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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

Trouble is, what killed the patent was prior disclosure from the researchers.

The same thing has happened to friends of mine; an undergraduate's summer research presentation may have betrayed patentable inventions. An effect of the 1-year prior art rule is to force researchers to keep mum about what they're doing and to generate greater numbers of incremental patents.

If you're interested in the free flow of information, using a researcher's own publications to kill patents may not help the cause.

Prior art from other work in the past? Bring it on!

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I didn't think from reading it that the two groups at MS were the same - I assumed they were independent parts of the org, in which case it was fairly clear that this was an idea that various people have had without direct communication, and thus throws serious doubt on "non-obvious". I'm pretty sure that you could find plenty of other people who've had the idea.

Companies like Akamai used to (probably still do) have image resizing proxies which took something like a multi-resolution TIFF file as part of their extended CDN features. I can't remember when I first saw that in action, but I'm sure it was pre-2011.

I'm also not sure why using a researchers own publications to kill a patent would be bad in your eyes. If you think something is really, truly patentable you'd keep it under wraps until you did so, as far as possible. If you only decided later, once you'd published research and people were productizing that research - and you then patented and sued them - well, that's exactly the kind of thing that should be stomped on!

Agreed with much of the above.

If you think something is really, truly patentable you'd keep it under wraps until you did so, as far as possible.

What this encourages though is, "If you think something is maybe patentable, you can't ever tell anyone about it until the invention is complete and fully functional." Nifty side projects occasionally become a big deal. For precision hardware, development time is often 5-10 years. For young researchers, it's critical to be able to talk about whatever it is that you do.

Completely agreed that bait-and-switch is unethical and wrong.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "prior disclosure" here. They filed a patent application: those are supposed to be public. The prior art Joel used was the documentation of the Win32 API from 5 years previously (and I'm pretty sure we've been using variable-resolution apps since earlier than 2008, and not just in Windows -- this was just an example). Could you clarify what the problem is?

App icons in OS X are interpolated between about 4 different sized images. I remember reading about this in the developer docs back in about 2002. I'd be surprised if Apple don't have pretty much the same patent on this already but registered 10 years earlier :-)

Mac OS has done this since much earlier. The classic Mac OS needed at least two different representations of the same icon, one for the desktop (32x32) and one for the application switcher (16x16). The application switcher, initially called MultiFinder, was introduced in 1987[1]. If memory serves, the various sizes of an icon were stored together in the ICNS resource of the app binary's resource fork. There was a developer tool provided by Apple called ResEdit which allowed you to view or change the icons of any application, in a nice GUI editor (of course).

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

I'm not 100% sure what you are confused about, but let me take a stab at it. Prior disclosure is public disclosure of the invention prior to the patent application. The one year rule states that once you publicly disclose an invention, you have one year from that date to file a patent application. Otherwise, your invention is considered public domain and cannot be patented. Does that clarify?

The problem I think you are referring to is that researchers run the risk of shooting themselves in the foot by prematurely presenting their findings unless they file an application in the process. Doing so would ruin their chances of being granted a patent.

I understand how prior disclosure works, my confusion is that nothing like that seems to have happened here. The patent was invalidated on the basis of documentation of a different piece of software with the same features released 5 years prior (albeit by the same company).

However, having read the ruling, I see it explicitly cites the prior-disclosure rule. So the bad patent system has invalidated a bad patent, but in a bad way.

The 1-year grace period is there specifically so researchers can publish and patent. What counts are the publication and filing dates. File within the year and you will be in a position to earn protection.

However, the 1-year grace period isn't available everywhere. The USA has it, for instance, but the EU doesn't.

IANAL, TINLA.

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