So you want to download their player and be able to do everything possible? They should give it to you for free?
No. They can reserve advanced functionality for their pay-for-play viewer. Ad-Aware, for instance, offers an Ad-Watch utility that actively monitors your system - but it's only in the professional version. I'm fine with that.
What I'm not fine with is crippleware - free versions that limit or omit basic functionality. I've seen HTML editing documents that prepare a document for you but won't let you save it. That is bogus, because it's not a functional program. It's an interactive demo.
Real does not bill its free player as an interactive demo. It bills it as a free media player. The basic functions that accompany every fully-working media player application are (a) viewing, (b) fast-forwarding, rewinding, and pausing, and (c) locally saving the content. Any media player application that lacks any of these basic functions is crippleware - but it's not advertised as such.
That's not true of the new one (or at least of the beta of the new one).
You know, I just don't care.
I'm usually pretty tolerant of lame software. Adobe Acrobat has always been a Windows-3.1-esque piece of junk; it's probably the only modern viewer-style application that noticeably pauses between page flips. But I will maintain a sliver of patience and hope that Acrobat evolves into a non-annoying product, because (a) I genuinely support Adobe's mission of a general-purpose, cross-platform, academic-friendly document format; and (b) it's really widespread, and doesn't appear to have any decent competitor.
Real - not so. They have completely exhausted my consumer interest in their product. That's what happens when you just blatantly ignore your customer's interests for a long time. Even if their latest rev is analogous to alternatives like Quicktime Player and Windows Media, it's still far too little, far too late.
RealPlayer tends to cause immediate irritation in people's minds and postings on the net.
Mention Rhapsody, though, and not a lot of flak is sent up. Why?
Because the reason people are irritated by Real isn't their proprietary nature. That's a business decision that need not directly impact consumers. That is, "prioprietary" does not necessarily require copy-protection schemes, closed formats, monopoly pricing, and tech stagnation. (These things often happen, but not always. Technically, Perl and Linux are proprietary, but they're open-source and free.)
No, the actual reason why people hate Real is because their technology is horrific dogshit.
Every time you want to view a new Real stream, you have to download RealPlayer version x+1.
Their player is bloated with ads and doo-dad components you'll never use and can't get eliminate, so the interface is cluttered. It's like poking a tiny hole in a full-page newspaper advertisement, and trying to watch TV through it.
Their free player is also crippled beyond repair. You can't save streams unless you buy their software, and that is complete bullshit.
Today's Real streams run like technology straight out of 1994. They're bloated, tinny, and pixelated. They're vastly outcompeted by every other format.
Their software won't stop f***ing harassing you. It spews links to itself all over your desktop, your start menu, your quick-launch bar, and your notification area. It nags you constantly to upgrade to a more recent version or buy the full version. It keeps installing its beyond-useless agent in your MSCONFIG startup, and won't go away.
In short, people hate Real because Real sucks. They've made a whole lot of awful business and technical choices, and this animosity is the consequence.
Your logic is sloppy too, you offer a hypothetical of someone's horn causing an accident, but don't consider how many accidents are prevented by using the horn. By your logic we should eliminate turn signals and brake lights too, because some driver will be distracted by a turn signal on one side and not see an impending collision on the other.
Down, boy.
Talk about sloppy logic. I didn't suggest eliminating horns - I merely pointed out that they can be a distraction. (And the horn example wasn't originally mine - the post to which I was responding brought them up as a positive distractor.)
Of course, distractors should be kept when they have a net positive gain. Turn signals are distracting, but they allow other drivers to get out of the way. Horns are distracting, but obviously help to prevent some accidents. (And the distraction is minimized because they're purely audible - you don't have to move your eyes to get the full message.) Net result is positive - even though they distract, they should be kept.
But I see very few net positives to automobile facial expressions (compared with the simpler, audible message conveyed by a car horn.) People will spend extra time fiddling with their emotion-display icon, and extra time gawking at the facial expressions of other cars. Is that a happy-smiley or an embarrassed-smiley? Is that Volvo frowning at me or the driver next to me? Hey, that's a neat frowny-face, I wond*CRUNCH*
Do you spend your entire time as you're walking smiling, frowning, crying, etc?
Odds are, the answer is 'No'.
True. But that's even worse: now a car expressing emotion is an unusual occurrence, one that prompts you to pay attention to it.
Can you think of another visual event that might encourage people to be better drivers? How about a wreck by the side of the road? A small visual indicator of the consequences of bad driving might encourage people to be more careful.
But what is the real impact of that? It's a visual distraction - and it causes people to gawk, horrendously tying up traffic. Worse, people have follow-up accidents: they're so busy looking out the side window that they hit something. All visual distractors have the same impact - and the more interesting they are, the more adverse the result.
Even car horns are distracting. If someone behind you honks their horn, you always shift your eyes off the road to your rear-view mirror to see what's up. Many accidents have happened in that instant. And if the car isn't honking at you, then that accident was pointless.
by adding distraction.. by making you pay attention to other cars.
Sure! And by that same token, we should let people mount billboards on top of their cars. Because in addition to allowing them to profit (by further cluttering our consciousness with marketing), you'd be paying more attention to the car, thus making the roads safer.
At least it'll mean you're paying attention to the vehicles on the road.
But are you? Instead of paying attention to all of the cars, you're paying more attention to one particular car. And it's not guaranteed to be a car that's important to your driving situation - it could very well be a car on the opposite side of the road.
One of the other posters wrote it best: as you look in your rear-view mirror at the guy behind you, whose car is making a frowny-face, you're likely to rear-end the guy ahead of you.
Or, look at it this way: You're spending less time thinking about driving, and more time thinking about our ephemeral human interaction with the other driver.
I suspect the primary claim of this patent reads: "A method of substantially increasing the frequency of auto accidents by adding distraction to the road, comprising..."
Seriously, what an awful idea. Yes, let's pay attention to the emotions of the cars around us. Because even after the advent of cellphones, food from drive-throughs, stereos, GPS devices, and in-car LCD screens - we're still paying WAY too much attention to our driving situation.
You know when chernobyl motorbike lady broke? Well it was sent around the office, and I made a comment about never being able to trust anything off the internet, and guess what, that was a hoax too.
And in your cynicism, you missed what the rest of us saw: We didn't care about the motorbike thing. We cared about the Chernobyl thing - her amazing photos, the incredible stories of the event and its aftermath. Those were stunning - and 100% true.
It would be similarly myopic to dismiss ilovebees.com for its marketing purpose. The AI game was a remarkable and rewarding experience, woven around some really good fiction. Hell, the Evan Chan story was far better than the AI movie, as well as most other movies, games, and stories I've experienced.
If this bee business is by the same guys, my eyes are glued to this marketing campaign.
Consider: How did the original manage to spawn four sequels, even though they all sucked? Because the first one was incredible. Tomb Raider 1 was one of the best gaming experiences of the early polygon days.
What made it so goddamn good? Not the fact that it was a polygonal adventure in the early days of fully-polygonal environment games (1996 - Quake had only been out for a year), and it could stand out as such in a way that it couldn't today. That wasn't the point.
The point was this: It had atmosphere. Specifically:
It had the thrill of getting swept over a waterfall into a pool filled with unknown inhabitants.
It had the dizzying climb to the top of a Roman tomb, in such a way that it gave you goddamn vertigo to look over the edge. That may be one of its defining traits: that leap over a gut-wrenching drop, saved by a last-second grab onto a ledge.
It had an awesome hugeness that has been oddly missing from all later games. The sheer volume of the Roman coliseum - the height and length of a three-tier aqueduct - the awesome visage of an enormous sphinx appearing out of gloomy darkness. The Tomb Raider 1 levels made excellent use of vast space in buried caverns.
It had puzzles that were not only clever, but visceral. How neat is it to have a huge cavern with very high entrances that you can only reach by flooding the whole cavern with water? And its setup was golden: you run around a corner and pull a lever, then hear a tremendous rush of water behind you... you know what's happened, but seeing this change is still marvelous. Commanding 100,000 gallons of water tends to convey a strong sense of power.
Of utmost importance, Tomb Raider 1 was chock-full of decaying-tomb creepiness. You peer down a hole and see a dark pool of water far below. Jumping in almost took an act of willpower, because you didn't know what lurked beneath the surface that might suck you under. Whistling wind in the Inca level; the shock of a tyrannosaur shaking the trees while running after you; the sudden leap of a wolf from behind a rocky pillar. 95% of the game was silent except for your echoey footsteps, which made the sudden roar of an attacking bear downright galvanic. In some ways, it was creepier than even Half-Life, which kind of deadened you to nasty pouncing headcrabs after a while.
In short, the first game delivered so deftly that it continues to have market appeal, even after many crappy sequels and two awful popcorn movies. The developers forgot everything that made TR1 cool. A submarine? High-tech headquarters? Venice? Jet skis? What the fuck do these things have to do with raiding tombs? And why did Lara have to turn into goddamn Rambo, taking out soldiers with bazookas? If I wanted to play a Metal Gear game, I'd play a Metal Gear game.
In short - Tomb Raider suffered from mission slip of the worst kind. The series lost its ancient-tomb-of-mystery roots, and it slid into the overcrowded field of generic third-person games. The Lost Artifact was a small step in the right direction, but it was far too puzzle-y: rather than solving clever puzzles while exploring, it felt like just a string of really lame puzzles. No gusto whatsoever. It didn't help that it was a really awful PC port with the feel of an old Playstation game.
I'd love to see the Tomb Raider series resurrected with a game true to its roots. But I think it has only one last chance to redeem itself - after five bad sequels and two crap movies, one more failure will crush the fading embers of interest.
Oh yeah... fill a jump table with pointers and
you can do some pretty cool stuff.
Sure... like crash your box, over and over again.
This code is incredibly useful - but it's also incredibly fragile. Setting your program counter to random addresses is like closing your eyes while driving and making a blind left turn. A small miscalculation means the difference between Fourth Avenue and the tree next to Fourth Avenue.
This is the single greatest reason why previous generations of software sucked: pointers are unusably fragile. This is why they're damn near nonexistent in modern programming. Of course, you're still using them a lot (with things like "ref" and "in" parameters), but it's all heavily supervised.
But, you can still get this functionality, though - even with managed code - through reflection. That is, just build an array (or other container) out of Method objects based on the same delegate/signature/parameter list, and invoke whichever method you want. The only real difference is that the interpreter running your code (Java's VM or Microsoft's CLR) doesn't just make a leap of faith based on the contents of an integer; it understands that you're accessing a method pointer and asking to invoke it. This understanding makes safety checking possible, so that if you're wrong, the interpreter can just throw an exception rather than executing garbage memory.
And this raises me to my point: Reflection rocks. I nominate this as one of the most extraordinary features of modern programming. Your code can peer at a generic object, and poke and prod it at will. Microsoft's "Reflection Emit" stuff is even better: you have methods writing other methods. This was possible before, of course, but it was always hacky/fragile; reflection makes this explicit, legal, safe, and understandable.
On September 1, 1992, Bobby Fischer came out of his 20 year retirement and gave a press conference in Yugoslavia. He pulled out an order from the U.S. Treasury Department warning him that he would be violating U.N sanctions if he played Chess in Yugoslavia. He spit on the order and now faces ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine if he returns to the U.S. In addition, he must forfeit his $3.65 million to the U.S. Treasury and forfeit 10% of any match royalties earned. On September 30, Bobby Fischer began his rematch with Boris Spassky in Sveti Stefan, Yugoslavia. The match was organized by banker Jedzimir Vasiljevic. On November 11, Fischer won the match with 10 wins, 5 losses, and 15 draws. He received $3.65 million for his winnings and Spassky received $1.5 million.
And I found the letter from the Senate that explains the basis for the sanction:
Department of the Treasury
Washington
Aug 21, 1992
Order to Provide Information and Cease and Desist Activities
FAC No. 129405
Dear Mr Fischer:
It has come to our attention that you are planning to play a chess match for a cash prize in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) (hereinafter "Yugoslavia") against Boris Spassky on or about September 1, 1992. As a U.S. citizen, you are subject to the prohibitions under Executive Order 12810, dated June 5, 1992, imposing sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro. The United States Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control ("FAC"), is charged with enforcement of the Executive Order.
The Executive Order prohibits U.S. persons from performing any contract in support of a commercial project in Yugoslavia, as well as from exporting services to Yugoslavia. The purpose of this letter is to inform you that the performance of your agreement with a corporate sponsor in Yugoslavia to play chess is deemed to be in support of that sponsor's commercial activity. Any transactions engaged in for this purpose are outside the scope of General License No. 6, which authorizes only transactions to travel, not to business or commercial activities. In addition, we consider your presence in Yugoslavia for this purpose to be an exportation of services to Yugoslavia in the sense that the Yugoslav sponsor is benefitting from the use of your name and reputation.
Violations of the Executive Order are punishable by civil penalties not to exceed $10,000 per violation, and by criminal penalties not to exceed $250,000 per individual, 10 years in prison, or both. You are hereby directed to refrain from engaging in any of the activities described above. You are further requested to file a report with this office with 10 business days of your receipt of this letter, outlining the facts and circumstances surrounding any and all transactions relating to your scheduled chess match in Yugoslavia against Boris Spassky. The report should be addressed to: The U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, Enforcement Division, 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Annex - 2nd floor, Washington D.C. 20220. If you have any questions regarding this matter, please contact Merete M. Evans at (202) 622-2430.
Sincerely, (signed)
R. Richard Newcomb
Director
Office of Foreign Assets Control
As a general rule, I agree. But there is one instance where anonymous inner classes are awesome: attaching some code to an event handler. Usually you have to do this:
class HandlerFunction implements EventHandler { blah blah blah }
and
HandlerFunction h = new HandlerFunction();
sourceObject.addEventListener(h);
This is syntactically unclear - it puts space between the event handler attachment and the event handler code. It's also wasteful: if you just use this event handler once, why design a whole class for it?
An anonymous inner class makes this really clear, though:
sourceObject.addEventListener(new EventListener { void eventRaised(Event e) {... } } ) ;
In short, you patch the event-handler code right after the spot where you attach a listener object.
What you needed to have done to make that transition smooth is to
1. have a comprehensive review of the research literature and past computer related businesses, and
2. pre-issue patents (possibly already expired) to the people who have already invented novel bits of computing
3. and then open the doors to new patents.
Very insightful. In an ideal world, it would work this way. But it played out differently for several reasons:
The USPTO proved remarkably inflexible in dealing with software patents. For an organization tha focuses on technology, the USPTO, historically, has been shockingly reluctant to change and modernization. (I find it incredibly ironic that the nation's center for innovation has 80386 computers.)
It really came down to a shoving match between the USPTO and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), and the CAFC just knocked them down. The USPTO had fair warning that a sea change was imminent - a string of cases leading up to State Street Bank suggested as much - it just failed to prepare.
The federal government looks at the USPTO as a cash cow, and consistently siphons off much of its income. The odd result of this fact is that the USPTO generates huge revenue, but still operates on a shoestring budget. And the fees continue to rise (which, unfortunately, increasingly excludes sole inventors who can't afford the process.) Particularly, the USPTO had no resources to build up a software reference for determining obvious vs. non-obviousness.
So, we have a train wreck. But this problem will cure iteself: bad patents expire and serve as prior art. It's outrageous that anyone can patent "double-clicking application buttons" in 2004... but no one will ever be able to claim it again.
Nonsense. For starters that is false outside the US.
...but becoming less so as time goes by. I recall seeing an article here on/. a week or two ago with news of the EU's growing inclination to allow software patents. (But you're correct - I mis-wrote by not specifying the U.S. legal community. Sorry 'bout that.)
Yes. A perfect textbook example of a patent on pure math. Utterly absurd.
This is a very common myth. Notice that the claims (which, as you know, completely define the scope of the patent) read:
1. A cryptographic communications system comprising:...
This is not a claim to "pure math" - this is not, "A method of adding two digits, comprising..." This is a claim to an element of a communications system, which ordinarily comprises two people who are each using a whole lot of equipment tied to a huge communications network.
Could you reason through a 128-bit encryption scheme? Sure, much like you could build yourself a 747 all by yourself, in your backyard, with a wrench and a whole lot of trips to Home Depot, and infringe a bunch of Boeing's patents. Fantastic, unrealistic examples are not a sound basis for broad legal precedent.
It is just absurd to suggest that a person stitting motionless and just *thinking* could violate the RSA patent (or any other software patent).
Good luck to the patentee who tries to sue you for infringing their patent in your mind. Can you imagine how that complaint would read? "Mr. Jones violated our patented process by thinking through the steps..."
Do you honestly envision this scenario ever arising? Ever? Patents are tools of reality, and, in virtually every case, are asserted only when the alleged infringement seriously harms one's business. I fail to imagine how your wish to think up the RSA encryption for your message would prompt anyone to wave their Letters Patent in your general di-rection.
Moreover: There is USPTO precedent to suggest that your fears are unfounded. For a short while, the USPTO issued patents for medical techniques (fictitious example: "the process of diagnosing appendicitis by palpating the abdomen and observing pain response.") Patentees actually attemped to assert these patents against competing physicians. In response, the USPTO issued an exception to the enforcement rules: you can still get a medical technique patent, if you really want one... but you can't enforce it against any medical practitioner. Medical practitioners have an unlimited right to use medical techniques, whether or not patented.
So if the impossible happens, and if patentees prove to be idiotic enough to assert "pure math" claims against mathematicians, the USPTO will explicitly carve out an exception.
Every peice of software is literally nothing more than a fancy math function.
Your rationale applies more broadly to all "process" patents. Consider that you can patent a hammer, and also - as a separate invention - the process of using a hammer to pound in a nail. What is a "process?" How is a "process" an invention? It's just a thought to use something to reach an intended goal. There is nothing truly tangible about a process - it is an event... much like encrypting a message with a private key.
Yet, process patents have been part of the U.S. patent system since its first incarnation. Stopping someone from conducting your patented process is exactly what's happening with a software patent. It's just a different kind of technical process.
the Association Of Computing Machinery (programmers and computer scientists) found about 90% opposition to software patents.
Heh. Yes, be sure you don't ask their employers when conducting a survey like this, or anyone with true business experience. Be sure you just ask the scientists who write software, without any knowledge or interest regarding its commercial uses.
The genetic information within natural organisms should be part of the common property shared among everyone. Allowing some individual to claim ownership of the genetic code of a natural organism is obviously absurd.
Agreed, and this is the current view of gene patents, both by the USPTO and the patent community. Novel genes and their novel protein products are patentable, but any case where a natural protein (or genetic precursor) is being claimed requires something unusual, bordering on extraordinary. For instance, I've seen some natural proteins patented, but in a purified, crystallized form that occurs nowhere in nature. (This is apparently useful, for instance, in determining atomic coordinate structure.)
The explosion of development in bio-technology has more to do with the available technology and automation than allowing patents on natural organisms.
Between the lab bench and the patient bedside resides an obstacle that is both enormous and often overlooked in posts such as yours. Even aside from the normal business of promoting a new drug (manufacturing, distribution, marketing, etc.), biotech companies must conduct safety and efficacy studies and obtain FDA approval. Those processes are tremendously expensive and time-consuming - and once the drug is proven and FDA approved, anyone can use it.
What company in its right mind would spend millions to obtain FDA approval of a drug if their competitors can use it the next day? Sheesh, this is/., the very epicenter of bitching about how Microsoft's theft of innovation is dragging down potential software R&D (which I believe to be true.) Pfizer could well do the same: conduct no research, but simply commercialize their formulations of drugs for which third parties obtain FDA approval.
No company would attempt FDA approval in those circumstances. We'd have a million fantastic basic-biotech observations a year, but no resources to turn them into real tools of medicine. Applied biotechnology research would cease to exist.
The only prevention of this calamity of non-innovation is the promise of a limited-time patent on such drugs. Pfizer will pay for a hundred FDA approval trials because it gets exclusive access to the drug market for a short window. - And that window is, indeed, short: by the time a drug hits the market, probably 15 years of its patent have already passed.
It seems that the current trend in the U.S. is to rush to grant ownership of everything, including knowledge, to some single individual or corporation.
(Current trend? These processes were first made available in the U.S. Constitution.) That aside - I agree with you. The details of protection have changed, and their ramifications are not well-considered. Business method patents are generally bogus, and should be allowed only in exceptionally meritorious cases. The "fixed duration" of copyright has been stretched to absurdity. We do need to resolve these misuses, or wanton abuses, of IP protection.
If there is a price tag on every bit of knowledge, it won't be long before progress in the sciences slows dramatically.
As noted in other responses - the beauty of patents is that they expire 20 years after the date of first filing. They don't just block the public domain; they become public domain.
The obstacles only concern the most recent inventions, and, one would hope, the most commercially valuable (which are the only ones that warrant $20,000 in prosecution fees and expenses.) Past this, though, you have a massive body of freely usable public knowledge. That is, of course, one of the two central purposes of the patent system.
How about factor #5: patent attorneys who help file bad patents to collect their fee, rather than talking their clients out of a bad idea (and thus making less money).
Yes, I wonder about the ethical implications of patent attorneys filing bogus patents like this, as it strongly appears to violate their ethical obligations (both to the client, and to the USPTO.)
It's my understanding that, at least historically, this was a requirement of the USPTO. You could not patent a naked, abstract, algorithm or method.
True, but that requirement was pointedly confronted and dismissed by State Street Bank (the case leading to the 1998 ruling that the USPTO must issue software patents.) Previously, in order to stem a flood of software patent apps that couldn't be handled effecively, the USPTO and federal courts conjured up imaginary reasons for denying them. For instance, the patent had to have a "real-world impact" or rely on "real-world inputs."
All of these requirements - including the embodiment requirement - are anachronisms. They should not appear in any software patent application filed in the past five years.
The big problem is that there is absolutely no way to know that you are stepping on someone's software patent if you write something at home.
Obviously, that knife cuts both ways. Why would a patentee care - or how would he even discover - that you're using his patented invention for a personal project? Even if he knows and cares, why would he waste legal fees ($HUGE) suing you to stop you from using it? Unless you're actually harming his business by using his invention, attempting to stop you is a tremendous waste of his own money.
As innovation becomes more and more stifled (creativity IS the act of building one thing on top of another which is becoming harder and harder to do legaly) fewer and fewer new things come into the world.
Heh. Do you really believe this? Reminds me of Charles Duell's fateful statement: "Everything that can be invented, has been invented." That was back in 1899, and innovation has barely slowed down. (It's a shameful fact that Mr. Duell was commissioner of the U.S. Patent & Trademark office at the time.)
The U.S. patent system was founded in the Constitution, and has existed since shortly thereafter. Indeed, previously the colonies each granted their own monopolies; and continuing back, England, Venice, and even ancient Rome and Greece had their own monopoly systems. Innovation has hardly slowed.
Keep in mind, too, that patents expire. Whereas the body of technology grows hugely every moment, the inflow of new patents is (to some extent) offset by the expiration of old patents. So you hardly have a vast body of growing patents to contend with - you have a small crust of recent patents, backed by a huge body of expired ones.
As a last point, but a very strong one: Even a patented invention can be freely used, so long as the patentee doesn't sue you. In virtually every case, the infringer is trying to sell an allegedly patented invention: e.g., your for-sale operating system utilizes a patented algorithm. If you're just using it in your own open-source project, the patentee is not likely to notice, care, or spend a million bucks suing you over it.
2. **AA people will assert that this is do to piracy.
You're mistakenly equating patents with copyrights. Music, movies, etc. are not patentable. Copyright law has massive problems right now, but it's a separate issue.
3. This leads to even more draconian laws.
Patent infringement claims are strictly a civil matter. You can't go to jail for it, because there are no such laws. Again, you're thinking copyright.
I'm a patent attorney who plans to build a career out of prosecuting software patents. I'm also halfway through earning an MCIS and several MCP certifications.
So I think that I'm well-positioned to state that awful software patents are bad for everyone - including the patentee.
Eolas is only the latest example in this stream of patents that should never have been filed, let alone examined and issued. Microsoft's double-click patent, Amazon's 1-Click patent, Yahoo's patent for an Internet search engine - these are not only completely unenforceable, but serve as albatrosses to the patentees attempting to assert them.
I blame these patents on four factors:
USPTO: Horrific ineptitude in examining even the most obviously (in the conventional sense) non-novel inventions.
Patentees: A fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of acquiring a patent, and the ramifications (legal, business, and PR) of asserting it against competitors.
Patent prosecutors: A lack of technical skill in software (far too many software patents are prosecuted by EEs who view software as just another circuit* - with poor results), and/or a reprehensible willingness to prosecute such patents. (Indeed, one wonders how filing a patent on "double-clicking application buttons" complies with the patent attorney's ethical obligation of candor before the USPTO.)
The simple fact that the field of software patents, in reality, is only six years old - the landmark court ruling that compelled the USPTO to issue software patents en masse issued in 1998. The USPTO has not had the time or resources to adjust, e.g., to hire an army of examiners skilled in the software arts and to build up a technical reference library.
While these patents are a collective debacle for the USPTO, the premise that software should constitute patentable subject matter is generally well-settled among the legal community (though, of course, the/. community has its own views.) I present the textbook example of an elegant, useful software invention worthy of patent protection: RSA - the public-key system that permits relatively effortless secured communication via one-way encryption.
There is a silver lining to this story. If you go back 30-40 years, you will see a host of complaints about these new-fangled patents on biotechnology - many claims that allowing inventors to patent novel organisms, gene sequences, proteins, and research techniques posed a horrific threat to biotech research and product development. These claims assumed the same basis as many of today's complaints against software patents: examiners were hopelessly lacking in technical skill in these areas; the subject matter qualitatively differed from conventionally patentable fields of art; a 17-year monopoly (pre-1995) represented a calamity to rapidly-evolving technology and typically-cooperative research. History has shown that those fears were hugely outweighed by the overall benefits of biotech patents - as evidenced by a thousand, wonderfully effective therapies and drugs (many of which, like prozak, are now expired, transferring the technology to the public domain.) Biotechnology and medicine are experiencing a huge upsurge in the pace of technical development - thanks in large measure to the willingness of corporations to invest in (potentially patentable) biotech R&D.
I posit that the software arts will experience a similar upsurge in innovation in short order, directly related to the allowance of software patents. The boondoggles that make for provocative/. headlines are the regrettable consequence of an unplanned transition, which time will remedy. These awful patents will expire - and, indeed, will serve as documented prior art for future corps of examiners to assert against future idiot patentees. It will simply take time to gear up the system.
Companies have a right to offer what ever pricing model people will go for, no one is forcing you to give them your money, if you don't like the terms then find another service.
Jesus christ, man. Please step forward into the 21st century. No, make that 20th century - we've had antitrust law since the 1880's.
Adam Smith's invisible hand works great at a farmer's market, where your competition across the aisle is selling the same commodity. Buyers and sellers are on equal footing, so either can choose a more reasonable dealer two steps away.
That vision is elegant and idyllic. It is also naive, and could not be more distant from the realities of the 2004 marketplace.
Antitrust law and huge regulatory agencies like the FTC, the SEC, and the EPA do not screw with the marketplace just for kicks, or to try to off-balance it from some mystical harmony. They exist because the invisible hand doesn't coerce modern corporations to sell fair products, compete with competitors (instead of cooperate), make honest representations, and avoid polluting the crap out of the environment.
I have a hard time associating anything bad with the Commodore computers I used to hack on. It was my first encounter with the world of computing and programming, it was great.
Don't get me wrong - I loved mine, too. The machine I type this on has a full install of Gamebase (16,000 great games in 500 megabytes!)
But its software model is outdated. Never again should we buy a general-purpose computer that is locked to a single operating system. That is stagnation - the very antithesis of the spirit of software. At this point, it's a computing anachronism.
except we will pay for our telephony and cable entertainment software apps that attach to our houses.
Yeah, but see, those are actual services. The phone is nothing without the vast telephone infrastructure that feeds it. Cable TV is an ongoing service with new content every day.
Software is not an ongoing service. With the exceptions noted below - you install the software, it runs. If it doesn't run and you need continuous updates - e.g., patches - then it is defective.
Now, I fully realize that most conventional apps are moving to a network model. I contend that this is fucking pointless for most apps and is only being used to drive people toward rental pricing. You will receive very little benefit from networked versions of Word, Excel, Access, Photoshop, Winzip, or most other applications. You may occasionally hop online for patches, clipart, whatever - but it's sporadic. These apps should be 99% complete right out of the (virtual) box.
A service, on the other hand, is a centralized supplier. What kinds of apps really need that to function every minute? Not all networked apps: local installs of Internet Exploder (not really a typo) and Eudora need net content, but from distributed sources, so there's no centralized service. No, you need something like iTunes or Symantec's security service. You actually receive benefit from ongoing service, so it makes sense to pay an ongoing fee.
What a racist comment, the real reason that so many minorities have problems in this country is because they're always looking for someone else to blame, how convinent that the evil white overlords come along and make everyone else give them their money.
Heh, relax... it's just an expression. Race is not really a factor (except maybe as an observation that a staggering disproportion of Fortune 500 CEOs are white males.)
It may be relevant to mention that I'm a white male myself.
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No. They can reserve advanced functionality for their pay-for-play viewer. Ad-Aware, for instance, offers an Ad-Watch utility that actively monitors your system - but it's only in the professional version. I'm fine with that.
What I'm not fine with is crippleware - free versions that limit or omit basic functionality. I've seen HTML editing documents that prepare a document for you but won't let you save it. That is bogus, because it's not a functional program. It's an interactive demo.
Real does not bill its free player as an interactive demo. It bills it as a free media player. The basic functions that accompany every fully-working media player application are (a) viewing, (b) fast-forwarding, rewinding, and pausing, and (c) locally saving the content. Any media player application that lacks any of these basic functions is crippleware - but it's not advertised as such.
- David Stein
You know, I just don't care.
I'm usually pretty tolerant of lame software. Adobe Acrobat has always been a Windows-3.1-esque piece of junk; it's probably the only modern viewer-style application that noticeably pauses between page flips. But I will maintain a sliver of patience and hope that Acrobat evolves into a non-annoying product, because (a) I genuinely support Adobe's mission of a general-purpose, cross-platform, academic-friendly document format; and (b) it's really widespread, and doesn't appear to have any decent competitor.
Real - not so. They have completely exhausted my consumer interest in their product. That's what happens when you just blatantly ignore your customer's interests for a long time. Even if their latest rev is analogous to alternatives like Quicktime Player and Windows Media, it's still far too little, far too late.
- David Stein
Mention Rhapsody, though, and not a lot of flak is sent up. Why?
Because the reason people are irritated by Real isn't their proprietary nature. That's a business decision that need not directly impact consumers. That is, "prioprietary" does not necessarily require copy-protection schemes, closed formats, monopoly pricing, and tech stagnation. (These things often happen, but not always. Technically, Perl and Linux are proprietary, but they're open-source and free.)
No, the actual reason why people hate Real is because their technology is horrific dogshit.
- Every time you want to view a new Real stream, you have to download RealPlayer version x+1.
- Their player is bloated with ads and doo-dad components you'll never use and can't get eliminate, so the interface is cluttered. It's like poking a tiny hole in a full-page newspaper advertisement, and trying to watch TV through it.
- Their free player is also crippled beyond repair. You can't save streams unless you buy their software, and that is complete bullshit.
- Today's Real streams run like technology straight out of 1994. They're bloated, tinny, and pixelated. They're vastly outcompeted by every other format.
- Their software won't stop f***ing harassing you. It spews links to itself all over your desktop, your start menu, your quick-launch bar, and your notification area. It nags you constantly to upgrade to a more recent version or buy the full version. It keeps installing its beyond-useless agent in your MSCONFIG startup, and won't go away.
In short, people hate Real because Real sucks. They've made a whole lot of awful business and technical choices, and this animosity is the consequence.- David Stein
Down, boy.
Talk about sloppy logic. I didn't suggest eliminating horns - I merely pointed out that they can be a distraction. (And the horn example wasn't originally mine - the post to which I was responding brought them up as a positive distractor.)
Of course, distractors should be kept when they have a net positive gain. Turn signals are distracting, but they allow other drivers to get out of the way. Horns are distracting, but obviously help to prevent some accidents. (And the distraction is minimized because they're purely audible - you don't have to move your eyes to get the full message.) Net result is positive - even though they distract, they should be kept.
But I see very few net positives to automobile facial expressions (compared with the simpler, audible message conveyed by a car horn.) People will spend extra time fiddling with their emotion-display icon, and extra time gawking at the facial expressions of other cars. Is that a happy-smiley or an embarrassed-smiley? Is that Volvo frowning at me or the driver next to me? Hey, that's a neat frowny-face, I wond*CRUNCH*
- David Stein
Odds are, the answer is 'No'.
True. But that's even worse: now a car expressing emotion is an unusual occurrence, one that prompts you to pay attention to it.
Can you think of another visual event that might encourage people to be better drivers? How about a wreck by the side of the road? A small visual indicator of the consequences of bad driving might encourage people to be more careful.
But what is the real impact of that? It's a visual distraction - and it causes people to gawk, horrendously tying up traffic. Worse, people have follow-up accidents: they're so busy looking out the side window that they hit something. All visual distractors have the same impact - and the more interesting they are, the more adverse the result.
Even car horns are distracting. If someone behind you honks their horn, you always shift your eyes off the road to your rear-view mirror to see what's up. Many accidents have happened in that instant. And if the car isn't honking at you, then that accident was pointless.
- David Stein
Sure! And by that same token, we should let people mount billboards on top of their cars. Because in addition to allowing them to profit (by further cluttering our consciousness with marketing), you'd be paying more attention to the car, thus making the roads safer.
- David Stein
But are you? Instead of paying attention to all of the cars, you're paying more attention to one particular car. And it's not guaranteed to be a car that's important to your driving situation - it could very well be a car on the opposite side of the road.
One of the other posters wrote it best: as you look in your rear-view mirror at the guy behind you, whose car is making a frowny-face, you're likely to rear-end the guy ahead of you.
Or, look at it this way: You're spending less time thinking about driving, and more time thinking about our ephemeral human interaction with the other driver.
- David Stein
Seriously, what an awful idea. Yes, let's pay attention to the emotions of the cars around us. Because even after the advent of cellphones, food from drive-throughs, stereos, GPS devices, and in-car LCD screens - we're still paying WAY too much attention to our driving situation.
- David Stein
And in your cynicism, you missed what the rest of us saw: We didn't care about the motorbike thing. We cared about the Chernobyl thing - her amazing photos, the incredible stories of the event and its aftermath. Those were stunning - and 100% true.
It would be similarly myopic to dismiss ilovebees.com for its marketing purpose. The AI game was a remarkable and rewarding experience, woven around some really good fiction. Hell, the Evan Chan story was far better than the AI movie, as well as most other movies, games, and stories I've experienced.
If this bee business is by the same guys, my eyes are glued to this marketing campaign.
- David Stein
Consider: How did the original manage to spawn four sequels, even though they all sucked? Because the first one was incredible. Tomb Raider 1 was one of the best gaming experiences of the early polygon days.
What made it so goddamn good? Not the fact that it was a polygonal adventure in the early days of fully-polygonal environment games (1996 - Quake had only been out for a year), and it could stand out as such in a way that it couldn't today. That wasn't the point.
The point was this: It had atmosphere. Specifically:
- It had the thrill of getting swept over a waterfall into a pool filled with unknown inhabitants.
- It had the dizzying climb to the top of a Roman tomb, in such a way that it gave you goddamn vertigo to look over the edge. That may be one of its defining traits: that leap over a gut-wrenching drop, saved by a last-second grab onto a ledge.
- It had an awesome hugeness that has been oddly missing from all later games. The sheer volume of the Roman coliseum - the height and length of a three-tier aqueduct - the awesome visage of an enormous sphinx appearing out of gloomy darkness. The Tomb Raider 1 levels made excellent use of vast space in buried caverns.
- It had puzzles that were not only clever, but visceral. How neat is it to have a huge cavern with very high entrances that you can only reach by flooding the whole cavern with water? And its setup was golden: you run around a corner and pull a lever, then hear a tremendous rush of water behind you... you know what's happened, but seeing this change is still marvelous. Commanding 100,000 gallons of water tends to convey a strong sense of power.
- Of utmost importance, Tomb Raider 1 was chock-full of decaying-tomb creepiness. You peer down a hole and see a dark pool of water far below. Jumping in almost took an act of willpower, because you didn't know what lurked beneath the surface that might suck you under. Whistling wind in the Inca level; the shock of a tyrannosaur shaking the trees while running after you; the sudden leap of a wolf from behind a rocky pillar. 95% of the game was silent except for your echoey footsteps, which made the sudden roar of an attacking bear downright galvanic. In some ways, it was creepier than even Half-Life, which kind of deadened you to nasty pouncing headcrabs after a while.
In short, the first game delivered so deftly that it continues to have market appeal, even after many crappy sequels and two awful popcorn movies. The developers forgot everything that made TR1 cool. A submarine? High-tech headquarters? Venice? Jet skis? What the fuck do these things have to do with raiding tombs? And why did Lara have to turn into goddamn Rambo, taking out soldiers with bazookas? If I wanted to play a Metal Gear game, I'd play a Metal Gear game.In short - Tomb Raider suffered from mission slip of the worst kind. The series lost its ancient-tomb-of-mystery roots, and it slid into the overcrowded field of generic third-person games. The Lost Artifact was a small step in the right direction, but it was far too puzzle-y: rather than solving clever puzzles while exploring, it felt like just a string of really lame puzzles. No gusto whatsoever. It didn't help that it was a really awful PC port with the feel of an old Playstation game.
I'd love to see the Tomb Raider series resurrected with a game true to its roots. But I think it has only one last chance to redeem itself - after five bad sequels and two crap movies, one more failure will crush the fading embers of interest.
- David Stein
Sure... like crash your box, over and over again.
This code is incredibly useful - but it's also incredibly fragile. Setting your program counter to random addresses is like closing your eyes while driving and making a blind left turn. A small miscalculation means the difference between Fourth Avenue and the tree next to Fourth Avenue.
This is the single greatest reason why previous generations of software sucked: pointers are unusably fragile. This is why they're damn near nonexistent in modern programming. Of course, you're still using them a lot (with things like "ref" and "in" parameters), but it's all heavily supervised.
But, you can still get this functionality, though - even with managed code - through reflection. That is, just build an array (or other container) out of Method objects based on the same delegate/signature/parameter list, and invoke whichever method you want. The only real difference is that the interpreter running your code (Java's VM or Microsoft's CLR) doesn't just make a leap of faith based on the contents of an integer; it understands that you're accessing a method pointer and asking to invoke it. This understanding makes safety checking possible, so that if you're wrong, the interpreter can just throw an exception rather than executing garbage memory.
And this raises me to my point: Reflection rocks. I nominate this as one of the most extraordinary features of modern programming. Your code can peer at a generic object, and poke and prod it at will. Microsoft's "Reflection Emit" stuff is even better: you have methods writing other methods. This was possible before, of course, but it was always hacky/fragile; reflection makes this explicit, legal, safe, and understandable.
- David Stein
I dug up some information:
On September 1, 1992, Bobby Fischer came out of his 20 year retirement and gave a press conference in Yugoslavia. He pulled out an order from the U.S. Treasury Department warning him that he would be violating U.N sanctions if he played Chess in Yugoslavia. He spit on the order and now faces ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine if he returns to the U.S. In addition, he must forfeit his $3.65 million to the U.S. Treasury and forfeit 10% of any match royalties earned. On September 30, Bobby Fischer began his rematch with Boris Spassky in Sveti Stefan, Yugoslavia. The match was organized by banker Jedzimir Vasiljevic. On November 11, Fischer won the match with 10 wins, 5 losses, and 15 draws. He received $3.65 million for his winnings and Spassky received $1.5 million.
And I found the letter from the Senate that explains the basis for the sanction:
Department of the Treasury
Washington
Aug 21, 1992
Order to Provide Information and Cease and Desist Activities
FAC No. 129405
Dear Mr Fischer:
It has come to our attention that you are planning to play a chess match for a cash prize in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) (hereinafter "Yugoslavia") against Boris Spassky on or about September 1, 1992. As a U.S. citizen, you are subject to the prohibitions under Executive Order 12810, dated June 5, 1992, imposing sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro. The United States Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control ("FAC"), is charged with enforcement of the Executive Order.
The Executive Order prohibits U.S. persons from performing any contract in support of a commercial project in Yugoslavia, as well as from exporting services to Yugoslavia. The purpose of this letter is to inform you that the performance of your agreement with a corporate sponsor in Yugoslavia to play chess is deemed to be in support of that sponsor's commercial activity. Any transactions engaged in for this purpose are outside the scope of General License No. 6, which authorizes only transactions to travel, not to business or commercial activities. In addition, we consider your presence in Yugoslavia for this purpose to be an exportation of services to Yugoslavia in the sense that the Yugoslav sponsor is benefitting from the use of your name and reputation.
Violations of the Executive Order are punishable by civil penalties not to exceed $10,000 per violation, and by criminal penalties not to exceed $250,000 per individual, 10 years in prison, or both. You are hereby directed to refrain from engaging in any of the activities described above. You are further requested to file a report with this office with 10 business days of your receipt of this letter, outlining the facts and circumstances surrounding any and all transactions relating to your scheduled chess match in Yugoslavia against Boris Spassky. The report should be addressed to: The U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, Enforcement Division, 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Annex - 2nd floor, Washington D.C. 20220. If you have any questions regarding this matter, please contact Merete M. Evans at (202) 622-2430.
Sincerely, (signed)
R. Richard Newcomb
Director
Office of Foreign Assets Control
- David Stein
class HandlerFunction implements EventHandler { blah blah blah }
and
HandlerFunction h = new HandlerFunction();
sourceObject.addEventListener(h);
This is syntactically unclear - it puts space between the event handler attachment and the event handler code. It's also wasteful: if you just use this event handler once, why design a whole class for it?
An anonymous inner class makes this really clear, though:
sourceObject.addEventListener(new EventListener { void eventRaised(Event e) { ... } } ) ;
In short, you patch the event-handler code right after the spot where you attach a listener object.
- David Stein
1. have a comprehensive review of the research literature and past computer related businesses, and
2. pre-issue patents (possibly already expired) to the people who have already invented novel bits of computing
3. and then open the doors to new patents.
Very insightful. In an ideal world, it would work this way. But it played out differently for several reasons:
- The USPTO proved remarkably inflexible in dealing with software patents. For an organization tha focuses on technology, the USPTO, historically, has been shockingly reluctant to change and modernization. (I find it incredibly ironic that the nation's center for innovation has 80386 computers.)
- The federal government looks at the USPTO as a cash cow, and consistently siphons off much of its income. The odd result of this fact is that the USPTO generates huge revenue, but still operates on a shoestring budget. And the fees continue to rise (which, unfortunately, increasingly excludes sole inventors who can't afford the process.) Particularly, the USPTO had no resources to build up a software reference for determining obvious vs. non-obviousness.
So, we have a train wreck. But this problem will cure iteself: bad patents expire and serve as prior art. It's outrageous that anyone can patent "double-clicking application buttons" in 2004... but no one will ever be able to claim it again.It really came down to a shoving match between the USPTO and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), and the CAFC just knocked them down. The USPTO had fair warning that a sea change was imminent - a string of cases leading up to State Street Bank suggested as much - it just failed to prepare.
- David Stein
Yes. A perfect textbook example of a patent on pure math. Utterly absurd.
This is a very common myth. Notice that the claims (which, as you know, completely define the scope of the patent) read:
1. A cryptographic communications system comprising: ...
This is not a claim to "pure math" - this is not, "A method of adding two digits, comprising..." This is a claim to an element of a communications system, which ordinarily comprises two people who are each using a whole lot of equipment tied to a huge communications network.
Could you reason through a 128-bit encryption scheme? Sure, much like you could build yourself a 747 all by yourself, in your backyard, with a wrench and a whole lot of trips to Home Depot, and infringe a bunch of Boeing's patents. Fantastic, unrealistic examples are not a sound basis for broad legal precedent.
It is just absurd to suggest that a person stitting motionless and just *thinking* could violate the RSA patent (or any other software patent).
Good luck to the patentee who tries to sue you for infringing their patent in your mind. Can you imagine how that complaint would read? "Mr. Jones violated our patented process by thinking through the steps..."
Do you honestly envision this scenario ever arising? Ever? Patents are tools of reality, and, in virtually every case, are asserted only when the alleged infringement seriously harms one's business. I fail to imagine how your wish to think up the RSA encryption for your message would prompt anyone to wave their Letters Patent in your general di-rection.
Moreover: There is USPTO precedent to suggest that your fears are unfounded. For a short while, the USPTO issued patents for medical techniques (fictitious example: "the process of diagnosing appendicitis by palpating the abdomen and observing pain response.") Patentees actually attemped to assert these patents against competing physicians. In response, the USPTO issued an exception to the enforcement rules: you can still get a medical technique patent, if you really want one... but you can't enforce it against any medical practitioner. Medical practitioners have an unlimited right to use medical techniques, whether or not patented.
So if the impossible happens, and if patentees prove to be idiotic enough to assert "pure math" claims against mathematicians, the USPTO will explicitly carve out an exception.
Every peice of software is literally nothing more than a fancy math function.
Your rationale applies more broadly to all "process" patents. Consider that you can patent a hammer, and also - as a separate invention - the process of using a hammer to pound in a nail. What is a "process?" How is a "process" an invention? It's just a thought to use something to reach an intended goal. There is nothing truly tangible about a process - it is an event... much like encrypting a message with a private key.
Yet, process patents have been part of the U.S. patent system since its first incarnation. Stopping someone from conducting your patented process is exactly what's happening with a software patent. It's just a different kind of technical process.
the Association Of Computing Machinery (programmers and computer scientists) found about 90% opposition to software patents.
Heh. Yes, be sure you don't ask their employers when conducting a survey like this, or anyone with true business experience. Be sure you just ask the scientists who write software, without any knowledge or interest regarding its commercial uses.
Similarly, I wonder how doctor
Agreed, and this is the current view of gene patents, both by the USPTO and the patent community. Novel genes and their novel protein products are patentable, but any case where a natural protein (or genetic precursor) is being claimed requires something unusual, bordering on extraordinary. For instance, I've seen some natural proteins patented, but in a purified, crystallized form that occurs nowhere in nature. (This is apparently useful, for instance, in determining atomic coordinate structure.)
The explosion of development in bio-technology has more to do with the available technology and automation than allowing patents on natural organisms.
Biotechnology? Yes. Commercial biotechnology - drugs, devices, and therapeutic techniques? No.
Between the lab bench and the patient bedside resides an obstacle that is both enormous and often overlooked in posts such as yours. Even aside from the normal business of promoting a new drug (manufacturing, distribution, marketing, etc.), biotech companies must conduct safety and efficacy studies and obtain FDA approval. Those processes are tremendously expensive and time-consuming - and once the drug is proven and FDA approved, anyone can use it.
What company in its right mind would spend millions to obtain FDA approval of a drug if their competitors can use it the next day? Sheesh, this is /., the very epicenter of bitching about how Microsoft's theft of innovation is dragging down potential software R&D (which I believe to be true.) Pfizer could well do the same: conduct no research, but simply commercialize their formulations of drugs for which third parties obtain FDA approval.
No company would attempt FDA approval in those circumstances. We'd have a million fantastic basic-biotech observations a year, but no resources to turn them into real tools of medicine. Applied biotechnology research would cease to exist.
The only prevention of this calamity of non-innovation is the promise of a limited-time patent on such drugs. Pfizer will pay for a hundred FDA approval trials because it gets exclusive access to the drug market for a short window. - And that window is, indeed, short: by the time a drug hits the market, probably 15 years of its patent have already passed.
It seems that the current trend in the U.S. is to rush to grant ownership of everything, including knowledge, to some single individual or corporation.
(Current trend? These processes were first made available in the U.S. Constitution.) That aside - I agree with you. The details of protection have changed, and their ramifications are not well-considered. Business method patents are generally bogus, and should be allowed only in exceptionally meritorious cases. The "fixed duration" of copyright has been stretched to absurdity. We do need to resolve these misuses, or wanton abuses, of IP protection.
If there is a price tag on every bit of knowledge, it won't be long before progress in the sciences slows dramatically.
As noted in other responses - the beauty of patents is that they expire 20 years after the date of first filing. They don't just block the public domain; they become public domain. The obstacles only concern the most recent inventions, and, one would hope, the most commercially valuable (which are the only ones that warrant $20,000 in prosecution fees and expenses.) Past this, though, you have a massive body of freely usable public knowledge. That is, of course, one of the two central purposes of the patent system.
- David Stein
Yes, I wonder about the ethical implications of patent attorneys filing bogus patents like this, as it strongly appears to violate their ethical obligations (both to the client, and to the USPTO.)
It's my understanding that, at least historically, this was a requirement of the USPTO. You could not patent a naked, abstract, algorithm or method.
True, but that requirement was pointedly confronted and dismissed by State Street Bank (the case leading to the 1998 ruling that the USPTO must issue software patents.) Previously, in order to stem a flood of software patent apps that couldn't be handled effecively, the USPTO and federal courts conjured up imaginary reasons for denying them. For instance, the patent had to have a "real-world impact" or rely on "real-world inputs."
All of these requirements - including the embodiment requirement - are anachronisms. They should not appear in any software patent application filed in the past five years.
- David Stein
Obviously, that knife cuts both ways. Why would a patentee care - or how would he even discover - that you're using his patented invention for a personal project? Even if he knows and cares, why would he waste legal fees ($HUGE) suing you to stop you from using it? Unless you're actually harming his business by using his invention, attempting to stop you is a tremendous waste of his own money.
- David Stein
Heh. Do you really believe this? Reminds me of Charles Duell's fateful statement: "Everything that can be invented, has been invented." That was back in 1899, and innovation has barely slowed down. (It's a shameful fact that Mr. Duell was commissioner of the U.S. Patent & Trademark office at the time.)
The U.S. patent system was founded in the Constitution, and has existed since shortly thereafter. Indeed, previously the colonies each granted their own monopolies; and continuing back, England, Venice, and even ancient Rome and Greece had their own monopoly systems. Innovation has hardly slowed.
Keep in mind, too, that patents expire. Whereas the body of technology grows hugely every moment, the inflow of new patents is (to some extent) offset by the expiration of old patents. So you hardly have a vast body of growing patents to contend with - you have a small crust of recent patents, backed by a huge body of expired ones.
As a last point, but a very strong one: Even a patented invention can be freely used, so long as the patentee doesn't sue you. In virtually every case, the infringer is trying to sell an allegedly patented invention: e.g., your for-sale operating system utilizes a patented algorithm. If you're just using it in your own open-source project, the patentee is not likely to notice, care, or spend a million bucks suing you over it.
2. **AA people will assert that this is do to piracy.
You're mistakenly equating patents with copyrights. Music, movies, etc. are not patentable. Copyright law has massive problems right now, but it's a separate issue.
3. This leads to even more draconian laws.
Patent infringement claims are strictly a civil matter. You can't go to jail for it, because there are no such laws. Again, you're thinking copyright.
- David Stein
So I think that I'm well-positioned to state that awful software patents are bad for everyone - including the patentee.
Eolas is only the latest example in this stream of patents that should never have been filed, let alone examined and issued. Microsoft's double-click patent, Amazon's 1-Click patent, Yahoo's patent for an Internet search engine - these are not only completely unenforceable, but serve as albatrosses to the patentees attempting to assert them.
I blame these patents on four factors:
While these patents are a collective debacle for the USPTO, the premise that software should constitute patentable subject matter is generally well-settled among the legal community (though, of course, the /. community has its own views.) I present the textbook example of an elegant, useful software invention worthy of patent protection: RSA - the public-key system that permits relatively effortless secured communication via one-way encryption.
There is a silver lining to this story. If you go back 30-40 years, you will see a host of complaints about these new-fangled patents on biotechnology - many claims that allowing inventors to patent novel organisms, gene sequences, proteins, and research techniques posed a horrific threat to biotech research and product development. These claims assumed the same basis as many of today's complaints against software patents: examiners were hopelessly lacking in technical skill in these areas; the subject matter qualitatively differed from conventionally patentable fields of art; a 17-year monopoly (pre-1995) represented a calamity to rapidly-evolving technology and typically-cooperative research. History has shown that those fears were hugely outweighed by the overall benefits of biotech patents - as evidenced by a thousand, wonderfully effective therapies and drugs (many of which, like prozak, are now expired, transferring the technology to the public domain.) Biotechnology and medicine are experiencing a huge upsurge in the pace of technical development - thanks in large measure to the willingness of corporations to invest in (potentially patentable) biotech R&D.
I posit that the software arts will experience a similar upsurge in innovation in short order, directly related to the allowance of software patents. The boondoggles that make for provocative /. headlines are the regrettable consequence of an unplanned transition, which time will remedy. These awful patents will expire - and, indeed, will serve as documented prior art for future corps of examiners to assert against future idiot patentees. It will simply take time to gear up the system.
- David Stein
*
It's like MAME for the C64. Highly, highly recommended.
- David Stein
Jesus christ, man. Please step forward into the 21st century. No, make that 20th century - we've had antitrust law since the 1880's.
Adam Smith's invisible hand works great at a farmer's market, where your competition across the aisle is selling the same commodity. Buyers and sellers are on equal footing, so either can choose a more reasonable dealer two steps away.
That vision is elegant and idyllic. It is also naive, and could not be more distant from the realities of the 2004 marketplace.
Antitrust law and huge regulatory agencies like the FTC, the SEC, and the EPA do not screw with the marketplace just for kicks, or to try to off-balance it from some mystical harmony. They exist because the invisible hand doesn't coerce modern corporations to sell fair products, compete with competitors (instead of cooperate), make honest representations, and avoid polluting the crap out of the environment.
- David Stein
Don't get me wrong - I loved mine, too. The machine I type this on has a full install of Gamebase (16,000 great games in 500 megabytes!)
But its software model is outdated. Never again should we buy a general-purpose computer that is locked to a single operating system. That is stagnation - the very antithesis of the spirit of software. At this point, it's a computing anachronism.
- David Stein
Yeah, but see, those are actual services. The phone is nothing without the vast telephone infrastructure that feeds it. Cable TV is an ongoing service with new content every day.
Software is not an ongoing service. With the exceptions noted below - you install the software, it runs. If it doesn't run and you need continuous updates - e.g., patches - then it is defective.
Now, I fully realize that most conventional apps are moving to a network model. I contend that this is fucking pointless for most apps and is only being used to drive people toward rental pricing. You will receive very little benefit from networked versions of Word, Excel, Access, Photoshop, Winzip, or most other applications. You may occasionally hop online for patches, clipart, whatever - but it's sporadic. These apps should be 99% complete right out of the (virtual) box.
A service, on the other hand, is a centralized supplier. What kinds of apps really need that to function every minute? Not all networked apps: local installs of Internet Exploder (not really a typo) and Eudora need net content, but from distributed sources, so there's no centralized service. No, you need something like iTunes or Symantec's security service. You actually receive benefit from ongoing service, so it makes sense to pay an ongoing fee.
- David Stein
Heh, relax... it's just an expression. Race is not really a factor (except maybe as an observation that a staggering disproportion of Fortune 500 CEOs are white males.)
It may be relevant to mention that I'm a white male myself.
- David Stein