Jakob Nielsen Defends "1-Click" Patents

danila writes "In his latest column the king of usability discusses competitive testing of website usability. Among other things he suggests that "Some tasks might be much easier on your competitor's site, and those tasks would indicate areas where you can learn from the competition and improve your design." Overall, a very informative and insighful article, if not for a small paragraph in the end. "You can patent usability innovations to keep the competition from stealing them. Most Web projects are managed by marketing departments that have no experience with the patent system. Websites, however, are inventions and should be protected when you invest in developing something new." How can you learn from competition if every potential improvement is already patented?"

Comments

Re:America on Old Europe are screwed

[SpaceLifeForm]

While I agree that the situation is totally fucked up, common sense will have to prevail. The motion of 'clicking' pre-dates computers, so how can a company have such a patent? Are not you humanoids existing prior art?

So his next book

[Felonius Thunk]

...is just going to be a directory of patents? Just swap out any point where there is actual usability advice with the relevant patent number and you're done. Ooh, then you can copyright the directory, just like West law tried.

Grr

[Dachannien]

Websites, however, are inventions and should be protected when you invest in developing something new.

No, websites are code and/or art, and therefore are copyrightable but not (well, should not be) patentable.

Re:First First

[JimCYL]

The thing about the patent system is that you probabably won't ever have to. Patent litigation is extremely expensive. Most people just cave in, even if they have a good defense, because they just can't afford to protect themselves.

The problem is that the patent office is staffed by human beings who have to make sure that every application is sufficiently new. Naturally, they miss things. Especially with IT patents. There isn't enough manpower to do a really effective prior art search.

This is how you get stupid patents. The examiners try to find prior art, and they don't. So they assume it's new, even if someone has been using it on the internet for years.

I think the answer to this is pretty simple. The US already publishes patent applications after a certain amount of time. I think the PTO should go a step further and do what other federal agencies do when they are about to enact a regulation - they publish it an invite comments.

Maybe the PTO should subject pending patent applications to a public comment period, in which other people can submit examples of prior art to show that the patent application is either not new or obvious. If it happened, you'd have public interest groups like the EFF monitoring patent applications as they get published and finding the prior art that the PTO misses.

Prior art

[ja]

When I bought my second hand Atari ST back in 1997 it came with (among other things) a 3D sculptor/renderer called "3D Cad" or somesuch. Some operations took a long time to complete and therefore the friendly programmer had supplied (TaTah!): A progressbar ...

I believe there are lots of even earlier textbased implementations around. Turbo Pascal comes to mind?

The IBM "patent" is from 1990 and therefore clearly not valid.

cheers // Jens M Andreasen

The trouble is we're too productive

[rsilvergun]

We're so productive, we don't know what to do with the rest of our populace. They don't really need to work (and they're aren't brilliant enough to become artists/scientists). Most societies are built around scarcity of resources and abundance of labor. They're meant for a wealthy few to use control of scarce resources to not only improve their standard of living but exercise power. As technology improves and resources are no longer as scarce people lose the power that comes with scarcity. "Intellectual Property" is one way to maintain artificial scarcity (there are others). With it, the wealth and powerful can maintain their hold on society in the face of raising productivity. I don't think China or Russia or any other country will pass us by. They'll want to join us in using IP to maintain the lower classes in the face of rising affluence.