How Joel Spolsky Shot Down a Microsoft Patent In 15 Minutes

Thornburg contributes news of a story spotted on Techmeme, writing: "[Joel Spolsky of] Joel On Software has a story about how he found and submitted prior art for a Microsoft patent listed on Ask Patents in 15 minutes. The patent was rejected based largely on the document he submitted." Spolsky gives a very readable introduction to the patent system, and software patents in particular; I especially like this part: "Software patent applications are of uniformly poor quality. They are remarkably easy to find prior art for. Ask Patents can be used to block them with very little work. And this kind of individual destruction of one software patent application at a time might start to make a dent in the mountain of bad patents getting granted. ... How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt."

Comments

Mutually Assured Destruction

[Joining Yet Again]

The big boys build weaponry to keep each other in check, and to eliminate all the smaller boys.

Works nicely for them all.

Don't know why they'd rock the boat.

Re:Mutually Assured Destruction

[fustakrakich]

That's alright. Microsoft owns a piece of Apple and all the other players. Only the Microsoft name 'loses' something in this shell game.

Re:Mutually Assured Destruction

[robot_love]

A bunch of small minded people are going to tell you this is impossible, but that's because many people react to new ideas with "I can think of a problem with your idea, therefore it won't work" rather than "let's see how we can make this work".

I think you may well be on to something. It could be the most important thing you do in your life. Explore this further. If you need someone to write some software for it (a web app?), let me know, and I'll contribute.

Re:Mutually Assured Destruction

[interkin3tic]

Also they're taking the sea urchin approach.

Sea urchins spew out sperm and eggs into the ocean, making millions of embryos. The numbers is the advantage. Each individual embryo is incredibly weak and defenseless, most will be gulped up by some predator. Doesn't matter, enough will get through for the sea urchin to successfully reproduce.

This guy shot down a MS patent in 15 minutes? Every bit helps, but until we do something about the thousands of parasitic, idiotic patents that people aren't catching, it won't be much.

For this metaphor to REALLY fit, sea urchins would have to attach to computers, mobile phones, and technology and eat it. But fortunately they don't. That would be really annoying and gross.

Re:Mutually Assured Destruction

[DarkOx]

If you really want to tear down the system of software patents though what you want to do is disrupt the balance of power. Right now big industry rivals share patent pools etc because it keeps new guys from entering the market; the pools work because they know if they don't all cooperate anyone of them could totally derail the business of the other.

So what really really want do is identify the pools, and players. Take a group like RIM/Apple/Google and focus your energy on just one of them. If you invalidate enough of Apple's key patents it puts them in a position where RIM and Google could use theirs as a club to gain market advantage, so Apple will be forced to take swipes at invalidating RIM and Google's patents in order to disarm them. You'd get a force multiplier effect.

Re:Mutually Assured Destruction

[rjstanford]

Even if a person can only do one an hour...

You do realize that one per hour is the great exception rather than the rule, right? It probably takes over an hour to read and understand most patents well enough to determine what exactly what nuanced change is being described as novel - not because of obfuscation, but because non-obvious things are non-obvious to explain.

Re:Mutually Assured Destruction

[davidbrit2]

They'd probably hide the activity behind so many shell companies and legal firms that it might as well be coming from the Huffy bicycle company.

Huh?

[Type44Q]

If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitorsâ(TM) applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt.

Why would these arguably-sociopathic organizations engage in what amounts to mutually-assured destruction for the sake of leveing the playing field?! :p

Re:Illegal Patents

[CastrTroy]

Can you imagine how far back computing would be if we were all stuck with using bubble sort because all the other sorting algorithms were patented? Sure the quicksort patent would have been long expired by now, being developed in 1960, but it would have set us back quite a bit to not be able to use the more efficient sorting algorithms.

Standoff?

[nitehawk214]

It already is a standoff. The big companies have an unwritten agreement not to assault each other's patents. When one things it has the upper hand it might start a battle such as Apple vs Samsung, but these are rare. This allows them to use their patents to crush smaller companies without being in danger of having their own patents assaulted.