eBay's multi-petabyte relational database is massively sharded. Once you partition, you lose a most of your "relational" advantages anyway. This is how virtually all "large databases" end up, and once you go there, you are essentially nosql anyway (but with a much hairier and harder-to-incrementally-scale architecture).
It's for exactly this reason that smart players recognize that a traditional relational database approach doesn't really buy you anything in the eventual case when you need to scale. It's why google/facebook/et al have pioneered nosql approaches, and it's why Amazon uses Dynamo for their shopping cart app (and many others) instead of oracle/sqlserver/postgres.
Google isn't the only company in the world that has to deal with petabytes of data. It's also not the only company that has to deal with incredibly large volumes of structured data.
I speak from experience, son. Your relational DB can't handle successful internet-scale loads, no matter how many awesome dbas you hire, and no matter how much money you fork over to Oracle.
You guys posting that traditional relational databases can handle the load of internet scale applications kill me. You mock this guy who has a legit problem that everyone who has ever run an internet scale technology is very familiar with.
NoSQL isn't some passing fad invented by high school kids.
Luckily, most of you will probably never discover that fact for yourselves, because you'll never have experience with a successful internet-scale architecture. Relational DBs are just fine for internal "enterprisey" apps, or for your hobby website that drives an astounding 1200 page views/month, or for your failed attempt at launching a web service that only ever garners 300,000 users, so you can continue to delude yourselves that there just isn't a problem here, and SQL is the only skillset you'll ever need.
For the elite few who actually achieve success, you'll totally know where the OP is coming from. Intimately. And you'll either be very glad that there is a path (hadoop, cassandra, mongodb, etc) to migrate to that solves your problems, or you'll be very glad that you started with one of those solutions in the first place.
The change doesn't allow companies to infringe on patents by non-practicing patent holders -- it simply gives courts discretion on whether an appropriate remedy is to issue an injunction, award damages, or mete out some other punishment.
In the case you illustrate, it is doubtful that a court would not grant an injunction against the infringer.
"This is a big deal, as it increases your right to create. It diminishes the paper inventor's monopoly over basic ideas, and gives you more freedom to invent and market your innovations without the fear that unscrupulous individuals will be able to thwart it all by gaming the legal system.
"This subtle change doesn't destroy the shackles of our broken patent system, but it certainly loosens the bonds that tie innovation down. And perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates that the Supreme Court understands how oppressive the current legal system has become with respect to patent litigation. This decision is, perhaps, a portent of how the Court might feel about several other important patent issues it is schedulued to hear."
If you implement theoretically secure designs, but they suffer from usability problems, you'll end up with a system which is neither secure nor usable.
If, on the other hand, you design your security/authentication mechanisms with usability as a key concern, you'll end up with usable, secure systems.
Myhrvold continues to maintain that his massive patent holding firm is all about hiring inventors and doing brand new stuff. Yet their own history is not on their side. With 3000 patents in their portfolio already, the young age of the firm, and normal patent pendancy of about 3 years, the only way they could have built this portfolio is by purchasing patents from dead companies or other patent trolls and paper inventors. Myhrvold is continually disengenuous about what they do, and the evidence is not in their favor (they almost spent $15 million on the XML patent portfolio before Novell got it and released it to the commons).
No, Balsillie didn't subtract out the cost of NTP/Campana filing bogus patent applications covering overly broad, obvious ideas, nor of paying lawyers to fight with the USPTO to get them approved. Why should he?
No, Balsillie didn't subtract out NTP/Campana's cost of failing in the marketplace. Why should he?
Balsillie made an interesting point yesterday -- NTP spent $19 on postage to send out cease and desist letters to 47 companies. Because of the length of the claims in their 5 patents, it would cost each company roughly $200,000 just to respond to the claims (to consult with counsel to avoid willful infringement), which means that just by sending out those letters, NTP cost the economy a net $9 million bucks, and this is before ever stepping into court!
To read the exact excerpt (where Balsillie made the point quite eloquently), read this
Your position sounds like someone who has never had their innovative idea squashed by greedy patent holders who have gained illegitimate "rights" to overly-broad and obvious chunks of the idea space.
Until you've labored for years to create something truly innovative and received a cease-and-desist letter claiming that you've infringed someone's ill-gotten patent, you have no legs to stand on. I've been through this. I've seen these guys' bogus patent claims, and determined that they wouldn't stand up in court. But, I'm sorry to say, I didn't have the $10 million needed to defend myself in litigation against them (that's the average cost of this type of legal proceeding, you know), so I folded.
Many hours of my life went down the toilet because of the patent system, and the world never got to see what I was about to unleash upon it. Perhaps that's all for the better. Perhaps my invention sucked. But we'll never know, will we, because the market never got to cast a vote on this one. Instead, poorly informed and overworked beauracrats in the government's Idea Regulatory Board (the USPTO) handed out monopolies over ideas like they were candy.
The rule of law is not what is being argued against here. Societal laws preventing murder are not arbitrary; they are clearly defined and well-understood.
In contrast, the granting of patents over ideas is arbitrary. Which ideas deserve such protection? Who gets to own a particular idea? And who decides? All of these decisions must be made subjectively.
The other arbitrary attribute of patent law lies in its blatant conflict with other natural rights, namely, the right to create and invent (which is a pre-governmental right, much like the right to physical property itself). You can't institute patent/copyright without stamping on this other right.
And that's why this is relevant to the discussion. The boundaries of such idea monopoly systems are arbitrary, and not natural. Whether you want to draw a patent fence around any conceivable idea or whether you want to exclude natural facts, whether copyright should cover any expressed idea or whether it should only apply to expressions of a certain length, whether prior art matters or not, whether obviousness matters or not, whether first-to-file or first-to-invent, whether to allow the independent invention defense, whether the patent office or the courts or congress defines the extent of patentability/copyrightability -- all are arbitrary decisions, handed down by authority. None are based in natural rights. There are no natural boundaries (except to claim that none of these monopolies should be enforced by government in the first place).
Perhaps the most accurate conclusion is that there is no natural right to exclusive idea monopolies (either in patents or copyright), as these cannot exist without the arbitrary intervention of government.
On the other side of the coin, the right to create and invent is a natural right, and has been with us since the beginning. It is only in the past several centuries that this natural right has been eroded by idea monopolists and those who want to tie up exclusive rights to natural discoveries through physical force, in the form of patent and copyright law.
It is absolutely false that the pharmaceuticals need protetionist monopolies granted by government fiat in order to make money. These two articles demolish that fallacy rather efficiently:
You really should look more closely at your history.
For example, those countries with the 'weakest' patent systems have often shown more innovation than those with 'strong'. This is particularly true of Switzerland and drug patents, and even of Germany (compared to the US and Britain prior to the 1970s).
I'll readily admit that what incentivizes people to be innovative is clealy complex, and any simple motive that we can assign is surely not adequate.
Thomas Edison spent fortunes and years of his life trying to perfect different inventions, and he was certainly no altruist.
I would agree 100% with you there. In fact, I'd take it further: Edison was more interested in money than he was in invention. His antics with DC vs AC, his cutthroat attitudes toward Westinghouse, his undervaluing of Tesla, his antagonism of competitive video equipment that drove the movie industry to California to escape his patents -- all indicate that he was very motivated by money, and not particularly motivated by truth or even, for that matter, progress. I know that sounds a bit heretical for a man we are taught to revere in elementary school, but it is an increasingly common sentiment for those who become familiar with his history.
But I digress. I wasn't trying to claim that altruism should be our only (or even our main) motivator. The real reason Edison is interesting in this debate is that he was FAR from alone in working on many of 'his' inventions. There were dozens of researchers working on the light bulb at the same time he was, for instance. He didn't invent the light bulb. He did happen upon a design that worked better (burned brighter and longer) first, but surely no one would claim that without Edison, the modern light buld wouldn't have been invented within +-1 or 2 years. It is also interesting to note that Edison didn't do a lot of his own inventing -- he hired others to do it for him (such as Tesla).
Goodyear, likewise. I certainly wouldn't argue with Daniel Webster, who asked "And now is Charles Goodyear the discoverer of this invention of vulcanized rubber?... Is there a man in the world who found out that fact before Charles Goodyear?" Yes, absolutely, Goodyear found it first, and he deserves that credit. But he certainly wasn't alone -- MANY people were working on the problem of how to make rubber less brittle in cold and more resilient to heat. No one can say when vulcanization of rubber would have been discovered, or who would have discovered it had Goodyear not done so, but it is quite certain that someone would have, and that it would not have been long after 1843.
Now, the natural response to all this is "there would not have been so many people interested in developing the light bulb or tough rubber if there weren't patents." Maybe so. You said:
Why would anyone bother to secure financing, start a company, form a production line, buy machinery, etc., when if the product flops, you hold the bag, and if the product is a success, a Chinese manufacturer produces the same thing in huge quantities and at half the price? Why would anyone bother?
Your argument seems obvious, but there is a lot of subtlety that I think you ignore. I'll point some of it out.
First, there is an insidious assumption underlying all of this: that invention, in and of itself, is without value.
I'll say that again. You are asserting that invention, without patent protection, is without economic value.
I assert that it is tremendously valuable economically, regardless of patents.
That Chinese Manufacturer that you mentioned, for instance, is tremendously benefitted by invention. Everytime some new idea for a producible good is created, the manufacturer is enriched. The manufacturer, then, has an incredible economic incentive to fund innovation.
That may sound a little crazy, but a large part of our economy already works that way. I'll give you an example. When I was a graduate student, I visited Intel's headquarters up in Oregon. We talked about storage devices, a market that Intel does not participate in. The people I met with told us, point blank, that if we had a good idea for a non-rotating storage device that could compete with magnetic hard drives, they had millions of dollars to throw at us
An argument can certainly be made that a patent on the safety pin is a bad patent. You may not agree, but here goes:
Patents, constitutionally, only exist for the "promotion of the useful Arts and Sciences." They don't exist to guarantee inventors revenue streams.
Now, you could say that the potential revenue stream that an inventor may get is what caused her to invent the safety pin, and that without patent protection, instead of inventing the safety pin the inventor would have instead sat on the couch and watched Jerry Springer. But the burden of proof for such a counter-argument is on he who puts it forth: why wouldn't the inventor have invented it anyway? How many inventors of our most seminal technologies claim to be motivated primarily by economic incentives? If this inventor had not invented the safety pin, why would no one else have invented it independently?
The truth is, there are a host of natural incentives for inventing the safety pin that exist without patent protection. The obvious one is: people buy safety pins. True, you wouldn't be able to avoid others from also making and selling safety pins, but there is nothing that prevents you from selling them yourself. And there are a number of 'first-mover' advantages in any market. If you can't use those advantages to your benefit, then perhaps you don't deserve to make as much money as a competitor that can. And the marketplace, in general, actually benefits from this competition.
Substitute any invention or discovery for 'safety pin' above. The argument is the same.
The following is more specific: the safety pin is a rather trivial 'invention' -- anything that couldn't naturally be protected by trade-secret should be considered obvious enough that it doesn't warrant patent protection in the first place. This harks back to my original post, about the essential trade involved in creating a patent system: inventor discloses a secret, society grants monopoly. If the inventor couldn't protect his original trade secret, he has nothing to trade to society in order to get his monopoly. What is the secret he can bring to the table to trade for? Thus, the patent is invalid to begin with. The much lamented 'patent quality' issue is also at play here.
I know that the current patent system doesn't recognize these arguments; it grants patents for essentially anything that can be created, regardless of the value to society of disclosing it publicly in a patent application. But that doesn't change the fact that the constitutional basis for giving Congress the power to grant idea monopolies is based in 1) an argument for spurring the Arts and Sciences and 2) an exchange of value for value (disclosure of a trade secret for grant of patent).
when *you* code, do you switch style every day? I didn't think so.
When I'm writing my own code, I format it the way I like. When I'm editing code that someone else has written (or adding functionality), I edit it conforming to the style that they used in that file.
So, yes, I do switch styles when I need to in order to play nice and respect code-ownership, and yes, in code pushing stretches, this is often every day.
You are absolutely right about the patent system being agreed upon in the U.S. largely as a compromise to get people to reveal their trade secrets. That is the essential exchange in the patent system: society agrees to grant a temporary monopoly on an application of an idea if the discoverer of that idea makes public everything about how to perform the invention.
The biggest problem with this is that the whole exchange is antiquated: there are no more trade-secrets that can be kept for periods of time longer than 10 or 20 years. Society is trading in a lot and getting essentially nothing in return, since the invention would eventually be disclosed anyway.
BTW -- about that period of time during which the discovery hasn't yet been reverse-engineered or independently discovered -- that time period forms a natural monopoly over the invention, and the length is a natural consequence of how ground-breaking, difficult, or genius the discovery actually is. No patent office, no arbitrary examiner's decision, no arbitrary and uniform 20-year period is needed. Trade secret lets the discoverer of an idea or technology have a limited monopoly without government intervention, oversight, or artificial grant of monopoly power.
You do realize it can take anywhere up to 2 years or more to have a patent approved?
You do realize that if anyone adopts your genius 'invention' during those two years, you'll be in a better position once your patent is granted than if you had stopped them right away, right? Isn't that the whole point of the GIF, JPEG, MP3, MPEG-4 patent strategy -- lay low until the technology becomes widespread, then do a massive shakedown.
The patent office is doing you a favor by taking so long.
Are you seriously comparing putting curly braces "in the wrong place" to murder?
everyone's right to kill whomever they please
If you can't differentiate between natural rights and an unquestionably non-right ('right to murder', WTF?), then I think I'll just go ahead and invoke Godwin's Law (or some variant) right now and end the discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
It's for exactly this reason that smart players recognize that a traditional relational database approach doesn't really buy you anything in the eventual case when you need to scale. It's why google/facebook/et al have pioneered nosql approaches, and it's why Amazon uses Dynamo for their shopping cart app (and many others) instead of oracle/sqlserver/postgres.
I speak from experience, son. Your relational DB can't handle successful internet-scale loads, no matter how many awesome dbas you hire, and no matter how much money you fork over to Oracle.
100GB+ is not a large dataset.
NoSQL isn't some passing fad invented by high school kids.
Luckily, most of you will probably never discover that fact for yourselves, because you'll never have experience with a successful internet-scale architecture. Relational DBs are just fine for internal "enterprisey" apps, or for your hobby website that drives an astounding 1200 page views/month, or for your failed attempt at launching a web service that only ever garners 300,000 users, so you can continue to delude yourselves that there just isn't a problem here, and SQL is the only skillset you'll ever need.
For the elite few who actually achieve success, you'll totally know where the OP is coming from. Intimately. And you'll either be very glad that there is a path (hadoop, cassandra, mongodb, etc) to migrate to that solves your problems, or you'll be very glad that you started with one of those solutions in the first place.
It works better than you'd imagine. See, for example, http://alenpeacock.flud.org/2/personal/CourseWork/cs572
The change doesn't allow companies to infringe on patents by non-practicing patent holders -- it simply gives courts discretion on whether an appropriate remedy is to issue an injunction, award damages, or mete out some other punishment.
In the case you illustrate, it is doubtful that a court would not grant an injunction against the infringer.
"This subtle change doesn't destroy the shackles of our broken patent system, but it certainly loosens the bonds that tie innovation down. And perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates that the Supreme Court understands how oppressive the current legal system has become with respect to patent litigation. This decision is, perhaps, a portent of how the Court might feel about several other important patent issues it is schedulued to hear."
From Right to Create
If you implement theoretically secure designs, but they suffer from usability problems, you'll end up with a system which is neither secure nor usable.
If, on the other hand, you design your security/authentication mechanisms with usability as a key concern, you'll end up with usable, secure systems.
My verdict: Troll to the Xth Degree!
No, Balsillie didn't subtract out NTP/Campana's cost of failing in the marketplace. Why should he?
sorry, link should have been this.
To read the exact excerpt (where Balsillie made the point quite eloquently), read this
Until you've labored for years to create something truly innovative and received a cease-and-desist letter claiming that you've infringed someone's ill-gotten patent, you have no legs to stand on. I've been through this. I've seen these guys' bogus patent claims, and determined that they wouldn't stand up in court. But, I'm sorry to say, I didn't have the $10 million needed to defend myself in litigation against them (that's the average cost of this type of legal proceeding, you know), so I folded.
Many hours of my life went down the toilet because of the patent system, and the world never got to see what I was about to unleash upon it. Perhaps that's all for the better. Perhaps my invention sucked. But we'll never know, will we, because the market never got to cast a vote on this one. Instead, poorly informed and overworked beauracrats in the government's Idea Regulatory Board (the USPTO) handed out monopolies over ideas like they were candy.
The patent system is FUBAR.
In contrast, the granting of patents over ideas is arbitrary. Which ideas deserve such protection? Who gets to own a particular idea? And who decides? All of these decisions must be made subjectively.
The other arbitrary attribute of patent law lies in its blatant conflict with other natural rights, namely, the right to create and invent (which is a pre-governmental right, much like the right to physical property itself). You can't institute patent/copyright without stamping on this other right.
And that's why this is relevant to the discussion. The boundaries of such idea monopoly systems are arbitrary, and not natural. Whether you want to draw a patent fence around any conceivable idea or whether you want to exclude natural facts, whether copyright should cover any expressed idea or whether it should only apply to expressions of a certain length, whether prior art matters or not, whether obviousness matters or not, whether first-to-file or first-to-invent, whether to allow the independent invention defense, whether the patent office or the courts or congress defines the extent of patentability/copyrightability -- all are arbitrary decisions, handed down by authority. None are based in natural rights. There are no natural boundaries (except to claim that none of these monopolies should be enforced by government in the first place).
On the other side of the coin, the right to create and invent is a natural right, and has been with us since the beginning. It is only in the past several centuries that this natural right has been eroded by idea monopolists and those who want to tie up exclusive rights to natural discoveries through physical force, in the form of patent and copyright law.
Why Drug Companies don't Need Patents
On the Necessity of Drug Patents
For example, those countries with the 'weakest' patent systems have often shown more innovation than those with 'strong'. This is particularly true of Switzerland and drug patents, and even of Germany (compared to the US and Britain prior to the 1970s).
I would agree 100% with you there. In fact, I'd take it further: Edison was more interested in money than he was in invention. His antics with DC vs AC, his cutthroat attitudes toward Westinghouse, his undervaluing of Tesla, his antagonism of competitive video equipment that drove the movie industry to California to escape his patents -- all indicate that he was very motivated by money, and not particularly motivated by truth or even, for that matter, progress. I know that sounds a bit heretical for a man we are taught to revere in elementary school, but it is an increasingly common sentiment for those who become familiar with his history.
But I digress. I wasn't trying to claim that altruism should be our only (or even our main) motivator. The real reason Edison is interesting in this debate is that he was FAR from alone in working on many of 'his' inventions. There were dozens of researchers working on the light bulb at the same time he was, for instance. He didn't invent the light bulb. He did happen upon a design that worked better (burned brighter and longer) first, but surely no one would claim that without Edison, the modern light buld wouldn't have been invented within +-1 or 2 years. It is also interesting to note that Edison didn't do a lot of his own inventing -- he hired others to do it for him (such as Tesla).
Goodyear, likewise. I certainly wouldn't argue with Daniel Webster, who asked "And now is Charles Goodyear the discoverer of this invention of vulcanized rubber?... Is there a man in the world who found out that fact before Charles Goodyear?" Yes, absolutely, Goodyear found it first, and he deserves that credit. But he certainly wasn't alone -- MANY people were working on the problem of how to make rubber less brittle in cold and more resilient to heat. No one can say when vulcanization of rubber would have been discovered, or who would have discovered it had Goodyear not done so, but it is quite certain that someone would have, and that it would not have been long after 1843.
Now, the natural response to all this is "there would not have been so many people interested in developing the light bulb or tough rubber if there weren't patents." Maybe so. You said:
Your argument seems obvious, but there is a lot of subtlety that I think you ignore. I'll point some of it out.
First, there is an insidious assumption underlying all of this: that invention, in and of itself, is without value.
I'll say that again. You are asserting that invention, without patent protection, is without economic value.
I assert that it is tremendously valuable economically, regardless of patents.
That Chinese Manufacturer that you mentioned, for instance, is tremendously benefitted by invention. Everytime some new idea for a producible good is created, the manufacturer is enriched. The manufacturer, then, has an incredible economic incentive to fund innovation.
That may sound a little crazy, but a large part of our economy already works that way. I'll give you an example. When I was a graduate student, I visited Intel's headquarters up in Oregon. We talked about storage devices, a market that Intel does not participate in. The people I met with told us, point blank, that if we had a good idea for a non-rotating storage device that could compete with magnetic hard drives, they had millions of dollars to throw at us
Patents, constitutionally, only exist for the "promotion of the useful Arts and Sciences." They don't exist to guarantee inventors revenue streams.
Now, you could say that the potential revenue stream that an inventor may get is what caused her to invent the safety pin, and that without patent protection, instead of inventing the safety pin the inventor would have instead sat on the couch and watched Jerry Springer. But the burden of proof for such a counter-argument is on he who puts it forth: why wouldn't the inventor have invented it anyway? How many inventors of our most seminal technologies claim to be motivated primarily by economic incentives? If this inventor had not invented the safety pin, why would no one else have invented it independently?
The truth is, there are a host of natural incentives for inventing the safety pin that exist without patent protection. The obvious one is: people buy safety pins. True, you wouldn't be able to avoid others from also making and selling safety pins, but there is nothing that prevents you from selling them yourself. And there are a number of 'first-mover' advantages in any market. If you can't use those advantages to your benefit, then perhaps you don't deserve to make as much money as a competitor that can. And the marketplace, in general, actually benefits from this competition.
Substitute any invention or discovery for 'safety pin' above. The argument is the same.
The following is more specific: the safety pin is a rather trivial 'invention' -- anything that couldn't naturally be protected by trade-secret should be considered obvious enough that it doesn't warrant patent protection in the first place. This harks back to my original post, about the essential trade involved in creating a patent system: inventor discloses a secret, society grants monopoly. If the inventor couldn't protect his original trade secret, he has nothing to trade to society in order to get his monopoly. What is the secret he can bring to the table to trade for? Thus, the patent is invalid to begin with. The much lamented 'patent quality' issue is also at play here.
I know that the current patent system doesn't recognize these arguments; it grants patents for essentially anything that can be created, regardless of the value to society of disclosing it publicly in a patent application. But that doesn't change the fact that the constitutional basis for giving Congress the power to grant idea monopolies is based in 1) an argument for spurring the Arts and Sciences and 2) an exchange of value for value (disclosure of a trade secret for grant of patent).
I see that you are right.
So, yes, I do switch styles when I need to in order to play nice and respect code-ownership, and yes, in code pushing stretches, this is often every day.
Is that really so hard to believe?
The biggest problem with this is that the whole exchange is antiquated: there are no more trade-secrets that can be kept for periods of time longer than 10 or 20 years. Society is trading in a lot and getting essentially nothing in return, since the invention would eventually be disclosed anyway.
BTW -- about that period of time during which the discovery hasn't yet been reverse-engineered or independently discovered -- that time period forms a natural monopoly over the invention, and the length is a natural consequence of how ground-breaking, difficult, or genius the discovery actually is. No patent office, no arbitrary examiner's decision, no arbitrary and uniform 20-year period is needed. Trade secret lets the discoverer of an idea or technology have a limited monopoly without government intervention, oversight, or artificial grant of monopoly power.
See the comments under this post for more discussion.
The patent office is doing you a favor by taking so long.