4 ms·

Great example of the problem with software patents. Landmark has a method for music-matching. They would love to be the only one having access to that technolog

Great example of the problem with software patents. Landmark has a method for music-matching. They would love to be the only one having access to that technology. The confusion starts where the patent system is meant to only protect how their particular implementation matches music and not the concept of music matching at all. They on the other hand argue, that the method described by the author is similar to what they have patented - after all, it uses the same fundamental CS concepts such as hash-table lookups etc... As other mentioned, the idea with patents was to offer people a limited time monopoly on their innovations in exchange for publishing them so others could use/enhance these ideas instead of reinventing the wheel over and over. I have not seen one instance where this works out for software...

iuygtfnh 16y ago
>Landmark has a method for music-matching. No they have a patent the idea of music-matching, not the implementation. I could have a patent on the idea of a car that defies gravity - and you pay up when you actually invent a flying car.
- wake_up_sticky 16y ago
  No you couldn't.
  - xilun666 16y ago
    Indeed, with enough magical legal verbiage and enough slightly unrelated drawing, you could. It probably would not be a valid patent, or maybe only valid on some not too interesting point, but validity does not really matters for patent holder playing cold war with their portfolio...
- voidpointer 16y ago
  This is not how it works. In the patent application you have to describe how your invention works. In software patents, the implementation is described in such general terms that a lot of the time, any implementation can be said to use the method described in the patent. This is my biggest problem with software patents: once you abstract your solution enough, it isn't of much use to anybody, hence the value of the patent to the general public is null while it still allows you to block out competitors that want to find a solution to the same/similar problem although your patent is of no help to them actually solving the problem. It is this skewed relationship that drives me crazy. Licensing a software patent only allows you to come up with your own solution a lot of the time, it does not save you the development cost. If you license a patent for some industrial process it saves you huge amounts of research cost so licensing the patent is actually attractive. Software should only be patentable if the patent provides actual value in solving the problem it claims to solve. Since useable software implementation are so specific, this may rule out patenting software at all.
  - iuygtfnh 16y ago
    Not in the US, although implementation patents are easier to defend you can write very broad patents. You can have a business method patent, eg look at the prices charged by various retailers and buy the lowest one, or even a patent on the plot of a novel. Both of these have been patented in the US. Your 'invention' no longer has to be workable for it to be patented nor do you have to demonstrate a working implementation. That's the issue with a lot of software patents on things like H264 - the patent can simply be on the concept of compressing video, you don't have to invent a particular encoding scheme.
    - nkassis 16y ago
      But the law was not intended to work that way. This is why bilski has gone so far. They were trying to do exactly what you describe and they probably won't get the patent in the end. The supreme court will probably find some way to not revolutionize patents by making the decision so specific that only this case will be affected.
      - iuygtfnh 16y ago
        The supreme court decided to let people fight it out in court. What this means is that patents only work for cartels of large companies forming a patent pool to keep a technology (eg. H264) to themselves and patent trolls who have no other business so can't be violating any other patents. For anyone else - even if you have a patent on a real invention, and can afford to defend it in court, you are likely to be violating dozens of the large company's patents (how could you know) and so are going to lose.
  - iuygtfnh 16y ago
    Microsoft is currently suing Apple over the page turn on the iPad's ebook reader. They have a patent on the idea of using a page turning gesture to go to the next page in a book on a computer, together with the idea of showing a page is turning. No code, no description of how to render it - just the idea of taking an everyday action (turning over a page) and using it to do the same thing on a computer http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20100175018.PGNR.&OS=DN/20100175018&RS=DN/20100175018 http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  they have a patent the idea of music-matching, not the implementation. This is indeed the exact opposite of how the patent system is supposed to work. But it is none-the-less a description of how the patent system is more and more winding up working.
- nzmsv 16y ago
  This is the outcome that patent trolls hope for. And this has been going on even before software patents. Look up the story about Feynman and the nuclear airplane.
  - voidpointer 16y ago
    I loved this story when I read it in "Surely you are Joking..." It is exactly how it still works at large Tech-Corps. Number of Patents filed is a metric the PHBs love to use in order to determine the innovativeness of departments and there is a nice bonus for submitting your ideas to the patent-process. Middle management is running around asking people whether they could think of anything they could submit because that will make the department look good - and there you go... loads of BS-patents and I bet you that Dollar that this is exactly how he Microsoft page-turn-gesture-thing became a patent.
wazoox 16y ago
The problem is with the (utterly broken IMO) US legal system (that unfortunately tends to "colonize" more and more foreign legal systems). Because they have a patent, they can efficiently scare away many hobbyists or commercial developers who could compete with them with litigation costs.
abstractbill 16y ago
This is quite amusing to me personally. I am named as the inventor of a patent which makes claims that appear practically identical to the Landmark one (mine is owned by Macrovision, for whom I used to work). I wonder how many times the damn thing has been patented!

iuygtfnh 16y ago

>Landmark has a method for music-matching. No they have a patent the idea of music-matching, not the implementation. I could have a patent on the idea of a car that defies gravity - and you pay up when you actually invent a flying car.

wake_up_sticky 16y ago
No you couldn't.
- xilun666 16y ago
  Indeed, with enough magical legal verbiage and enough slightly unrelated drawing, you could. It probably would not be a valid patent, or maybe only valid on some not too interesting point, but validity does not really matters for patent holder playing cold war with their portfolio...
voidpointer 16y ago
This is not how it works. In the patent application you have to describe how your invention works. In software patents, the implementation is described in such general terms that a lot of the time, any implementation can be said to use the method described in the patent. This is my biggest problem with software patents: once you abstract your solution enough, it isn't of much use to anybody, hence the value of the patent to the general public is null while it still allows you to block out competitors that want to find a solution to the same/similar problem although your patent is of no help to them actually solving the problem. It is this skewed relationship that drives me crazy. Licensing a software patent only allows you to come up with your own solution a lot of the time, it does not save you the development cost. If you license a patent for some industrial process it saves you huge amounts of research cost so licensing the patent is actually attractive. Software should only be patentable if the patent provides actual value in solving the problem it claims to solve. Since useable software implementation are so specific, this may rule out patenting software at all.
- iuygtfnh 16y ago
  Not in the US, although implementation patents are easier to defend you can write very broad patents. You can have a business method patent, eg look at the prices charged by various retailers and buy the lowest one, or even a patent on the plot of a novel. Both of these have been patented in the US. Your 'invention' no longer has to be workable for it to be patented nor do you have to demonstrate a working implementation. That's the issue with a lot of software patents on things like H264 - the patent can simply be on the concept of compressing video, you don't have to invent a particular encoding scheme.
  - nkassis 16y ago
    But the law was not intended to work that way. This is why bilski has gone so far. They were trying to do exactly what you describe and they probably won't get the patent in the end. The supreme court will probably find some way to not revolutionize patents by making the decision so specific that only this case will be affected.
    - iuygtfnh 16y ago
      The supreme court decided to let people fight it out in court. What this means is that patents only work for cartels of large companies forming a patent pool to keep a technology (eg. H264) to themselves and patent trolls who have no other business so can't be violating any other patents. For anyone else - even if you have a patent on a real invention, and can afford to defend it in court, you are likely to be violating dozens of the large company's patents (how could you know) and so are going to lose.
- iuygtfnh 16y ago
  Microsoft is currently suing Apple over the page turn on the iPad's ebook reader. They have a patent on the idea of using a page turning gesture to go to the next page in a book on a computer, together with the idea of showing a page is turning. No code, no description of how to render it - just the idea of taking an everyday action (turning over a page) and using it to do the same thing on a computer http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20100175018.PGNR.&OS=DN/20100175018&RS=DN/20100175018 http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...
joe_the_user 16y ago
they have a patent the idea of music-matching, not the implementation. This is indeed the exact opposite of how the patent system is supposed to work. But it is none-the-less a description of how the patent system is more and more winding up working.
nzmsv 16y ago
This is the outcome that patent trolls hope for. And this has been going on even before software patents. Look up the story about Feynman and the nuclear airplane.
- voidpointer 16y ago
  I loved this story when I read it in "Surely you are Joking..." It is exactly how it still works at large Tech-Corps. Number of Patents filed is a metric the PHBs love to use in order to determine the innovativeness of departments and there is a nice bonus for submitting your ideas to the patent-process. Middle management is running around asking people whether they could think of anything they could submit because that will make the department look good - and there you go... loads of BS-patents and I bet you that Dollar that this is exactly how he Microsoft page-turn-gesture-thing became a patent.

wazoox 16y ago

The problem is with the (utterly broken IMO) US legal system (that unfortunately tends to "colonize" more and more foreign legal systems). Because they have a patent, they can efficiently scare away many hobbyists or commercial developers who could compete with them with litigation costs.

abstractbill 16y ago

This is quite amusing to me personally. I am named as the inventor of a patent which makes claims that appear practically identical to the Landmark one (mine is owned by Macrovision, for whom I used to work). I wonder how many times the damn thing has been patented!