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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

We really need to start naming and shaming the people willing to have their names listed on frivolous patents like this, and not just their employers. If you're listed as an inventor on an unethical patent, you have violated the implicit moral code of technologists and positioned yourself in opposition to progress.

Michael Stephen Brown and Herbert Anthony Little: you are not good people.

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http://paulgraham.com/6631327.html

Paul's patent would seem frivolous now, but it wasn't then. By applying for a patent, did he position himself in opposition to progress? Seems doubtful.

Here's another example: http://www.google.com/patents/US5204966 This patent was filed in 1990. I was two years old. The internet hardly existed then. Was this patent frivolous? Should these inventors be punished according to your ethics?

So what's our criteria for a frivolous patent? Perhaps "(a) it was filed since 2010, and (b) it covers some well-known technique." Yet that's completely arbitrary. Punishing someone for violating an arbitrary moral code is a recipe for evil.

It's a software patent, therefore it's frivolous.

"The basic algorithmic ideas that people are now rushing to patent are so fundamental, the result threatens to be like what would happen if we allowed authors to have patents on individual words and concepts."

- God himself, http://progfree.org/Patents/knuth-to-pto.txt

That's not very good reasoning.

If all software patents are bunk, so are many electrical engineering patents.

If software is built on hardware, anything I represent in software can be 1:1 related to the digital circuit equivalent. It may be silly or infeasible to do so - but I could make an ASIC or FPGA that runs my latest piece of code. Maybe those wouldn't count because they're too close to the way we think of software. Okay - I lay out my PCB with just 4011s NAND gates. Is this sufficiently far from software to get me a patent for my ideas?

I think software should move towards a trade secret model and abolish software specific patents entirely. Unless you can demand to see the source code, you can never prove whether or not I used your algorithm.

That - or, software developers need to make one gigantic document of every single idea they have implemented and used. If everyone has 5 ideas a day that they implemented and wrote down, we'd hit some sticky situations where a new problem is found. And, much like the patent system, if we put it online where anyone could potentially see it, we can say that it was prior art for any future patent.

Then - as they don't have to be good ideas necessarily, we run through and make all permutations of every single word on the page, leading to every possible idea that can be thought of in that context. Prior art for everything. Or just get Pi out and start translating it to English.

If all software patents are bunk, so are many electrical engineering patents.

And yet few people realize that. The USPTO continues to issue software-equivalent patents as well as software patents, and the courts uphold their validity, all while claiming that "real" math is not patentable, but offering no clear theoretical framework for distinguishing the two.

ASICs could be argued to be physical implementations and therefore patentable. On the other hand, when converting a software algorithm to an ASIC design involves no additional creative effort, how can the ASIC be patented?

We used to argue that inventions should be patentable, but abstract ideas around inventions are not deserving of patents. If I was interested in your supposed ASIC design, and in a position to be awarded a patent, I would argue that by taking the algorithm and realizing it into a chip fab (or by doing the requisite homework to bring it to a chip fab, if I didn't have the requisite billion dollars to actually market the chips) I had done sufficient work to be worthy of a patent.

As a good person (who doesn't want his patent thrown out when it goes to court), I would not try to submit an incomplete design and I would make sure that my filing included all of the necessary information to put the design into future generations' hands. (But not the billion dollars, of course!) Who's to say it involves no additional creative effort? I remember Computer Organization and Architecture classes as a Computer Scientist that were meant to teach me the left hand of the equation while making me aware of the tetris game that exists on the right hand side, but not bogging us down (since we were computer scientists and not electrical engineers.)

So out of self interest, maybe I should wish to be able to patent the algorithms. I know and I was raised better than that. Our pyramid schemes start and end with our brothers (and sisters) who majored in electrical engineering! Software is meant to be free, and hardware has innate marginal cost as a necessity of physics.

Remember it can be up to the patent examiner in an abstract sense with no rhyme or reason on whether or not to grant a patent, and many of the folks I hear would rather see "boots on the ground." In other words, without the billion dollars to put the fab into works: no patent for us, so no victory.

That's not very good reasoning.

If all software patents are bunk, so are many electrical engineering patents.

I hope that the second sentence is not supposed to be a substantiation for the first one. If anything, it's an example of why the system must be fixed.

Is this sufficiently far from software to get me a patent for my ideas?

It shouldn't give you that right in the first place. Patents were meant for engineering inventions, not for mathematical discoveries. Encoding a mathematical discovery in an engineered form does not change its substantial nature.

This brings up the problem of patent terms. At least in software, the ordinary term of a patent is obviously much too long. Even granting a ten-year monopoly would be onerous in this business; twenty is absurd - the technological landscape can change completely in that time.

Devil's advocate: by allowing software patents, that might tend to force technological change. You need to invent a new landscape if the current landscape is illegal or onerous to operate in.

For the record, software patents annoy me and I don't think they should be allowed.

But the patents are so general in scope that they tend to preempt any technological change.

What benefit is there in inventing a better mousetrap if the very idea of causing inconvenience to vermin has been patented, and the only people beating a path to your door are verm^H^H^H^H patent lawyers.

20 years was long enough for Microsoft to rise and fall.

Thing is that using common sense will reveal that this patent is restrictive in a bad way since it helps potential attackers to get into system. No matter if it's year 1980 or 2000. When Volvo invited three-point seat belt it was shared with other manufacturers because they were well aware the obvious benefit to all. Same goes eg. with blocking simple passwords.

There are places of employment where having your name attached to a patent is only barely optional. They hire "patent experts" to go around and figure out what is supposedly patentable with little to no input from developers and then have the "inventors" who touched those bits sign off on it (thus having their name attached to the patent). And of course you don't have to agree to this, but not agreeing essentially comes in the form of quitting or at least creating a schism that didn't exist between you and your manager and/or team.

While there exists a group of developers whose geographical situation and years of experience allow them to easily quit over such matters, there are plenty who aren't so lucky.

So while I am very much against software patents, I only support "naming and shaming" when it comes to those who are initiating, publically supporting or otherwise directly involved on the offensive side of patent lawsuits.

Even if the inventor refuses to sign the declaration, if they have an obligation to assign and are truly an inventor, their name will appear on the face of the patent. There are procedures at the patent office for proceeding with getting a patent even when an inventor refuses to sign.

But if the original inventor refuses to sign off, they will find someone else to 'invent' it.

Wow that's the worst situation I've heard of wrt to patent writing, but there are other, more seemingly innocuous ones too.

For instance, many places have departmental quotas on patents filed, and often have patents as a parameter in their quarterly/annual performance criteria.

I've been in that position. I even argued that the patent application was invalid due to prior art. The patent people consulted with other developers and just presented me with the paper work to sign. I signed it. It was that or be labeled as uncooperative. This was a company of 60 people, not some mega-corp.

Some companies have a culture of patenting. You want to stay hired - you patent everything you can, to reach the targets.

A friend worked for a company that did code maintenance (support/bug fixing) for some embedded IBM systems. They were bought by IBM, and in the first meeting their new IBM boss said to them "I checked the company records and I see no patents. This needs to be changed." What kind of patents can you get while fixing bugs in some C code written by somebody else?

And if you choose to work for one of those companies with a culture of patenting, you deserve the shame. If you run a company and you want to go patent crazy, you should be starved of engineering talent.

You do have a choice of where you work. "i just want to keep my job" is not a valid excuse for anything.

I think this is hard strategy to convince the world to follow. It involves causing culture shift in existing business and the culture momentum in this case is not insignificant.

The next problem is that the business exist in a legal system that rewards patenting profusely and broadly. A company that refuses to do this is at a disadvantage.

In addition to avoiding companies that participate in such behavior what other strategies to you think are worth while?

Google is the biggest advocate for change in the direction of devaluing software patents or at least they are easy to observe doing such.

>You do have a choice of where you work. "i just want to keep my job" is not a valid excuse for anything.

I'm not sure how valid this is. It might be true in most of the United States, but if you work for $GIANT_JAPANESE_AUTO_COMPANY which produces the second largest number of patents/year in the world after IBM (iirc), you have very few employment options other than said company geographically, and the corporate culture there makes it extremely difficult to change jobs at all.

How old are you? Your attitude of absolute, rigid moral certainty suggests you don't have much experience with the real world.

You do have a choice of where you work

Only if you don't care too much about where you work or what your work on. If you're happy to work on any old Rails app anywhere in the US, sure you have plenty of choice. If you want to work on cutting edge quantum computing close to New York, not so much.

>What kind of patents can you get while fixing bugs in some C code written by somebody else? //

Ones related to bug fixing? Ones concerning optimisation of code to enable lower memory use or lower power consumption or more compressed data formats or ...?

Some companies, the big players in electronics and computing for example, use patents not only to enforce the limited monopolies but also as bargaining chips enabling them to buy in to patent pools and such - like you can use these 500 patents if we can use your 500. I'm sure with some such deals some "packing" is needed to bolster the numbers and let you play above your station.

Your employer will have its internal lawyers call you to explain to you that your employment contract says that you have to assign them the patent, and that they're giving you $1,000 honorarium for this, and if you do not accept this then they will file your name anyway as "assignment by an uncooperative inventor." Not sure if you can blame someone for caving. Who wants to be called an "uncooperative inventor" by their employer?

There is no implicit moral code of technologists.

(unrelated to the topic of OP)

Which is too bad. Doctors do, but technologists arguably have a larger effect on the lives of all people.

Doctors have an explicit moral code.

You know what, maybe we could put them all on a list. We can name that list after a color. We will all promise not to hire anyone on the list unless they are willing to tell us more names to add to our list. Who cares if we hurt some innocent people along the way or destroy someone's career for an act they committed 20 years ago? At least we will be able to weed out any people with politics we disagree with.

In reality, neither the employees nor the employers deserve the blame. It is misguided laws that allow and even encourage this type of behavior. As the old saying goes, don't hate the player hate the game.

I agree with this. I might get some flack, but.....if you don't file the patent then someone else likely will. Morality points are great and all, but at the end of the day you're going to lose out to the company which "beat" you to it and will now attempt to collect royalties on you.

In a perfect world, no one would file software patents. Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world. Pretending like we do will simply burn you later.

So no, I'm not in favor of software patents but I think it's ignorant to act like ignoring them solves the problem.

> I might get some flack, but.....if you don't file the patent then someone else likely will.

If you don't file the patent and someone else tries to you can challenge it with your documented prior art.

Now that we are in a first to file system, will that actually invalidate it?

As long as you've documented or used the invention in public prior to the filing, I believe yes. IANAL, though.

If you're trying to keep it as a trade secret you might have trouble then.

Yes. Prior art was actually expanded with the new Act.

That's not the right approach, because usually an employee has an obligation to assign the invention to their employer. Frequently it's not really up to the inventor whether or not a patent gets filed on a particular idea.

Maybe they patented this only because no other potentially evil could patent?

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