Comment by MCRed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MCRed | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

If we're going to have a discussion about patents, we need to actually have a discussion about them, not base our opinions on blatant misrepresentations. For example, people often claim that Apple "patented" the rounded rect, which is so dishonest that basically you have to call it a deliberate lie.

The title of the article is politically biased. Amazon did not patent shooting a subject in front of a white background. They also never patented buying something with just one click.

The problem is, that the political agenda against patents (and the people who oppose them, it seems) don't care whether the patents are on something innovative or not.

For instance, I participated in some work that resulted in a patent of a solution for some very difficult problems in MMOs. The outraged headline was "Company patents playing games online!"

When all of the opposition against patents comes form people misrepresenting patents, it's hard to see it as anything other than sour grapes that certain companies are more innovative than others. (the recent anti-patent movement is coincident with a specific innovation.)

While I agree with you that anti-patent rhetoric often spawns ridiculous headlines with unread articles beneath them, do you not feel that Amazon's patent in this case is a little odd?

Here's the abstract, for those who tl;dr'ed the article:

"Disclosed are various embodiments of a studio arrangement and a method of capturing images and/or video. One embodiment of the disclosure includes a front light source aimed at a background, an image capture position located between the background and the front light source, an elevated platform positioned between the image capture position and the background, and at least one rear light source positioned between the elevated platform and the background. A subject can be photographed and/or filmed on the elevated platform to achieve a desired effect of a substantially seamless background where a rear edge of the elevated platform is imperceptible to an image capture device positioned at the image capture position."

It appears that they've managed to patent the idea of setting up two lights, a white background, and a small pedestal for the object to be photographed. Isn't it a logical certainty that this has been done before? How is this an innovation worthy of legal protection?

"do you not feel that Amazon's patent in this case is a little odd?

Here's the abstract..."

Yes the abstract makes it sound very vanilla. OTOH that's the whole point of an abstract, to give the most cursory and non-detailed summary of the thing possible. Here's a slightly more detailed summary of what's being patented:

"More specifically, embodiments of the disclosure can allow images and/or video of an item placed in a studio arrangement as described herein to be captured with a background that appears, when captured with an image capture device, as a near perfect white without the need for post-processing, retouching, or other image manipulation. In other words, images and video of items captured in the studio arrangement appear against a background that is equivalent to a white background when converted into a web color hexadecimal triplet corresponding to a true white."

As far as inventions go that isn't the wheel or light bulb but it's still a legitimate invention. This patent is fine under the rules of the game today. I would be happy if 95% of current patents, including this one, weren't issued but the impetus for that change needs to come from legislation.

> As far as inventions go that isn't the wheel or light bulb but it's still a legitimate invention

Really? That's both trivially obvious as a goal and something which has been independently re-"invented" countless times since the dawn of printed product catalogs. The only difference is that they tossed in some technical jargon about the web — I strongly doubt that it'd have been issued if it referred to the identical process in the print world.

My understanding is those since the dawn of time setups generally needed "post-processing, retouching, or other image manipulation".

The desire for something like this might be obvious but the actual multiple moving parts they've arraying to achieve it in fact constitutes an invention. There might be many ways of achieving the same result -- those different setups are also inventions. Go take a look at how many patents there were for light bulbs before Swann and Edison.

This works both ways: patent holders view of what their patent covers expands dramatically if they need cash. Your work might have been a very specific problem but if the company goes broke, in a few years everyone might be hearing from a lawyer claiming it covers far more than you claim now.

Having clients receive letters from shakedown operations (e.g. a patent for part of a wired in-store POS system being claimed as integral to every online storefront) I'm rather skeptical about your belief that there's a significant problem of dishonesty on the patent reform side. Yes, there might be the occasional headline which oversells things but for every example you provide you can find a dozen cases where someone's lawyer made an equally outrageous claim which cost people doing actual innovative work millions of dollars.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com