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Comment by blahbl4hblahtoo | Hacker News Reader

This is an area where the downvotes are just waiting to crush you...but as per usual, I disagree with the premise that these guys have done something wrong.

Patents and copyright provide small businesses or inventors the means to monetize their innovation for a time. I don't see what's wrong with that. It could stand being reformed, like almost everything in American civil life...institutions are broken all over...but holding this small group of ira glass look-a-likes responsible for the larger system being broken is kind of lame.

They made something wonderful, they should be able to be rewarded under the terms of the law. Don't like the law? Take that up in the political process.

At this point usually everyone says that the political process is irreparably broken and the Republic is lost. If you think that's the case...I don't know...just kill yourself. There's nothing you can do and everything, everywhere, is bad. Woe is me. Oh. Oh, woe is me.

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Patents and copyrights are more different than similar. Copyrights provide immediate protection with almost no up-front cost, and apply almost invariably to cases where people have deliberately and overtly derived value from your work.

A small business attempting to make use of the patent system can expect to spend many tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of waiting 5-7 years for the issuance of a document that entitles them to wait 2-5 years for the privilege of a hearing in court which only has a chance of being remunerative if the counterparty is a gigantic tech company that can afford to bury you in legal costs.

Aside from all this, flip a coin: heads you're in the "right" and have a "case", tails your patent claims are insufficient to keep anyone from realizing value from the idea underlying your patent: you lose, and we all breathe a sigh of relief.

Patents make sense for some industries, where inventions are clear (or at least justiciable) and product lifecycles are measured in half-decades. But they are decidedly unuseful for software entrepreneurs.

Patents are a pox on the software industry.

(I have a few, from earlier in my career; I've never been the one paying for them).

Things that are perfectly legal and acceptable in some areas may be heavily frowned upon in others. The law can't take into account best practices for each group, it has to be broadly applicable for the entirety of the population. In that regard, it doesn't sound like IA has done anything illegal or even anything that should be illegal.

What can be done, however, if you disapprove of their actions is to do exactly what the OP is doing. Calling them out, shaming them to a group that might feel similarly. Likewise, if one of my friends is being a jerk, I can choose not to be friends with him and also tell my other friends what he did that irritated me. Hitting on my girlfriend is not illegal, but it's not acceptable in my social circle either.

Not everything needs to be illegal, sometimes it can just be immoral to a certain audience.

> Patents and copyright provide small businesses or inventors the means to monetize their innovation for a time.

No they don't. Quite the opposite: they prevent small businesses from innovating, as they're hampered by the legal minefields of patent and copyright infringement. They only benefit large corporations that already have a legal team and their own patent portfolio to bargain with.

Two lies that can be ignored; a rich man telling you what's best for the poor and a large corporation telling you what's best for small business :-)

Considering the number of posts and links in the threads here on HN showing prior art, making the assumption that just because you saw it on IA first doesn't mean they invented it.

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