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

[Anonymous Coward]

Works nicely for them all.

Not any more.

"The ‘irrelevance of Microsoft’ illustrated in a single chart
Microsoft’s share of connected device sales peaked at more than 90% in early 2009. Consider that for a moment — more than nine out of every 10 connected devices sold were powered by a Microsoft operating system. Fast forward to the first quarter of 2013 and Microsoft’s share of connected device sales has plummeted to just over 20%."
http://bgr.com/2013/07/22/microsoft-market-share-connected-devices/

Re:Mutually Assured Destruction

[farrellj]

So let's change the rules...create a Kickstarter campaign to fund a patent-bounty system. If funded, the fund pays out $10 per-patent that is squashed. Suddenly, it becomes a game for people to compete with each other to kill off patents. Even if a person can only do one an hour, that is better pay than minimum wage in many US States, or around the world. And once a year, they can throw a conference, and give out awards to the top "sharp-shooters" who kill off the most patents!

Turn killing bad patents into a game where you can make money, and we can have the patent-trolls slain in short order!

Re:Mutually Assured Destruction

[cold fjord]

I tried watching Dr. Whom once. Didn't much care for it.

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.

None of them try very hard

[bill_mcgonigle]

I still don't understand it, but there was a patent issue a few years back, where the smaller player put up a plea to the community for help invalidating a certain patent that the megalocorp was wielding against it.

Being curious, I did a quick Google Groups search (Splotsky's 15 minutes sounds about right) and submitted the prior art (a then-defunct software package that was announced on a Usenet group which had the same functionality years before).

A few months later, I got a note from council, asking if I had any contacts with that software company and that they were using my submission as the basis as their challenge, which they ultimately won a couple years later.

Anyway, the surprise was how easy it was for me to find that prior art when the company hadn't managed to. The work I do overlaps with what they do, so, yeah, I had some domain expertise, but so did their employees.

FWIW, they never offered me a token copy of their software or anything for my help. I wasn't expecting it (I'd have no use for it anyway - they make complex proprietary configurations of open source software, while I tend to use the simple-blocks model), but it was also surprising to me that there was no follow-up or loop-closing after the fact. So, if you get into this kind of hobby, do it for the knowledge that you're helping defeat a dangerous patent system.