Slashdot Mirror
Wireless Email Patents Vs. Innovation
Exactly a year ago Slashdot discussed Geoff Goodfellow's early contributions to wireless email and how they were conspicuously absent from the NTP vs. RIM patent fight. Techdirt points us to another early wireless email innovator, Nicholas Fodor, who recently came to the notice of the NY Times. Techdirt uses Fodor's story to highlight the problems with the US patent system that are by now so obvious to this community.
Okay, so reform is needed. But what's the solution, though? Is it legislation-based? Is it market-based? We have to make sure the solution doesn't fuck us over more than the problem it's trying to solve.
A good example of how a good idea can go wrong is Digg. It addresses one of the sore spots about Slashdot: the ability for anyone to submit news, and immediately have it viewable by others. It also opens up the comment moderation system to everyone. It's the Digg comment moderation I'd like to consider for the moment.
What we often find is that people in the know get their posts voted down, especially if they say something unpopular (even if completely factual). An example of this is noted Slashdot poster John Randolph, who goes by the handle jcr. He often speaks his mind, and that gets some people at Digg all riled up. So they moderate down his comments. This is especially true in his posts dealing with Apple, where John says it as it is. After all, John worked at Apple for a long time. He knows how things are done there. But that's not good enough for many of the morons at Digg. They bury what are perhaps the most informative, insightful and interesting comments. It's a perfect example of how a system that tries to fix Slashdot ends up being far worse in most cases.
I could see the same thing happening with proposed solutions to these US Patent and Trademark Office problems. If it's a legislation-based approach, the law may end up making innovation far more difficult, time-consuming and expensive for individuals and start-ups. A market-based approach will no doubt have even more problems.
What about the folks using packet BBSes in the 80s? Surely that's wireless email :-)
I think a large problem with patents is that society as a whole doesn't remember anything past 5 years ago. Kids honestly think that "hotmail" for instance, was the first e-mail provider or most significant, (mostly because they're so young that the oldest computer they touched was a P4 in 2000 or whatever).
That being said I hate crackberries so I'm kinda for RIM getting screwed.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Give till it hurts, give till you're broke, but GIVE!!!
Sarcasm tags courtesy of slashdot. Not available in every state or country. Please keep in mind that most web browsers do not accurately render sarcasm tags due to non-compliance with Web 2.1.3.4 standards. Your milage may vary. For use as a suppository only. Please consult a Proctologist before using.
Many in the Linux community look at the Novell-Msft deal for precisely this reason. "I will pretend to beat you, you pretend to cry" and in that process we will create the impression that I am a unbeatable big honcho on the hill.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That's an interesting theory, but if the patent were so easy to invalidate, couldn't RIMs competitors do it as well? Thus making the 650M payout redundant and a complete loss.
Truth be told, even though you or I know the patent is obvious, chances of actually overturning it without a hugely costly legal battle (that even RIM didn't want to play) is low.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
True, but the idea is to mainly kill off the venture funding for competing services. To compete with RIM the cost of entry into the market is high and it is well nigh impossible without venture funding. With the long shadow of 650 M$ settlement, there wont be big venture funding. Small players will try to invalidate the patent first, and they can be kept at bay using lawyers. And RIM might not even be shooting for a full 15 or 18 years of protection. If the competition is delayed by 5 years, RIM might figure, that gives me X B$ and as long as (X-0.65) > 0, it makes sense to bring in a credible partner who will assert the patent rights and keep the howling competition at bay.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I fail to see how your example is relevant to the discussion at hand. Slashdot and Digg are competing Web sites for geek news. They are run by their respective management and editors. It's not a matter of democracy -- each of the editorial and management staffs see different solutions to the same problem of how to run a geek news site.
f -of-digg-censorship/- digg-bury-brigade-top-50/
Yes, but Slashdot takes the stance that the USPTO currently takes: a relatively small group of people making all of the decisions, be it which stories to publish or which patents to grant. And we know that there are many problems with this sort of a system. One such problem is the delay caused by backlogs. Sometimes it takes Slashdot a day or two to report on an important news story, just as it takes the USPTO years to grant patents. Another problem involves the objectivity of the process: only the views, opinions and ideas of a small number of stakeholders are represented.
A lot of the USPTO reform suggestions we've heard so far involve opening up the process. They want more peer review, for instance. That's essentially what Digg did to Slashdot. While Slashdot has a few editors who review stories, and a slightly larger number of moderators who review comments, Digg gives those privileges directly to the community as a whole. But like the original post notes, doing so can cause serious problems. One such problem is that of outspoken people-in-the-know having their comments buried because the truths they express hurt the feelings and emotions of a few too many uninformed Diggers.
Part of the problem may be that Digg is only partially transparent. A number of bloggers have written about how Digg doesn't list who buried a post or a comment, but perhaps it's something they should list:
http://www.seorefugee.com/seoblog/2007/04/03/proo
http://pinderkent.blogsavy.com/archives/26
http://baron.vc/a-tribute-to-the-unsung-heroes-of
So what I think is being said is this: when it comes to patent reform, we shouldn't pull a Digg. Opening up the system may be a good idea, but we have to make sure that it is fully transparent. It needs to be known who not only supports a patent being granted, but also who supports a denial of that request. And this information needs to be 100% out in the open.
Unless a competitor grows outside the US market. Believe it or not there are plenty of mobile users in Europe and, last I heard, even Asia!
So you can entirely make a market for yourself out of the US of A.
To m
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Yet Another Thermodynamic Cycle syndrome is just starting for IT and the center of the problem is not the patent system. The problems are that capitalism is unbridled and there is profit in litigation. I have a difficult time visualizing a patent system reform that will actually improve innovation because it never comes down to who is the inventor, it comes down to who has the resources to hire the most and best lawyers. There really isn't much point in attempting to obtain a patent if you have a good idea or product but don't you don't have a large corporation behind you. Either your idea is crap, you are so far ahead of your time no one will "get it" or a larger company will pick up on the idea. In whichever situation, a patent isn't going to help. I would think generally the type of person that invents anything truly innovative, isn't the type of person that wants to spend their life in a court room and dealing with the legal system.
I believe the Internet will eventually change this. If a good idea is spread very quickly, it reduces to a commodity very quickly. If one company "steals" your idea, many will. My opinion is that unless you want to spend your life in court, it's simpler to just publish your ideas in an open manner and then develop a business model around the sub-components and consulting. This is very similar to the Open Source vs. Proprietary software model. If you have a new idea that has value but you have minimal resources, you cannot show the profit of Microsoft, but you can be Red Hat.
http://usptocareers.gov/
Have you posted here before?
May the Maths Be with you!
Yeah, I too wonder how RIM managed to lose this: my laptops have been wireless-eMail-enabled for the last four years and I have been able to send/receive mail on my cell phone (up to 140 characters) for the last seven years.
I could convert a desktop PC to receive wireless mail too... I just need to plug it into an UPS, charge the battery, disconnect the wall plug and add an USB WiFi card.
My guess is that RIM used custom wireless protocols for mail instead of tunneling TCP/IP with standard eMail services... they tried to lock-in their customers by using proprietary technologies and got whacked by another company that had patented that business model.
Patents do, actually, serve some purpose: they help people publish their work and still retain some space in which to develop products. There are just so many problems when we apply heavy, slow, industrial patents to something as light and diverse as software. And there are big problems with patents in pharmaceuticals as well... focussing on private profits at all costs simply does not work well for society.
We have three main alternatives:
1. Throw out the entire patent system - this has happened in the past in different countries.
2. Throw out software patents - this is a simple and effective cure for the problems that patents cause in the software industry.
3. Fix the patent system.
The last option is the most difficult but potentially it could create a patent system that actually works in all sectors and really does help society, not just the rich and the lucky.
The EthiPat campaign has tried to describe what is really wrong with the patent system as a whole, in terms of discrimination, and use this as a measure of what a 'good' patent system would look like.
Note that an 'ethical patent' would be very different from the things we call patents today. Basically it would be a lot more like copyright, and provide limited protection for very specific descriptions of ideas.
And if such an idea worked, we'd be able to go and look up all documented "mobile email solutions" because it'd be so easy, harmless, and cheap to register an "ethical patent" that everyone would do it... much like buying domain names.
My blog
- R. Buckminster Fuller GRUNCH of Giants, 1983
The article talks about numerous people developing similar solutions at about the same time. It seems to me that if numerous people come to similar solutions to a problem at about the same time, this should be taken as strong evidence that the solutions are "obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art" and should not be patentable under the law.
The fix to the patent system is on the way. It's called Google (specifically, google cache), Wikipedia, archive.org, and many other names. The trick is time stamping. Even if the uspto is too ossified to use such publications as prior art, the courts very well could. It only takes one court ruling to change the uspto's mind.
Deciding if something is obvious or not is a huge problem for everyone involved in the patent field. Having lots of people working toward the same goal, however, is not a good test. Think Edison vs Tesla. They fought tooth and nail and each invented a lot of very cool things along the way. On the other hand, we ended up with the xor patent.
The guy in TFA who has all the prior art, well, it isn't really prior art for the purpose of invalidating a patent. The work was kept secret. It has to be published to be useful in invalidating a patent. Maybe the guy can out innovate for a while. I doubt it though. If you're going to innovate without patenting, then you gotta go open source. The community can, and should, blow away his lone efforts in a heartbeat. Interestingly, open source code is published and thereby useful for invalidating patents. Best of both worlds.
As for wireless email transmission, look back to the filing date of the application. Email was old. The foundations of the internet date back to the old (from my horrid memory, please be kind) aloha network - an old packet switched network. Back in the mid nineties, the patent office decided (temporarily I hope) that a transceiver pair was a unique nonobvious addition to an old thing.
I am a lawyer, but not yours. Anything I tell you might be a total lie intended to benefit my clients at your expense.
70-80 percent of US corporate value is IP based.
t ion&hl=en&lr=
This means that if you broke apart every US company and sold the physical assets you would get 20%-30% of the current stock price.
The other value is protected by trade secret primarily and then copyright, trademark and patent.
If any of that value is infringed upon then one option is to litigate. To think that any corporation precludes lititgation as a competitive option is wrong.
The patent system sucks because it is difficult to implement laws surrounding such complexity but to '/. typical' anecdotally assert unequivocally that no benefit is derived from it is a meek argument to anyone that has attempted to obtain emphirical data on the subject:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=patent+innova
The patent system needs reform in order to better line up innovation with reward in order to ensure that inventor of magnitude 999 is motivated to continue innovation via reward equitable with innovation 999 regardless of his/her financial capabilities.
As far as I am concerned, if something can be covered by a patent, it should have a normal consumer warranty (suitable for purpose, free from defects, etc) if it is sold or leased or licensed to use, exactly the same as any other patentable product. If companies insist on patents, they would either have to A) write some simply outstanding code, or B), stop with the software patents and leave it at copyright where it belongs.
Part of the whole problem is that even a patent that is obviously invalid is expensive to invalidate however easy. The court system operates under the fiction that the process doesn't intrinsically harm a vindicated defendant (civil or criminal) when in fact it can be ruinous.
The purpose of patents is to encourage innovation and perhaps to reward ingenuity. Innovation needs to be encouraged ONLY in otherwise stagnant areas and ingenuity can only be determined in fairly stable disciplines. In software, where the pace of innovation is breathtaking, it's impossible to really determine what is obvious and what is non-obvious - and there is no reasonable need to reward innovation because innovation is relatively cheap in comparison to more traditional fields.
Patents have no place in software until the pace of innovation begins to flatten, and techniques and algorithms don't change for several years - thus illustrating that the new innovation is clearly non-obvious.