Actually any ordinary smart guy can draft their own patent application (or at the very least a Provisional and test the market).
Patent system is the same. If it's harder to file a patent claim then it is to invent new technologies and products then there is little money to be gained from releasing your invention into the wild.
Sure there needs to be a balance between protecting the small guy from the big companies that without a patent system would just lie and wait for the truly innovative competitors to emerge and then copy-paste them and release in their own next product version.
Not if you don't have enough money to pay for patent lawyers to outlast their patent lawyers. If it is Microsoft we are talking about, I bet they could drag the case out for years without paying a dime while you're burning away my life savings paying a lawyer. You might win, but then they'll keep appealing and try to get you to settle. This is inherent to the american judical system. If you have a valid patent then you have several options:
settle out of court (most often best option for both sides anyways)
fight them in court
admit defeat and abandon
If you decide to fight them in court then don't forget there are law firms that will work on contingent basis anyways (sure at non-trivial percentage and that's why I suggest option #1 is usually better route).
Patents help the smaller guy innovating and improving civilization. Otherwise explain to me why overwhelmingly it was the larger software companies standing behind these new rules?
show me a little guy that without patent protection can develop & market something truly innovative and not be quickly copied-pasted into the next release of a larger company product with the marketing muscle.
Both sides voiced their opinions to the courts and small and independent software groups were victorious today, and large software companies were defeated (for now). Unfortunately the trolls give small companies a bad name in innovation and patents.
we didn't need an elaborate lecture on web servers and URL parsing. We are talking about one specific patent here and its focus on web search engines and the innovation(s) it teaches. The searchengines.com/slashdot examples show how to easily search for the search term (in this case "slashdot" but could be any other search term).
And why don't the major web search engines already do this, if it's so user-friendly? Because they're web search engines! They exist because URLs aren't a very user-friendly way to get around online!
Exactly, like a previous poster you've also shown why this patent is valid - it does something a different way.
I have read it, it's still stupid - yes it has uses, but it's certainly not a technological advancement. It's something that's been around since mod_rewrite as a codified structure & available earlier than that as customized 404 pages. Slapping 'for search engines' on it doesn't make it innovative. It makes it a waste of everyones time.
Looking at history of civilization and how technology evolves - it is filled with examples of minor innovations. Add up all those minor innovations over years and you've got some big progress (look at cars the past ~100 years). Many of those minor innovations would not happen without some financial investments. Many of those investments would not happen without some guarantee for the investor. A patent is one way to get a guarantee (trade secrets, copyrights, etc... are others). Software is no different from any other technology except that software developers want to disregard the blood sweat and tears expended to bring the current state of technology to market.
So please do go on to explain how exactly applying existing webserver controls to the subset of webservers dedicated to search engines is innovative & non-obvious.
1. Everything simple is obvious in hindsight.
It's similar to whether we would have intermittent windshield washers on our cars today if that guy back in the late 70's didn't invent it. Keep in mind that:
the problem (variable rain volume),
the technology for intermittent windshield washers
all existed for decades before ~1980. Once people saw an implementation of intermittent wipers it was dead obvious (timer delay switch and pause at the end of the cycle), but obviously back before 1970's people didn't think it was a problem worth solving or it wasn't obvious (I would think the former). So obviousness of the invention/innovation is not everything but it could be the problem isn't seen as a problem or not seen as the problem.
2. One Useful example
Maybe some people don't have the Google item in their browser toolbar and/or it would be easier to type "google.com/search term". Say I am at a locked down computer (library, internet cafe, parents house, etc...) and their browser is some older version that does not have Google in their toolbar (say IE 5), so instead of 1) going to google.com, 2) typing "search term", instead with this innovation I can just: 1) enter "google.com/search term" into the URL bar. So 1 less step.
Alternatively, this saves someone from remembering and typing:
google.com/search?q=search%20term
3. Prior Art
I still haven't seen any prior art for web search engines that provide this functionality.
Again none of these work:
www.google.com/slashdot
www.yahoo.com/slashdot
www.altavista.com/slashdot
search.msn.com/slashdot
4. How do you *know* someone else would have came up with this?
If this is so obvious why didn't the other major search engines provide this functionality? How can you guarantee that 1) the search engines would have come up with this, 2) provided it.
limiting an existing technology to a subset of usable situations is not an innovation.
this is not a subset - mod_rewrite (or however they wish to implement it) is being applied to something very specific that no one else did/thought-of before - web search engines.
Furthermore, this patent is targeting something which few people here need to worry about (again "web search engines" AND if you are providing searches by www.yoursearchengine.com/searchterm). Find a "web search engine" that does this and you've come closer to finding prior art.
To be honest, it's a stupid patent because it deliberately breaks the HTML specification (which is why people don't do it now).
Thanks - you've just shown another reason why this is non-obvious - it does something with the technology that was not intended for, not common practice, etc...
If you believe it to be a "stupid patent" then you may wish to re-read it again, I see the use of it and some technological advancement (sure perhaps minor but almost all of civilization has been from minor inventions along the way).
Most seem to be missing that this patent is focused/limited towards search engines:
The present invention relates to user interfaces and methods for submitting search queries to web-based search engines.
I just tried the following URL's and none provided the functionality or technological advancement the patent provides to the public:
http://www.google.com/slashdot
http://www.yahoo.com/slashdot
http://www.altavista.com/slashdot
http://search.msn.com/slashdot
So this provides an alternative to browser toolbars that provide easy access to search engines. Who knows how long we would have went without this advancement - similar to how mankind had to wait until the 1980's before the intermittent wiper was invented and brought to market (even though the equivalents to mod_rewrite existed for decades before someone came up with that).
good point and similar to the fact that software patents hurt the big software companies more than the little ones - because the big guys are plenty happy to just wait and watch the best competitor products come to market and then copy-paste those ideas into their already established products and push out a new update/patch/version and wipe out the little guy.
most inventions in history have been minor technological advancements this one applies to search engines. Today's cars are built on ~100 years of minor advancements, etc...
Innovative tech companies need patents more than anybody since the true innovation are typically done by small companies and their technological advancements can be copied and pasted fairly easily. Indeed this is the reason software patents hurt the mid-large companies more than the small companies. Software patents are the only defense innovative small company has.
If you can't recognize a truly good idea when you see one then you'll probably want to stay away from innovating. Probably something akin to a chef that can't tell the perfect recipe after he's baked it.
"There is a difference between: "No one had thought to ask specifically for intermittent wipers." And "Intermittent wipers were hard to figure out and no one had solved the problem of how to make them."
This really doesn't matter when we're talking about innovations benefitting society, all that matters is that intermittent wipers are here and just about everybody benefits from them right? Or do you actually believe that for the 50+years before the 1980's (when intermittent windshield wipers were finally invented) that people were satisfied with 3-speed slow/medium/fast wipers and that those few people who were unsatisified and thought "I wish I had a time delay in my switch" and they just decided it wasn't worthwhile to pursue even though there are millions of cars being sold every year? But how can you believe this since those people should have recognized the potential in it (quick 2minute off the cuff estimate might have said $1 per car manufactured and sold in america per year adds up to a pretty decent amount). I find that hard to believe anybody could miss that (unless they found easier way to make $200million somewhere else) so I think this pretty clearly proves nobody did think of intermittent wipers before the 1980's!
If on the other hand you think the car manufacturers invented it at the same time then how do you explain:
1) nobody had invented intermittent wipers for the 50+years before the 1980's,
2) the final court decision (after many many years) ruled in favour of the little guy in spite of all the resources the american car manufacturers had.
Furthermore, did you know it took a long time for him to win that court ruling and that at least 2 of the big american car manufacturers knowingly infringed on his patent for that whole time? If anything that seems to say patents still don't give enough power to the small inventor and the large companies still have incentive to try to drag it out in the courts.
Now last but definitely not least, you still cannot prove that if that guy who invented the intermittent windshield wipers had not have invented them when he did that we would still have them standard today:
1) we were missing the invention from the 1920's to 1980's anyways so a lot of people had the chance (and the monetary motivation should have been great all along)
2) what has changed in the past 25 years that all of a sudden this would have made this invention suddenly possible in 1980? The technology to make the intermittent windshield wipers is a lot older than the 1980's.
I think I've shown that patents should not be limited to just Einsteins but rather society can benefit from seemingly ordinary ideas.
"You went the wrong way, that I thought I might want to commericalize the idea, go the other way as it proves my point exactly. What if I *didn't* think tucking the jug of milk under my shirt was innovative? What if I thought it was completely obvious?"
You know it when you see it. If you come up with an RSA algorithm, or Google PageRanking, or SecurId you should be smart enough to recognize it's potential too. If you don't recognize it then that's fine if you were still first to invent (for now). If someone did innovate and come up with the RSA algorithm say a year before you did then I think it's fair that it's theirs (assuming they recognized the potential and went for the patent).
"Because hooking up a high delay turn signal blinker to the wiper control switch is worth millions. The idea was a good one, and I'm glad he had it, but I'm unconvinced it merits a patent, or that it should be ANYONES meal ticket for life."
And Google's PageRanking is just weighting backlinks, and the light bulb is just a filament, and the first wheel was just a stone with a hole in it and a stick, and fire was just a spark and some twigs, and.... As they say, hindsight is everything. The fact is production cars were around for 50+years before the intermittent windshield wiper was invented, so now how are you going to explain that invention was so obvious? If you can see these things so clearly today then you could be improving society too (open source, technical paper, or even writing a patent).
"And it took 2 generations of their implementation to make something a lot better then Mosaic/Netscape ever produced."
Because Microsoft had the money and resources to do with the tiny Netscape how they wished. Maybe somebody else would have come up with it and Microsoft would have copied and killed them too. What incentive did the large company Microsoft have to innovate and develop an online browser? So that there would be something to compete with Office and Windows? If you were an investor and a similar situation would crop up today, let's say someone were to come up with better search engine then Google's PageRanking, and the company told you "we're going to implement it and market it and not bother with going applying for a patent because we think we can stay ahead of Google" - would you still invest with them? Again, where is the incentive to spend $dollars to innovate. Show me examples, give me reasons for your side of the argument, show me how a small company has good odds of surviving (let alone growing). Any good business will attract competition, show me how a small company that comes up with a good innovative idea can invest money in R&D and trials and cost of bringing their product to market and produce a return on the risk of investment. The risk of failure is great, there's better places for your investment dollar. After a 5-10 years in a non-patent world investors would soon realize what investments produce returns and innotive companies would not, instead companies built on copying and bringing products to market cheaper would produce the better returns - and there innovation would slow down, and then society's benefit from innovation would also slow down.
"Monopoly power and having it pre-installed with their OS definitely helped, but like it or not, their browser was simply a lot better after some time of development."
With the money and resources they were throwing at it (I've seen numbers in the hundreds of $millions they spent by the time IE5 was out) anybody could build a better browser than 4 or 5 students at UofIllinois. Do you remember up to and including IE3? yuck, and all the resources they had.
The lessons learned from Mosaic/Netscape vs Microsoft are exactly indicative of the David vs Golaith and why patents are needed. You can go on and on about how Netscape screwed themselves, well any company that innovative should be able to make a few mistakes and still survive but they didn't. Any other company that would have come up with that if NCSA/Mosaic/Netscape hadn't also would have met a similar fate without any kind of protection.
"The 'free' part however is a silly argument. Most private users where I have seen Netscape were using either free 'trial' versions, 'branded' versions provided by their ISP, or the always available and much used beta versions. People actually paying for the browser wasn't happening much way before MS entered the browser game, and it couldn't work without something else to support it, not before and not after Microsoft entered the market."
Nobody was paying for the browser but one way Netscape was originally generating revenue was by the advertising on their home page. That was fair since people could easily change their home page too. Maybe that wasn't sustainable but they also got into selling servers and some ecommerce products if I remember correctly. They could and should have survived if it wasn't for the behemoth looking to take them down and some protection against him.
Even with some patent on their web browser (some simple ideas might be something like bookmarks, or some function of a home page, or Back button, etc...) something that a competitor would have had to improve upon to create some incentive for users to switch. Any of those could have had workarounds, and maybe would have pushed the web browser envelope farther, maybe instead of a home page it somehow determines some page/news appropriate for the user to see, maybe instead of
"Mosaic and Netscape lost due to their implementations being inferior to those of others, not because of lack of patents.
Microsoft succeeded despite lack of patents there (actually, thanks to lack of patents of course)
As a whole, the web is as succesfull as it is thanks to those same patents lacking."
This is sad that you feel this way. Mosaic innovated, who knows what we'd be doing today without Mosaic (maybe still BBS or telnet to forums) then Microsoft pounced and stole the idea and used monopoly power to completely destroy Netscape. No business model Netscape could have come up with would have competed with a 'built into the OS with 90%+ market share and free' business model. In fact that's all Microsoft wanted to do was kill them off.
This is like alcohol addiction - before you can rehab you have to understand that this is ailing you, you believe a company as innovative and beneficial to society as Netscape could have survived, or maybe you have better business sense then they did and know of a way they could have. Either that or you believe Internet Explorer would have come along within a few years anyways.
"No, we do not want a protected market where a few can determine who can enter, and it is not needed either."
I believe patents are the one weapon a truly innovative small company has to innovate and survive. I'm not talking about the next web design or professional service or desktop publishing company, etc... I'm talking about the next Mosaic, the next RSA, the next VMWare, the next Apple Macintosh/Xerox, the next mouse, the next Google, etc... I think you're talking more about the regular guy making his $120,000/year. I'm talking home runs (and lots of strikeouts), you're talking about steady singles and doubles. In the end your model clearly benefits more people, but I would like a place for the true innovators to be able to survive. Mosaic/Netscape failed (maybe because no patent on web browser and Microsoft mostly copied), RSA survived and prospered (with patents), etc... The existing system allows for this. Your point about "not needed" seems to indicate that you don't feel patents are worthwhile to protecting those small companies at all.
Your points:
"- Your implementation sucks (if it can be done on a comparable level by substandard programmers without any kind of real involvement with the project it most likely does)
- You are not making good use of the other forms of protection that exist
- Despite it being 'easy' according to you, your distribution and promotion suck."
show this fact since if you do have the next RSA algorithm, the next Mosaic, the next SecurId, it is extremely easy to copy despite any other protection and larger companies will instantly out-distribute and out-promote you. Hey, how did you know my implementation sucks:-) Seriously though, the innovative products are usually dead simple (again RSA algorithm is 2 line math formula, Mosaic was coupling of ftp gif telnet etc... libraries, SecurId is changing random number every 60 seconds in hardware, Google's PageRanking is a really just a bunch of GET's + parsing + SQL queries), given another piece of software and handing that to a substandard programmer to copy is fairly straightforward no matter the implementation. It's the large custom jobs that would survive in a patent-free world (e.g. a government's custom built software based on 50 different products) but not the innovative companies.
"Yes I know I'm being facetious, but i think it humorously illustrates my point."
It doesn't prove the point at all. We were talking about the cost of patent searches. If you really felt tucking your jug of milk under your shirt was innovative and worthwhile then the first step of checking whether it had been patented the cost is very low (just your time, maybe you'd quickly find out in 5 minutes, maybe after 8 hours you still hadn't found anything on your "method" of tucking). If after reading the other related prior art you still felt it was indeed innovative then you could search further. Or maybe in your search you found some guy hangs it from his belt buckle instead and after thinking about it that makes more sense to carry it that way since you could have the hip-hop look going at same time with your underwear showing (excuse any niativity about hip-hop fashion:-) then maybe you decide nah under the shirt is not worth it, or maybe you determine that invention can generate higher revenues anyways and so you decide to contact that inventor and work out a license agreement.
Sure you should do a search and that's one of the prices to pay for patents but in my opinion it is not an argument to abolish patents or software patents altogether.
"WHY should it even matter that NTP is holding rights to an idea they weren't developing and which RIM likely hadn't never seen. WHY should NTP get 100,000,000 or even 100 dollars from RIM. What did NTP do to create the product? How does that promote innovation? How does that benefit society?"
Why did RIM not license their technology when they had their chance? Or why did RIM not change their products to workaround the patent? It would be niave to think RIM didn't know about their patents especially since RIM themselves have patents of their own. Even if NTP didn't have courted RIM, why didn't RIM iniate with NTP to license.
NTP paid out the non-trivial $dollars and effort to patent the technology (hard to give figures since one partner was the law firm but since it was several patents, the R&D, legal, engineer's time, operating could be around $500k - $1million). Whatever happened after that their manufacturing failed or they decided not to manufacture, but the fact remains that the patent was their asset and publicly available. They were looking for RIM to license years before and RIM incorrectly figured they were untouchable (mostly because they figured running the infrastructure on Canadian soil). Whether you agree with NTP's exact business decisions or not doesn't matter - the patent is their asset and they chose their route.
In fact, if you look at it the other way, the fact that RIM was able to infringe 10+ years ago and then drag this through the courts for so many years shows the laws are still in favour of the infringer (the bigger guy) and the patent holder suffers (indeed the inventor died a few years ago after initiating lawsuit and before the final verdict). You see often it's in RIM's favour to chance it and drag it through the courts since the smaller companies might just go away.
Similar to the guy that invented intermittent windshield wipers way back in the 70's, the car manufacturers took his idea didn't license it and just copied it and didn't have to pay for over 20 years. Do you think his business model should have been to try to build the first car with intermittent wipers, or to license it to the car manufacturers.
NTP patents did benefit society with their open disclosure of how to enable the invention, RIM decided not to license it earlier and in the end paid a price.
"It is far from pointless in the face of the argument that inventions would not happen without patents. It proves that statement untrue. You can argue that patents help getting more inventions, and at least in specific areas of technology that is true."
Ah now it becomes clear why you're not convinced yet - nobody ever said inventions wouldn't happen, they would happen far less though.
"The point of the patent system is to have society be better off? Is that true? I thought it was just to help some folks, or companies, make more money. To a casual observer, like me, the extending the life of a patent hardly seemed to benefit society."
One aspect of patents is indeed to improve society - by driving innovation. In exchange for exclusive rights to use the invention for a short time (17-20 years) the patent holder must provide full disclosure for others to use it once it expires. In fact, even during the patent lifetime others can use it but not for monetary gains (since it's all documented).
Extending patent life is rare and in practice hard to do.
"Not really, but you are definitely trying to ignore those things that don't fit your picture."
Maybe, and I can say I've been on both sides of the fence (big open source proponent 10 years ago) and have realized over the past few years the value of patents especially with the:
1) incredibly small barriers to entry in software world,
2) easy copying (much more easier than with physical products and cost of making manufacturing plants),
3) why would any company spend the significant costs on R&D to innovate if instead they could just copy their competitors successful products (and just ignore the ones not making any ground),
4) cheap labour offshore
" - without patent protection businesses would spend much less on R&D and more on just watching the competition and copying the best ideas and therefore innovation would be reduced."
"That is at best an unproven assumption. Yes, it makes logical sense, yet, there is a long history suggesting the opposite of what you say. Inventions have been made for thousands of years without patents."
Maybe unproven but your argument makes the assumption that the previous history is the same as today's world. That "long history "you refer to is for the most part where trade secrets were good enough protection or speed and availability of communication was not what we have today. Let's take an example of a type of company from your "long history", say a chocolate bar company, so now copying a successful competitor meant things like:
1) getting the recipe (outright stealing, or ex-employee, or breaking it down, or creating recipe from scratch close enough)
2) setting up the production facilities (buying and installing machines for your assembly lines, plant building, warehouse, maybe even distribution centers around the country)
3) trucking it out to the destination store shelves
4) taking on the risk of all the above costs
In today's software world, #1 is dirt cheap (reverse engineer, etc...), #2 is dirt cheap - buy PC, get broadband, setup website and/or burn CD's, #3 is dirt cheap - website or mail CD, #4 cost of salary of paying some programmers and their PC's. Then add to this the fact this can be done anywhere and we all know where you can obtain those programmers at substantial discount.
So in fact I might even argue that software patents are even more important then before.
"If you believe otherwise, that is fine, but you'll have to make an actual argument, seeing how history tells the opposite story. I'd dare to argue that most inventions in software already took place before patent protection was allowed at all for it"
"most inventions in software already took place"? That sounds like the head of the US patent office in 1903 or some close date "Everything that can be invented has been invented.". Google's PageRanking algorithm for instance is really just some straight forward SQL queries, does this mean it shouldn't be protected? RSA's algorithm is just prime numbers, exponents, and remainders - does that mean it shouldn't have been protected - I'm sure those math concepts have been around a longtime.
In fact you have not backed up your argument whatsoever.
1) You've given no solid examples of open source innovations to the extent of the 4 simple examples I gave.
2) You've given no business model that might work for a software company in a patent-free world with competitors watching you and ready pounce for the most successful products
3) You've twisted history and making assumptions the previous world of manufacturing physical objects also applies to software world with the 4 points I made above.
"Financial compensation is an indicator for usefullness only when an invention is made available with the purpose to achieve such compensation directly. It ignores many cases where the compensation isn't as direct, and of course cases where compensation is not by financial means."
What better argument for usefulness then whether c
"Risk of vulture competitors suing you for patent infringement? Lower."
Sure if you're going to infringe on someone else patent then you're going to face getting sued. Do you walk of the grocery store with a jug of milk tucked under your shirt too? Ignorence is no excuse of the law. If you're a small shop you're going to be building small niche products and will know your area and competitors inside and out and should be able to avoid infringing patents, however if you're not building a niche product then you have to do your due diligence in researching the area.
"I see NTP suing RIM for "wireless email" and winning 100,000,000... that's enough to fund a lot of innovation."
NTP vs RIM is a prime example of the little guy winning. NTP was first to invent and won. Don't believe much of the hype of some of the press - RIM is not the little innocent-played-by-the-rules as they were often portrayed. RIM had their chance to license and didn't and in the end paid a fair price (it could have been much worse for RIM).
I can't comment much on your other examples because I haven't looked at the exact patents or followed their stories closely but I can say is spend some time looking closely at the patents, when they were first filed, the exact claims and what they cover, etc... and you might find the reason why they were granted - sometimes the claims are so narrow that workarounds exist or if there was prior art then most often it wouldn't have been granted.
"the current patent system stifles the small inventor, who can't afford a huge patent search and who doesn't have a huge patent portfolio to cross-license with competitors."
Patents are not a do-it-all-at-once-up-front thing. If the invention is truly innovative then I'm sure you can afford spending 1-5 days doing your own patent search first and if you don't find prior art AND still feel confident that your invention is better than most/all of the other solutions out there then you can move on to the next step. There will be many steps in the arguing back and forth with the USPTO. That's the way it's done by most people today - you take it in stages. In the end after maybe 3-7 years you'll have shelled out $5k-25k which considering the protection it buys and the fact you now have an asset should be more than worth it for truly innovative products.
I believe for the most part that patents give the smaller companies a fighting chance. Sure at times there might be legal fees that might criple a small business, but small in comparison to the cripling potential of a larger company looking to copy and re-brand. In fact, if you really have legal ground to stand on you should be able to get investors to back you in your legal fees.
"I never actually claimed that. I brought up OSS only to demonstrate that people can make money at producing something the competition can copy for free."
Fair enough. However, would you not admit that the risks of innovating and releasing a product into the world without patent protection (and vulture competitors) is greater than releasing same product with patent protection?
And if so, then would you not therefore admit that the costs and risks of innovating in a patent-free world would be greater, and would reduce investors wanting to shell out their $dollars for patent-free innovation?
"We had innovation before we had patents."
U.S. have had patents for at least a couple hundred years and guess who have been some of the most innovative people? Take a look at some of the other countries that have patent protection and see which ones are better off.
"Patents may help stimulate innovation, but they aren't a prerequisite, and "too many patents" are demonstrably now acting as a drag on further innovation. Whether that drag now exceeds the stimulus is an open question, but there should be no question that innovation will continue to occur without patents. If the drag is now exceeding the stimulus then innovation could even accelerate if they were removed entirely."
Absolutely patents are by no means a prerequisite to innovation. The patent itself is really just detailing the design and functioning and in the end a piece of paper. But in today's world with vultures for competitors it's pretty useful.
Where do you see this "drag on further innovation"?? Some of the patents I see coming out are pretty exciting glimpse into the near future.
I'll grant you tcp/ip is a great example of an invention being incredibly useful and that many of today's patents couldn't exist without it. However, tcp/ip was really govt funded (defense actually) and not free market businesses which I think is mostly what we're talking about with patents here.
IPSec is also not really open source originations, it's driven by a bunch of companies all concerned about interoperability and a controlling body.
"Measuring how well open source does with a metric that is irrelevant to inventions and in the case of open source not even measurable?"
"The usefullness of an invention is measured by its use, not by the financial compensation the inventor got."
You're missing the main point - without patent protection businesses would spend much less on R&D and more on just watching the competition and copying the best ideas and therefore innovation would be reduced. Without patents copying your competitor would be more cost effective and provide more lower hanging fruit. In the industry so many people go on and on about how open source model is the be all end all but they fail to realize that it isn't driving innovation at all.
"The usefullness of an invention is measured by its use, not by the financial compensation the inventor got."
Not exactly, but for the most part the two (usefulness & financial compensation) are more closely attached then the anti-patents proponents want to admit. Afterall, the money people/companies spend on products does have some realy indication of the usefulness. Take a closer look at the financial rewards the examples of RSA algorithm, Netscape SSL, Google PageRanking, SecurId have brought and how they originally spent the $dollars to innovate with the hope of gaining protection from competitors in the end. Would we still be using AltaVista for our searches based on meta-tags, http or applets or javascript encryption for our ecommerce, shared secret keys with everyone we communicate with, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
Sure there needs to be a balance between protecting the small guy from the big companies that without a patent system would just lie and wait for the truly innovative competitors to emerge and then copy-paste them and release in their own next product version.
- settle out of court (most often best option for both sides anyways)
- fight them in court
- admit defeat and abandon
If you decide to fight them in court then don't forget there are law firms that will work on contingent basis anyways (sure at non-trivial percentage and that's why I suggest option #1 is usually better route). Patents help the smaller guy innovating and improving civilization. Otherwise explain to me why overwhelmingly it was the larger software companies standing behind these new rules?show me a little guy that without patent protection can develop & market something truly innovative and not be quickly copied-pasted into the next release of a larger company product with the marketing muscle.
Both sides voiced their opinions to the courts and small and independent software groups were victorious today, and large software companies were defeated (for now). Unfortunately the trolls give small companies a bad name in innovation and patents.
shouldn't matter, the examiners are assigned fields or categories they are experts in.
Exactly, like a previous poster you've also shown why this patent is valid - it does something a different way.
Score:0, Troll?? I should have known better than to make valid points about patents on slashdot.
This is not "web search engine".
I have read it, it's still stupid - yes it has uses, but it's certainly not a technological advancement. It's something that's been around since mod_rewrite as a codified structure & available earlier than that as customized 404 pages. Slapping 'for search engines' on it doesn't make it innovative. It makes it a waste of everyones time.Looking at history of civilization and how technology evolves - it is filled with examples of minor innovations. Add up all those minor innovations over years and you've got some big progress (look at cars the past ~100 years). Many of those minor innovations would not happen without some financial investments. Many of those investments would not happen without some guarantee for the investor. A patent is one way to get a guarantee (trade secrets, copyrights, etc... are others). Software is no different from any other technology except that software developers want to disregard the blood sweat and tears expended to bring the current state of technology to market.
So please do go on to explain how exactly applying existing webserver controls to the subset of webservers dedicated to search engines is innovative & non-obvious.1. Everything simple is obvious in hindsight.
It's similar to whether we would have intermittent windshield washers on our cars today if that guy back in the late 70's didn't invent it. Keep in mind that:
- the problem (variable rain volume),
- the technology for intermittent windshield washers
all existed for decades before ~1980. Once people saw an implementation of intermittent wipers it was dead obvious (timer delay switch and pause at the end of the cycle), but obviously back before 1970's people didn't think it was a problem worth solving or it wasn't obvious (I would think the former). So obviousness of the invention/innovation is not everything but it could be the problem isn't seen as a problem or not seen as the problem.2. One Useful example
Maybe some people don't have the Google item in their browser toolbar and/or it would be easier to type "google.com/search term". Say I am at a locked down computer (library, internet cafe, parents house, etc...) and their browser is some older version that does not have Google in their toolbar (say IE 5), so instead of 1) going to google.com, 2) typing "search term", instead with this innovation I can just: 1) enter "google.com/search term" into the URL bar. So 1 less step.
Alternatively, this saves someone from remembering and typing: google.com/search?q=search%20term
3. Prior Art
I still haven't seen any prior art for web search engines that provide this functionality. Again none of these work:
4. How do you *know* someone else would have came up with this?
If this is so obvious why didn't the other major search engines provide this functionality? How can you guarantee that 1) the search engines would have come up with this, 2) provided it.
this is not a subset - mod_rewrite (or however they wish to implement it) is being applied to something very specific that no one else did/thought-of before - web search engines.
To be honest, it's a stupid patent because it deliberately breaks the HTML specification (which is why people don't do it now).Furthermore, this patent is targeting something which few people here need to worry about (again "web search engines" AND if you are providing searches by www.yoursearchengine.com/searchterm). Find a "web search engine" that does this and you've come closer to finding prior art.
Thanks - you've just shown another reason why this is non-obvious - it does something with the technology that was not intended for, not common practice, etc...
If you believe it to be a "stupid patent" then you may wish to re-read it again, I see the use of it and some technological advancement (sure perhaps minor but almost all of civilization has been from minor inventions along the way).
The present invention relates to user interfaces and methods for submitting search queries to web-based search engines.
I just tried the following URL's and none provided the functionality or technological advancement the patent provides to the public:
So this provides an alternative to browser toolbars that provide easy access to search engines. Who knows how long we would have went without this advancement - similar to how mankind had to wait until the 1980's before the intermittent wiper was invented and brought to market (even though the equivalents to mod_rewrite existed for decades before someone came up with that).
good point and similar to the fact that software patents hurt the big software companies more than the little ones - because the big guys are plenty happy to just wait and watch the best competitor products come to market and then copy-paste those ideas into their already established products and push out a new update/patch/version and wipe out the little guy.
most inventions in history have been minor technological advancements this one applies to search engines. Today's cars are built on ~100 years of minor advancements, etc... Innovative tech companies need patents more than anybody since the true innovation are typically done by small companies and their technological advancements can be copied and pasted fairly easily. Indeed this is the reason software patents hurt the mid-large companies more than the small companies. Software patents are the only defense innovative small company has.
If you can't recognize a truly good idea when you see one then you'll probably want to stay away from innovating. Probably something akin to a chef that can't tell the perfect recipe after he's baked it.
"There is a difference between: "No one had thought to ask specifically for intermittent wipers." And "Intermittent wipers were hard to figure out and no one had solved the problem of how to make them."
This really doesn't matter when we're talking about innovations benefitting society, all that matters is that intermittent wipers are here and just about everybody benefits from them right? Or do you actually believe that for the 50+years before the 1980's (when intermittent windshield wipers were finally invented) that people were satisfied with 3-speed slow/medium/fast wipers and that those few people who were unsatisified and thought "I wish I had a time delay in my switch" and they just decided it wasn't worthwhile to pursue even though there are millions of cars being sold every year? But how can you believe this since those people should have recognized the potential in it (quick 2minute off the cuff estimate might have said $1 per car manufactured and sold in america per year adds up to a pretty decent amount). I find that hard to believe anybody could miss that (unless they found easier way to make $200million somewhere else) so I think this pretty clearly proves nobody did think of intermittent wipers before the 1980's!
If on the other hand you think the car manufacturers invented it at the same time then how do you explain: 1) nobody had invented intermittent wipers for the 50+years before the 1980's, 2) the final court decision (after many many years) ruled in favour of the little guy in spite of all the resources the american car manufacturers had.
Furthermore, did you know it took a long time for him to win that court ruling and that at least 2 of the big american car manufacturers knowingly infringed on his patent for that whole time? If anything that seems to say patents still don't give enough power to the small inventor and the large companies still have incentive to try to drag it out in the courts.
Now last but definitely not least, you still cannot prove that if that guy who invented the intermittent windshield wipers had not have invented them when he did that we would still have them standard today: 1) we were missing the invention from the 1920's to 1980's anyways so a lot of people had the chance (and the monetary motivation should have been great all along) 2) what has changed in the past 25 years that all of a sudden this would have made this invention suddenly possible in 1980? The technology to make the intermittent windshield wipers is a lot older than the 1980's.
I think I've shown that patents should not be limited to just Einsteins but rather society can benefit from seemingly ordinary ideas.
You know it when you see it. If you come up with an RSA algorithm, or Google PageRanking, or SecurId you should be smart enough to recognize it's potential too. If you don't recognize it then that's fine if you were still first to invent (for now). If someone did innovate and come up with the RSA algorithm say a year before you did then I think it's fair that it's theirs (assuming they recognized the potential and went for the patent).
"Because hooking up a high delay turn signal blinker to the wiper control switch is worth millions. The idea was a good one, and I'm glad he had it, but I'm unconvinced it merits a patent, or that it should be ANYONES meal ticket for life."
And Google's PageRanking is just weighting backlinks, and the light bulb is just a filament, and the first wheel was just a stone with a hole in it and a stick, and fire was just a spark and some twigs, and .... As they say, hindsight is everything. The fact is production cars were around for 50+years before the intermittent windshield wiper was invented, so now how are you going to explain that invention was so obvious? If you can see these things so clearly today then you could be improving society too (open source, technical paper, or even writing a patent).
Because Microsoft had the money and resources to do with the tiny Netscape how they wished. Maybe somebody else would have come up with it and Microsoft would have copied and killed them too. What incentive did the large company Microsoft have to innovate and develop an online browser? So that there would be something to compete with Office and Windows? If you were an investor and a similar situation would crop up today, let's say someone were to come up with better search engine then Google's PageRanking, and the company told you "we're going to implement it and market it and not bother with going applying for a patent because we think we can stay ahead of Google" - would you still invest with them? Again, where is the incentive to spend $dollars to innovate. Show me examples, give me reasons for your side of the argument, show me how a small company has good odds of surviving (let alone growing). Any good business will attract competition, show me how a small company that comes up with a good innovative idea can invest money in R&D and trials and cost of bringing their product to market and produce a return on the risk of investment. The risk of failure is great, there's better places for your investment dollar. After a 5-10 years in a non-patent world investors would soon realize what investments produce returns and innotive companies would not, instead companies built on copying and bringing products to market cheaper would produce the better returns - and there innovation would slow down, and then society's benefit from innovation would also slow down.
"Monopoly power and having it pre-installed with their OS definitely helped, but like it or not, their browser was simply a lot better after some time of development."
With the money and resources they were throwing at it (I've seen numbers in the hundreds of $millions they spent by the time IE5 was out) anybody could build a better browser than 4 or 5 students at UofIllinois. Do you remember up to and including IE3? yuck, and all the resources they had.
The lessons learned from Mosaic/Netscape vs Microsoft are exactly indicative of the David vs Golaith and why patents are needed. You can go on and on about how Netscape screwed themselves, well any company that innovative should be able to make a few mistakes and still survive but they didn't. Any other company that would have come up with that if NCSA/Mosaic/Netscape hadn't also would have met a similar fate without any kind of protection.
"The 'free' part however is a silly argument. Most private users where I have seen Netscape were using either free 'trial' versions, 'branded' versions provided by their ISP, or the always available and much used beta versions. People actually paying for the browser wasn't happening much way before MS entered the browser game, and it couldn't work without something else to support it, not before and not after Microsoft entered the market."
Nobody was paying for the browser but one way Netscape was originally generating revenue was by the advertising on their home page. That was fair since people could easily change their home page too. Maybe that wasn't sustainable but they also got into selling servers and some ecommerce products if I remember correctly. They could and should have survived if it wasn't for the behemoth looking to take them down and some protection against him.
Even with some patent on their web browser (some simple ideas might be something like bookmarks, or some function of a home page, or Back button, etc...) something that a competitor would have had to improve upon to create some incentive for users to switch. Any of those could have had workarounds, and maybe would have pushed the web browser envelope farther, maybe instead of a home page it somehow determines some page/news appropriate for the user to see, maybe instead of
Microsoft succeeded despite lack of patents there (actually, thanks to lack of patents of course)
As a whole, the web is as succesfull as it is thanks to those same patents lacking."
This is sad that you feel this way. Mosaic innovated, who knows what we'd be doing today without Mosaic (maybe still BBS or telnet to forums) then Microsoft pounced and stole the idea and used monopoly power to completely destroy Netscape. No business model Netscape could have come up with would have competed with a 'built into the OS with 90%+ market share and free' business model. In fact that's all Microsoft wanted to do was kill them off.
This is like alcohol addiction - before you can rehab you have to understand that this is ailing you, you believe a company as innovative and beneficial to society as Netscape could have survived, or maybe you have better business sense then they did and know of a way they could have. Either that or you believe Internet Explorer would have come along within a few years anyways.
I believe patents are the one weapon a truly innovative small company has to innovate and survive. I'm not talking about the next web design or professional service or desktop publishing company, etc... I'm talking about the next Mosaic, the next RSA, the next VMWare, the next Apple Macintosh/Xerox, the next mouse, the next Google, etc... I think you're talking more about the regular guy making his $120,000/year. I'm talking home runs (and lots of strikeouts), you're talking about steady singles and doubles. In the end your model clearly benefits more people, but I would like a place for the true innovators to be able to survive. Mosaic/Netscape failed (maybe because no patent on web browser and Microsoft mostly copied), RSA survived and prospered (with patents), etc... The existing system allows for this. Your point about "not needed" seems to indicate that you don't feel patents are worthwhile to protecting those small companies at all.
Your points:
"- Your implementation sucks (if it can be done on a comparable level by substandard programmers without any kind of real involvement with the project it most likely does)
- You are not making good use of the other forms of protection that exist
- Despite it being 'easy' according to you, your distribution and promotion suck."
show this fact since if you do have the next RSA algorithm, the next Mosaic, the next SecurId, it is extremely easy to copy despite any other protection and larger companies will instantly out-distribute and out-promote you. Hey, how did you know my implementation sucks :-) Seriously though, the innovative products are usually dead simple (again RSA algorithm is 2 line math formula, Mosaic was coupling of ftp gif telnet etc... libraries, SecurId is changing random number every 60 seconds in hardware, Google's PageRanking is a really just a bunch of GET's + parsing + SQL queries), given another piece of software and handing that to a substandard programmer to copy is fairly straightforward no matter the implementation. It's the large custom jobs that would survive in a patent-free world (e.g. a government's custom built software based on 50 different products) but not the innovative companies.
It doesn't prove the point at all. We were talking about the cost of patent searches. If you really felt tucking your jug of milk under your shirt was innovative and worthwhile then the first step of checking whether it had been patented the cost is very low (just your time, maybe you'd quickly find out in 5 minutes, maybe after 8 hours you still hadn't found anything on your "method" of tucking). If after reading the other related prior art you still felt it was indeed innovative then you could search further. Or maybe in your search you found some guy hangs it from his belt buckle instead and after thinking about it that makes more sense to carry it that way since you could have the hip-hop look going at same time with your underwear showing (excuse any niativity about hip-hop fashion
Sure you should do a search and that's one of the prices to pay for patents but in my opinion it is not an argument to abolish patents or software patents altogether.
"WHY should it even matter that NTP is holding rights to an idea they weren't developing and which RIM likely hadn't never seen. WHY should NTP get 100,000,000 or even 100 dollars from RIM. What did NTP do to create the product? How does that promote innovation? How does that benefit society?"
Why did RIM not license their technology when they had their chance? Or why did RIM not change their products to workaround the patent? It would be niave to think RIM didn't know about their patents especially since RIM themselves have patents of their own. Even if NTP didn't have courted RIM, why didn't RIM iniate with NTP to license.
NTP paid out the non-trivial $dollars and effort to patent the technology (hard to give figures since one partner was the law firm but since it was several patents, the R&D, legal, engineer's time, operating could be around $500k - $1million). Whatever happened after that their manufacturing failed or they decided not to manufacture, but the fact remains that the patent was their asset and publicly available. They were looking for RIM to license years before and RIM incorrectly figured they were untouchable (mostly because they figured running the infrastructure on Canadian soil). Whether you agree with NTP's exact business decisions or not doesn't matter - the patent is their asset and they chose their route.
In fact, if you look at it the other way, the fact that RIM was able to infringe 10+ years ago and then drag this through the courts for so many years shows the laws are still in favour of the infringer (the bigger guy) and the patent holder suffers (indeed the inventor died a few years ago after initiating lawsuit and before the final verdict). You see often it's in RIM's favour to chance it and drag it through the courts since the smaller companies might just go away.
Similar to the guy that invented intermittent windshield wipers way back in the 70's, the car manufacturers took his idea didn't license it and just copied it and didn't have to pay for over 20 years. Do you think his business model should have been to try to build the first car with intermittent wipers, or to license it to the car manufacturers.
NTP patents did benefit society with their open disclosure of how to enable the invention, RIM decided not to license it earlier and in the end paid a price.
Ah now it becomes clear why you're not convinced yet - nobody ever said inventions wouldn't happen, they would happen far less though.
One aspect of patents is indeed to improve society - by driving innovation. In exchange for exclusive rights to use the invention for a short time (17-20 years) the patent holder must provide full disclosure for others to use it once it expires. In fact, even during the patent lifetime others can use it but not for monetary gains (since it's all documented).
Extending patent life is rare and in practice hard to do.
Maybe, and I can say I've been on both sides of the fence (big open source proponent 10 years ago) and have realized over the past few years the value of patents especially with the: 1) incredibly small barriers to entry in software world, 2) easy copying (much more easier than with physical products and cost of making manufacturing plants), 3) why would any company spend the significant costs on R&D to innovate if instead they could just copy their competitors successful products (and just ignore the ones not making any ground), 4) cheap labour offshore
" - without patent protection businesses would spend much less on R&D and more on just watching the competition and copying the best ideas and therefore innovation would be reduced."
"That is at best an unproven assumption. Yes, it makes logical sense, yet, there is a long history suggesting the opposite of what you say. Inventions have been made for thousands of years without patents."
Maybe unproven but your argument makes the assumption that the previous history is the same as today's world. That "long history "you refer to is for the most part where trade secrets were good enough protection or speed and availability of communication was not what we have today. Let's take an example of a type of company from your "long history", say a chocolate bar company, so now copying a successful competitor meant things like:
1) getting the recipe (outright stealing, or ex-employee, or breaking it down, or creating recipe from scratch close enough)
2) setting up the production facilities (buying and installing machines for your assembly lines, plant building, warehouse, maybe even distribution centers around the country)
3) trucking it out to the destination store shelves
4) taking on the risk of all the above costs
In today's software world, #1 is dirt cheap (reverse engineer, etc...), #2 is dirt cheap - buy PC, get broadband, setup website and/or burn CD's, #3 is dirt cheap - website or mail CD, #4 cost of salary of paying some programmers and their PC's. Then add to this the fact this can be done anywhere and we all know where you can obtain those programmers at substantial discount.
So in fact I might even argue that software patents are even more important then before.
"If you believe otherwise, that is fine, but you'll have to make an actual argument, seeing how history tells the opposite story. I'd dare to argue that most inventions in software already took place before patent protection was allowed at all for it"
"most inventions in software already took place"? That sounds like the head of the US patent office in 1903 or some close date "Everything that can be invented has been invented.". Google's PageRanking algorithm for instance is really just some straight forward SQL queries, does this mean it shouldn't be protected? RSA's algorithm is just prime numbers, exponents, and remainders - does that mean it shouldn't have been protected - I'm sure those math concepts have been around a longtime.
In fact you have not backed up your argument whatsoever. 1) You've given no solid examples of open source innovations to the extent of the 4 simple examples I gave. 2) You've given no business model that might work for a software company in a patent-free world with competitors watching you and ready pounce for the most successful products 3) You've twisted history and making assumptions the previous world of manufacturing physical objects also applies to software world with the 4 points I made above. "Financial compensation is an indicator for usefullness only when an invention is made available with the purpose to achieve such compensation directly. It ignores many cases where the compensation isn't as direct, and of course cases where compensation is not by financial means."
What better argument for usefulness then whether c
Sure if you're going to infringe on someone else patent then you're going to face getting sued. Do you walk of the grocery store with a jug of milk tucked under your shirt too? Ignorence is no excuse of the law. If you're a small shop you're going to be building small niche products and will know your area and competitors inside and out and should be able to avoid infringing patents, however if you're not building a niche product then you have to do your due diligence in researching the area.
"I see NTP suing RIM for "wireless email" and winning 100,000,000... that's enough to fund a lot of innovation."
NTP vs RIM is a prime example of the little guy winning. NTP was first to invent and won. Don't believe much of the hype of some of the press - RIM is not the little innocent-played-by-the-rules as they were often portrayed. RIM had their chance to license and didn't and in the end paid a fair price (it could have been much worse for RIM).
I can't comment much on your other examples because I haven't looked at the exact patents or followed their stories closely but I can say is spend some time looking closely at the patents, when they were first filed, the exact claims and what they cover, etc... and you might find the reason why they were granted - sometimes the claims are so narrow that workarounds exist or if there was prior art then most often it wouldn't have been granted.
Patents are not a do-it-all-at-once-up-front thing. If the invention is truly innovative then I'm sure you can afford spending 1-5 days doing your own patent search first and if you don't find prior art AND still feel confident that your invention is better than most/all of the other solutions out there then you can move on to the next step. There will be many steps in the arguing back and forth with the USPTO. That's the way it's done by most people today - you take it in stages. In the end after maybe 3-7 years you'll have shelled out $5k-25k which considering the protection it buys and the fact you now have an asset should be more than worth it for truly innovative products.
I believe for the most part that patents give the smaller companies a fighting chance. Sure at times there might be legal fees that might criple a small business, but small in comparison to the cripling potential of a larger company looking to copy and re-brand. In fact, if you really have legal ground to stand on you should be able to get investors to back you in your legal fees.
Fair enough. However, would you not admit that the risks of innovating and releasing a product into the world without patent protection (and vulture competitors) is greater than releasing same product with patent protection?
And if so, then would you not therefore admit that the costs and risks of innovating in a patent-free world would be greater, and would reduce investors wanting to shell out their $dollars for patent-free innovation?
"We had innovation before we had patents."
U.S. have had patents for at least a couple hundred years and guess who have been some of the most innovative people? Take a look at some of the other countries that have patent protection and see which ones are better off.
"Patents may help stimulate innovation, but they aren't a prerequisite, and "too many patents" are demonstrably now acting as a drag on further innovation. Whether that drag now exceeds the stimulus is an open question, but there should be no question that innovation will continue to occur without patents. If the drag is now exceeding the stimulus then innovation could even accelerate if they were removed entirely."
Absolutely patents are by no means a prerequisite to innovation. The patent itself is really just detailing the design and functioning and in the end a piece of paper. But in today's world with vultures for competitors it's pretty useful.
Where do you see this "drag on further innovation"?? Some of the patents I see coming out are pretty exciting glimpse into the near future.
IPSec is also not really open source originations, it's driven by a bunch of companies all concerned about interoperability and a controlling body.
"Measuring how well open source does with a metric that is irrelevant to inventions and in the case of open source not even measurable?" "The usefullness of an invention is measured by its use, not by the financial compensation the inventor got."
You're missing the main point - without patent protection businesses would spend much less on R&D and more on just watching the competition and copying the best ideas and therefore innovation would be reduced. Without patents copying your competitor would be more cost effective and provide more lower hanging fruit. In the industry so many people go on and on about how open source model is the be all end all but they fail to realize that it isn't driving innovation at all.
"The usefullness of an invention is measured by its use, not by the financial compensation the inventor got."
Not exactly, but for the most part the two (usefulness & financial compensation) are more closely attached then the anti-patents proponents want to admit. Afterall, the money people/companies spend on products does have some realy indication of the usefulness. Take a closer look at the financial rewards the examples of RSA algorithm, Netscape SSL, Google PageRanking, SecurId have brought and how they originally spent the $dollars to innovate with the hope of gaining protection from competitors in the end. Would we still be using AltaVista for our searches based on meta-tags, http or applets or javascript encryption for our ecommerce, shared secret keys with everyone we communicate with, etc...