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IBM Sues Amazon For Patent Infringement
Petersko writes "It appears Amazon is about to be sued for patent infringement by IBM". From the article: "Hundreds of other companies have licensed the same patents, and IBM has tried to negotiate licensing deals with Amazon "over a dozen times since 2002," Kelly said. Amazon.com, which has bought a lot of hardware from Hewlett-Packard Co. over the years but not IBM, has allegedly refused every time."
Our system has become based on the ridiculous premise that all inventors come up with ideas that nobody else could possibly have come up with.
.. regardless of how obvious your idea is .. you win a monopoly on it for 20 years (with possible infinite extension via mickey mouse legislators).
The patents system has devolved to be that if you are the first to file a piece of paper
Just because you are the first to invent something, doesn't mean society would have been deprived of your invention were it not for you. It just means you got there first (thanks to better resources available to you). It's like a winner of a race claiming that if it wasn't for him, nobody else would have crossed the finish line.
It should read:
Make lawyers a minimum wage job. All the lawsuits are costing the public a fortune and has placed the court system in perminate gridlock. We need to concentrate on crime not petty squabbling. Patents should be for significant inventions not every minor thing some one thinks up. Often times there's no thieft involved it's simply such an obvious idea that others are recovering the same ground and haven't a clue some suit ape patented the idea. Patents should help spur innovantion. If they don't they aren't in the publics interest. Patents are a creation for the publics interest and are not in the Constitution so when they work against the public they need to be revised. There is no inherent right to patents. I'm a big supporter of inventors rights but these aren't inventions they are similar to cybersquatting and need to removed from the patent process.
The "no evidence of copying" is the sticky part. You're back to a system that requires that patent examiners be shrewd enough to understand the fundamental difference between one patent and the next. What would obviously end up happening in such a system is Amazon finds out IBM has a patent on something it wants to do (patents are published, public documents), says, "hey, that's a great idea!" and then "invents" its own way of doing it. Voila! Instead of paying IBM to license the patent, Amazon gets to add itself to IBM's patent and take half of IBM's fees. You can see where patents would quickly become an anti-competitive weapon of an order even greater than they are becoming today.
In today's world, the outcome of these patent lawsuits between big companies, more often than not, is some kind of licensing agreement. It will more than likely be a cross-licensing agreement ... so IBM says it's OK for Amazon to use its patent, provided IBM can add One-Click shopping to its Web site, or something of the sort. It's not as if IBM really wants to put Amazon out of business. It just wants to keep the money moving from hand to hand, with some of it staying at IBM for a while.
Breakfast served all day!
Not so. This can be done with suitable NDAs and/or pre-contracts (eg. negotiating a flat high percentage and no money up front for use of the ideas, with the understanding that this is just a stopgap and renegotiating will occur once people know what's on the table). This is of course impractical now, since investors would be taken aback with such agreements, however without patents this would have a high chance of becoming pretty much standard, so smart money would go with it.
Problems with that theory:
> And these organizations exist and work so hard at keeping information unfree.
Actually, the purpose of these organizations is generally to acquire information. Most of the secrecy comes to protecting their methods for acquiring information. And, it isn't the information that wants to be free. People want the information because it is valuable.
This is off-topic because ideas on their own cannot be patented. Only implementations can be. In the special case where the implementation is the same as the idea (e.g. look and feel), those *should* be protected by copyright instead.
In your examples, idea for a UI, Napster, YouTube - they have their specific implementations and only those are patentable (I'm sure there are at least 50 ways of implementing user interface, napster, youtube, slashdot or digg).
If you think these ideas are somewhat original, then let me tell you that ideas are a dime a dozen. Don't worth anything at all unless it's elevated into something tangible, like an implementation.
Unless, of course, you may be confusing between an idea and an implementation. Sometimes the line is blurred but it certainly exists. Napster and YouTube - they have good business ideas. Slashdot and Digg - the idea is a "community system" (which, again is a dime a dozen), but Slashdot and Digg are implementing it differently.
This just heavily underscores why the duration of patents needs to be drastically shortened, with no option for extension. Ten years or less would be sufficient.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
I'm lost... which company is the good cop now and which one is bad cop? Oh that's right, companies don't care, they just want more money - I keep forgetting that quintessential fact about a company.
The patent system wasn't invented to protect the little guy. It was invented to protect society.
In your note above, you say going it alone might take so long to get there someone else scoops you. In that case, you want to protect that you got there first, or patented the idea first. Patents weren't designed to protect the person that gets there first.
In terms of getting funding for an idea, in my experience VCs fund teams and markets first, and ideas second. I do have some sympathy with this part of your argument, but not a tremendous amount. If your ideas are really good, they will fund you precisely because you can come up with good ideas.
CIA, spooks, etc.? Pulease. Patents aren't about protecting information, they are about releasing information but protecting ideas.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
Good guy or not, it depends on what they do with the patents, not that they hold a lot of patents.
In suing Amazon, are they trying to sue away a competitor? Don't think so. Are they trying to extort money? Given IBM's size, I doubt it.
On the flip side of the coin, IBM is pro-OSS at this moment, and I'm glad that IBM has so many patents.
I am probably misunderstanding you. Surely you don't imply that whenever someone uses quicksort, someone else should get five cents? Hoffman, Dijkstra, etc. also worked very, very hard to develop those classic algorithms, and limiting their use might be like copyrighting string theory, or copyrighting math techniques. Of course I'm not implying that your algorithms are simple, but merely suggesting how these copyrights can be abused.
If anything, this is a perfect example of why Amazon must keep patents. Our patent system is so broke the only way to defend yourself from "evil" companies like SCO is to stock your own ammunition.
It's like nuclear proliferation, until every company in the world signs a treaty, you have to continue to stockpile patents. Amazon officials have said in numerous interviews, patents are taken whenever they can be granted under the current (broken) system to prevent someone else from patenting an idea and turning around and suing THEM.
Amazon is not playing the IP company (like SCO and others) that sits around and looks for people to sue, they sue when needed to protect their patents, which they taken whenever possible to protect themselves from being on the other end of the warhead. If we could just fix this broke system none of this would be needed. As long as the patent office will allow something like 1-Click to be patented, companies like IBM, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, eBay, and others must aggressively seek patents just to protect themselves.
Getting the 1 click patent was about protection, sure. Except it used it to stop a competitor, a competitor who wasn't threatening any patent lawsuits. I see this lawsuit against Amazon as a way to punish Amazon for their past behavior. I kinda like this lawsuit actually.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
What was I talking about again?
I'm not entirely sure; I think you were talking about how utterly evil and despised IBM used to be, how there's no guarantee that this isn't the first sign of a return to form, and that they are the world's most prolific software patentors, but you seem to have been distracted by an utterly irrelevant swipe at MS.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate all that IBM has been doing lately, but understand this - they're not doing it because they're nice guys, they're doing it because it makes them money. If that were to change, so would their tactics. They're nice to us *now*; we cna only hope that they continue being nice.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Specially software ones (you know, the patenting of ideas and concepts, that is speech).
In view of the last few days of sheer madness I find sad an discomforting that there are people out there still supporting what is clearly a rotten system.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
How dare you forbid me to think for myself!
The problem with your reasoning is that it goes against the most basic grain of how human culture has developed.
The most fundamental freedom of any person (after covering the basic necesities) is the freedom to think.
If you come up with a method to solve a problem you should be fully entitled to get some kind of remuneration if your method is useful. But I don't see why if I come with my own method to solve the same problem I should have to pay you anything for it.
Notice here that I am talking about methods to do something. If that method describs a trinket then the trinket should be patentable, giving you protection for your efforts, ensuring other people can't look at your trinket and do their own to ssolve the same problem.
But what you are advocating is that by writing a program that adds 2 + 2 anybody should pay you money for the addition operator.
But not only that, there will be people claiming to have invented binary operators, then even others claiming they inveted operators, and then even others that will claim they invented mathematical symbolic languages and so on.
Software patents becomes a game of who can come with the most outrageous and broad claims and is prepared to support them with enough cash in a court of law.
The system is broken, anybody writing sofware is amply protected by copyright and should realize that at times he may "win" but in the long term we are all losing (all that money that goes to parasitic lawyers could be spent doing new, innovative products, then IT companies woue earn a living by actually doing useful things).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.