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Comment by jcoffland | Hacker News Reader

It's painful reading these things. Companies like Google file thousands of patents gobbling up all kinds of fairly obvious ideas and by doing so create a minefield of inovation stifiling lawyer fodder. Many people forget that the original intent of the patent system was to give inovators a leg up not to create a market for buying and selling IP.

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I thought the actual actual intent was to make sure innovations are accessible to the public (and competitors once protection expires), helping society as a whole.

Yet, it's hard to find any instance where someone would have used a software patent for its supposed purpose: to replicate the innovation. They're utterly useless.

I recently saw a charming example of this (for a physical patent):

http://youtu.be/vCLyPMSrdko

I don't support the existence of software patents at all. That said, I also don't think the benefits of patents should be interpreted so narrowly, or that we should judge patents by the single criterion of their "actual" intent instead of these other benefits.

The other benefit is that it enables companies to do innovation where they would not have been able to keep the idea secret in the first place. E.g. a pharmaceutical drug whose chemical composition would be trivial to reverse engineer. In that case, the patent does not serve the purpose of making the knowledge public in exchange for a monopoly. What it does do, though, is incentivize innovation be rewarding the inventor with the "rights" to that idea.

The real problem with patents is when patents are of trivial things that anyone could have thought of without much effort. That is why I don't support any software patents, because it's so much easier to patent trivial things in the software world than the physical world.

The argument for actual intent is based on how it was sold to voters when the laws were first enacted. I think it's perfectly legit to judge patents on these terms.

If our primary interest is stating what the law should be, then how the law was originally sold to voters is a minor point. Very charitably, it might be argued that my views are different to the average voter, and so in a democracy I should argue for laws that reflect the opinions of voters. But if we were to reform the laws, the voters would be asked to make another choice, and I so would rather spend my effort in convincing lawmakers and voters based on all the arguments and evidence available.

Patents are in the Constitution, so they weren't "sold to voters" per se. In any case,like a lot of old legal things, they were conceived at a time when we didn't understand economics. It's perfectly legitimate to reinterpret old legal concepts in light of advances in economic theory.

Tort law, for example, predates the U.S., but today we have an economic understanding of what purpose it serves (addressing the negative externalities of risk-creating activities). It's perfectly legitimate to look at those modern economic models to decide how we interpret (and evolve) these existing laws. With regards to patents, we can understand them as a solution to free-rider problems. Regardless of what intuitive understandings motivated them in the first place, the laws should be interpreted with the economic model in mind today.

To my knowledge Google has stated, and not violated that statement, that their patents would be used for defensive purposes only... Do you have knowledge to the contrary?

Such statements are not legally binding and thus completely irrelevant in a lawsuit.

Promises on which another party reasonably relies can be legally significant even if not made in a binding contract. See, particularly, the doctrine of promissory estoppel.

But Google didn't make any promises to anyone specifically. They just made a statement they will not actively sue.

How will you justify that you experienced negative consequences because Google decided to defend their own patents, by actively suing.

I guess it is complicated...

If that was truly the case, they would have released all of their patents into the public domain, which would equally protect them.

I think it's more about the patents being used to sue, say, Samsung if Samsung decides to sue Google about something else. Bullets in the gun, if yo will

MAD

I would like to see a progressive fee structure on the filing of patents, and a point in the fee structure(say after 500 patient filings, the fee would jump up to a amount that would sting(maybe 5 million dollar filling fee?).

Plus, I would like all fees for the first patent, copyright, trademark free for individuals under federal poverty level.(Just the first one. If gross mistakes are made in the paperwork--so be it, but give smart, poor people a way to protect their works, trademarks, and inventions?)

This would just cause people to create one company per x patents.

I thought the same.

Google wasn't always like this but since the android patent wars which made them buy Motorola for their patent portfolio - they seem to be just like all the others now.

And most incumbent players seem to like the current state of affairs.

The whole situation is beginning to resemble feudal Europe class system. You cannot sell a car unless you belong to a specific fraternity. You cannot sell Android phones unless you pay licence fees to some company. The free market is shrinking because of various regulations written by lobbyists.

Unfortunately this seems to a trend for societies across the globe. The older society, the more walls higher class builds to protect their status.

"You cannot sell Android phones unless you pay licence fees to some company"?

Of course you need to pay licence fees to "some company" if you are selling Android phones, they're the ones making it. Why shouldn't Google get paid for their work? You can always remove Play store and other Gstuff and "leech" Android like Amazon. Let's not compare selling(licensing) software to some kind of feudal extortion pls.

I kinda can see what you're trying to say, it has been said many times before - patents make it harder for new players to enter the market. We have Jolla (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla), and that spanish Ubuntu/Android-phone maker (http://www.bq.com/gb/), and the other spanish company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeeksPhone) which kinda prove otherwise.

So people that make use of Open Source software are Leeches now? Really....

I think he's actually referring to the Microsoft Android patent licensing thing:

http://gizmodo.com/the-secret-android-patents-that-microsoft...

I would hesitate to describe Google as 'just like the others' until Google uses their patents offensively. Apple has a similar patent to this one and I presume Google got this one as a defence

Agree, not yet. But then there's no guarantee. And seeing them trying to build up a patent inventory for stuff that seems to be close to obvious or public knowledge gives mixed feelings...

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