Comment by phillmv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phillmv | Hacker News Reader

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> Isn't this what the patent system was created to do? I see a lot of complaints about when patents are wrongfully used, but this is the first time I see someone complaining when they are correctly used.

I'm saying the system is broken - not an uncommon argument here on HN - because I don't think these are ideas worth protecting.

Did you spend $10 million dollars investigating the right kind of chemical coating to get glass to respond to finger tips? Maybe you can get a monopoly on that.

Did you have an engineer dick around in a lab for a week? Why are we protecting this? We're basically rewarding incumbents.

Being a software engineer I obviously can't comment on other fields. But it strikes me that a huge proportion of these patents were awarded on incredibly specious grounds. I know innovation is obvious in hindsight but… I think these kinds of wide-swath patents destroy competition which harms all of us.

Patents as they stand today destroy more social value than they produce.

You are creating a purely rhetorical distinction here. There is nothing that can be so complex that it cannot be replicated by someone else -- that is the whole definition of engineering.

What you're saying that is that if it is innovation in materials research then it is valuable (probably because you and me don't know anything about it). But software engineering is not, probably because you could (in theory) do something similar. Let me tell you: if you were the one doing the design of a motion sensing system, I can bet it wouldn't be "easy". And you would want some kind of protection for your efforts. It is too simple to disregard somebody else's effort when making a hypothetical point.

> if you were the one doing the design of a motion sensing system, I can bet it wouldn't be "easy"

WELL… I never took any visual recognition courses in university. But there is a large amount of literature on the subject. I think there may have been more innovation producing cheap infrared 3d sensors that work reliably than converting that vector field into a bit of math you can pattern match - but what do I know?

We're disagreeing on the "obviousness" of these patents.

>The aspect of a patentable invention most difficult to judge is obviousness. An invention is patentable only if it is not obvious to a person who is typically educated or trained in the field of the invention.

http://www.uspatlaw.com/contant.php?id=3

I'm trained in the art and I think pinch to zoom is obvious. It would be the first thing you try right after scrolling.

At the end of the day, I think the USPTO has been far too lax in what they consider obvious or not obvious. And yeah, frankly, I think a stunningly large percentage of all software patents are 'too obvious'.

None of the examples of patent trolling we've seen are really 'misuses' of the system.

Let me tell you: if you were the one doing the design of a motion sensing system, I can bet it wouldn't be "easy".

This sentence makes no sense. The patent in question is not on a single technical implementation of pinch-to-zoom; it is on pinch-to-zoom in general. It does not merely protect the (easy) engineering needed to detect two fingers pinching, it protects the idea of "two fingers pinching = zoom". This is an obvious idea, and should not be protected by patents.

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