DISQUS

Andrew,

Good interview.

Thanks for taking on this mission of yours. I especially like the idea of using videos to persist and share experiences. There are a lot of entrepreneurs like me out there who live in rural areas and don't have a chance to meet up and learn from others. I wish you could take this to the next level, but I'm not sure where the next level is! Perhaps some sort of dynamically interactive site where people can explore issues and hear from multiple people via video -- like having a business meeting just on your topic with some of the best people in the industry where you could ask questions and get video responses? That would be cool. You gotta love us programmers: always trying to take something simple and make it complicated.

I liked your comments on not having all the answers. It took me a long time to learn this lesson. I kept reading books, listening to tapes, and chasing all the "experts" in the field only to finally realize that the best you're going to get is somebody's opinion. Just because they sound confident doesn't mean what they're saying has value.

Must marketing seems like such an obvious idea -- it's one of those things that are so obvious people overlook it. I think the catch here is that must marketing must be an integral part of your product. Some products lend themselves to it and some don't. With e-cards you found that sweet spot where the product itself was also a marketing tool. I don't think that would work with a checkbook management program, for instance.

I like it, Tom. Not bad for a joke site!

Tom,

There's been a lot of speculation that fast internet and low cost of living is going to move a lot of knowledge workers into the country. When the country was first founded, most folks lived as farmers in rural areas and only came to cities to sell, vote, and attend church. We may see this making a comeback.

First I acknowledge that I can not come up with a good example. I have not tried to find one, however. If I run across one, I will let you knwo. But searching a zillion patents? Not going to happen.

I have read several patents that seemed very ingenious to me. Patents that combined several old concepts in new ways to create products that did not exist before.

But you're kind of making my point, Ted. If you are reading patents without a foundation to understand what you are reading, quite frankly you are part of the problem and not part of the solution. When I started reading patents I went beserko too. But it's the enabling text. Read the enabling text.

The claims are crazy. I've read patents in the last couple of years that tried to claim database technology, for goodness sake.

You guys are all welcome to stop by my blog. I'm trying to keep it light, but serious posts are welcome.

Thanks for the good material over here! I've only been reading the RSS feed once a month, but I plan to bump it up some. I enjoyed the conversation.

Peace guys.

You are correct. I have used this example on this board before. What your argument was, honestly, I did not check up on. I'll try to do better.

"Pharmaceuticals deserve patents, but then again, a pharmaceutical company can't patent the idea of an anti-inflammatory drug or the idea of an ant-cancer drug. Yet so very many software patents aim to patent the equivalent of an anti-inflammatory drug ... heck lots of them basically try to patent the idea of a drug itself"

You are misreading the patents if you believe this. Yes, there are broad and bold claims. But the enabling text -- the meat of the patent. Is about an instruction book for doing something. This instruction book must be specific -- if it is generic the instructions have no value.

This is the thing you are missing. The claims for patents are all over the map and are a mess. But once you get to the litigation, you have to discover exactly what the patent enables -- what it teaches that hasn't been taught before.

Like I said, I think you're confusing the nature of our litigious society, a misreading of the nature of the patents involved (due to a poor approval process and overly broad claims) and fears of "I can't do anything" mainly coming from the big guys, not joe coder. (The big guys have deep pockets. Joe Coder does not) Basically the system is broken due to the fact that many patents are approved that shouldn't be, and the claims are all over the place. These issues are all settled in litigation, and the truth will out. That's not the way it is supposed to work, but it still works. The big companies end up paying for litigation that restricts the claims of bad patents granted by the government.

I'd like to ask a rhetorical question. How much have you guys studied exactly what patents are and how to get and use them? I know you know the horror stories, but do you really know how it all works? Before you announce the system broken beyond repair, it might be a good idea to really understand what you are talking about. Any patent attorneys here? I've read about a dozen books. I don't know much, but I understand and agree that changes need to be made.

I'll say it again, in the hopes it might sink in. The ability for anybody with a great idea and a few thousand bucks to stake an intellectual claim and ownership of an idea that improves society is a powerful force of innovation. This is true in all areas. Intellectual Property and intellectual solutions are where all of the societal value of the future is. That means that, as a society, we have to learn how to deal with abstract intellectual advancements. Yes -- currently everybody goes generic and the tests for obviousness and anticpation are poor. But these matters are corrected in the courts. Let's fix the problems we have, instead of over-generalizing. In my opinion, we have a great problem with lawsuits for a number of reasons: medical malpractice, smoking, selling fat foods, etc, that are also going way too far. If you think about it, as our society abstracts the value it has into intellectual concepts, we're going to carry all the same old bad things we did before into the new age. It's not just patents, it's everything. We had some good models in the old paradigm. Perhaps they need tweaking a bit in the new one, but that's okay.

Ok.

So this Intellectual Ventures -- where's the fire? I see all of the smoke. But where are the investors, the profits, the return?

Sounds like a coop for patent litigation attorneys. Welcome to the world of mass commercial products, guys. It ain't bean bag. Try learning about building and selling airplanes or firearms and come back and tell me about legal risk.

I'd like to make a couple points here.

First -- do not confuse the free market and intellectual property. The open market rewards good businesspeople, not necessarily new ideas. The IP system we have is a trade between society at large and any individual or corporation. The trade is about encouraging innovation from the masses. A simple review of the history of IP can show how a lot of little guys were rewarded for teaching society something valuable. That principle, I believe, is not in question. Whether the trade is a good one is all about the application evaluation system, not the idea itself. You save the baby by draining the water! Not by throwing the whole thing out or forcing absolute decisions.

Anonymous -- I must confess that I miss your point entirely. Are you trying to argue that business value is the same as intellectual value to a society? Sounds kind of short-sighted to me. The whole purpose is the decoupling of the two -- the competitve forces are for the businessperson to wrestle, not the inventor. The guy who makes a collection of bottlecaps cure cancer doesn't have to worry about any of those factors. He's not supposed to.

It seems to me the whole "kill the software patents" movement is rather more emotional than intellectual, hence the absolutist positions, the horror stories, and the mis-reading of patent applications. One of those "read the book and join the movement!" kind of deals. Whatever floats your boat. I will add one example here for your consideration.

Let's suppose that I just stepped off a time machine from the year 3400. I have, in my knowledge, the way to make computers truly sentient. So I sit down and write an instruction book on how to do it: how to assemble the various bits and bytes into a system that creates intelligence.

A couple of interesting things happen, almost immediately. First, whatever my instructions, they will involve re-assembly of obvious primitives: arrays, indexes, loops, CPUs, etc. So one group will immediately come out and say, "hey! There's nothing new here! He's just re-assembling old stuff and trying to pawn it off as something new! Patent troll!"

Likewise, whatever my approach, it will likely mirror other approaches that haven't (and won't for hundreds of years) be successful. But aside from that inconvenient point, those parties who were generally correct will be clamoring that their work "anticipated" my patent.

Still another group will read the patent, understand how it works (that's the whole point) and claim that it's really just a simple concept. Completely obvious. The best inventions always are -- in retrospect.

At the end of the day, boys and girls, it's all just ones and zeroes. The entire future advancement of our society will depend on ones and zeroes. Our economy, our military, our livlihoods, and our leisure. Simple stuff. Put together in more and more complex and useful ways. Now you can take the extreme, and rather anarchist, position and state that none of our intellectual future can be patented -- that the social contract with inventors is over as far as software. Or you can try to find a better way to sort the BS from the good stuff.

Oddly enough, the argument I hear the most about letting the market decide it tends to reward huge businesses with business managers and market power. It's a well known fact that large, resourceful entities can sell crap and stomp the little guy. If you really feel that mega-corporations can manage our future better, I'd like to hear that argument. I know, I know -- the nimble, little, creative companies will innovate and survive. But let's not kid ourselves: how many Pkzips do you think it takes to be a Microsoft? Do you really want the Microsofts of the world stealing whatever they want without any recourse at all?

Tim.

Keep in mind that there are little guys like me developing work that might or might be truly revolutionary. Please don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Intellectual protection is the only thing the little guy has in the game. Given, of course, that there's something truly there, which in 99% of the cases is not true.

I said that the patent didn't rise to the level of non-obviousness. Get a grip and switch to decaf.

The peculiar combination of caching a hierarchical data structure is something I haven't seen before. It's all ones and zeros, so no matter what, people will say it is obvious. If I came back from a thousand years in the future and told you how to make artificial intelligence, the minute I explained it, somebody would be whining about how obvious it was. That's just the way it's always going to work with computer technology.

Learn. Read up some. Arguing at extremes is always stupid.

Interesting post. As a software architect who has recently had to learn a lot about patents in order to get one, the patent system is broken, no doubt. Having said that, there is a place for the truly non-obvious and useful software patents. The problem is that making the decision of what works and what doesn't is a tough call. That's what your lawyer is supposed to be for, to keep you from polluting the system.

You asked a question about how to program a flight simulator -- "After all, every flight simulator is going to have most of the elements claimed in this patent"

Well. I think you answered your own question. Since Flight Simulators have been around for more than a dozen years, there's really nothing to worry about, is there?

Scanning the patent, it's not just hierarchical data structures, which ARE trivial. It's also the ability to project from a random 3-D point and it's the process of caching and processing the blocks that are also unique.

It looks somebody did a a lot of hard work to put together this patent, to be honest. That amount of work is not trivial at all, and no, I don't think any CS grad would logically come up with what they have. Personally I don't think it rises to the level it needs to be anywhere near valid, but obviously somebody must think differently or there wouldn't be a court case, right? I mean the FS prior art alone throws out a lot of the claims. And you can claim anything, after all. (that's why you shouldn't read the claims, btw. They're all total BS) The enabling text must have some meat in there somewhere -- I'm betting it's the caching mechanism.

I remember when I first started reviewing patents as part of my prior art seach. Reading the claims, it was a wonder that people could program at all! But my attorney pointed out that it is the enabling text that really describes what the patent is, not the claims. The claims are just stakes that the applicant tries to stick in the ground to identify his property. People claim all kinds of silly nonsense.