging them.

You do realize that a patent is a deliberately created, temporary monopoly.

Yes, and that's why I think (most) software patents are a crock of shit, same as most design patents. The very idea that someone can get a patent something like 'a tablet with a metal casing and rounded corners' is revolting.

But then, the whole patent system has been fucked up for umpteen years because of the way lawyers lay out the legalese on most patents. Something as specific as a new protocol to transfer data (say, SPDY) can be massaged into being a vague generic definition ("a binary transmission method designed to make HTTP-like data structures and operations possible in a more efficient manner") that could cover a lot of ground, giving the owner of the patent the power to halt innovation (ZeroMQ could very well fall under the umbrella defined of such 'patent') while giving exactly 0 benefit to anyone.

I'm just waiting for someone cheeky enough to come up with a vague wording for describing a 'wooden and/or plastic object designed with the purpose of holding items and or facilitating common household tasks' (i.e. a piece of furniture) and sue IKEA.

Where would Google be without the PageRank patent to give them a monopoly on search? Don't think many people have an issue with that.

what an absurdly wrongheaded statement, do you really think that Google depended on patent protection to stop others from using PageRank, and even if they did, how could it ever be conclusively proven that PageRank was used by somebody else?

What the hell? How is the PageRank patent not protection to Google? If Yahoo, LiveSearch and whatever other famous search engine just went ahead and ripped off Google then Google wouldn't be the Google we know now... Proving it shouldn't be any more difficult than asserting any patent. The defendant would have to show how they're ranking pages I would imagine, and if there's an infringement, they're found guilty.

"What the hell? How is the PageRank patent not protection to Google?"

Because it belongs to Stanford University, not Google.

Under exclusive license by Google. Basically the same as having the patent yourselves

I know less than little about most things, but wouldnt that m ake search engienes compete more, giving us, the users, better results?

I think there's a fine line where on one side inventors cant net a profit without a time-based monopoly but on the other side of this fine line it's just hurting competition.

Sort of. The average search results would have gotten a little better, but only because Excite/Altavista/etc would have poached some key early employees of Google and walked away with their algorithm, which was Googles key advantage back then. So the big incumbents would be able to use PageRank AND their pre-existing market share to destroy google easily. The huge leap forward in search (and it was a huge leap) would have never happened, because their would be no challengers who could match the purchasing power and market share of incumbents

Google has a patent on pagerank? If their algorithm was patented, it would be open for anyone to read and understand - just not to use. My understanding is their ranking is something they keep a closely guarded secret, and to apply for a patent on it would be silly.

Or was pagerank something they did early on and I'm mixing up two things.

You got it mixed up. They built Google on the (patented) PageRank algorithm, but have since improved upon it to such a degree that the what they currently use bears little resemblance.

Google's secret sauce has a lot less to do with page rankings and a lot more to do with how to do really cheap and efficient data processing.

So, if they had really crappy, but fast search results, they would be just as successful? That doesn't hold merit at all

Don't be silly. I'm not saying search results aren't important; I'm saying they're not difficult. The specifics of Google's algorithm have to stay secret to make it harder to game them, but the real "secret sauce" is the stuff they don't talk much about: custom built networking switches, smart power grids, and clever software like Map/Reduce. I bet R&D spends a lot more on that stuff than on figuring out how to improve ranking order.

But what you said was that the constitution was supposed to break monopolies. No it wasn't.

And the inverse, where Apple inflicts similar, irreparable harm to their competitors that are using "bogus" patents? Consider Apple is already a market leader, the implications are more damning in the opposite direction.

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