7 ms·

Victory Lap for Ask Patents

1075 points by jaydles 13y ago

mixmax 13y ago
Congratulations to the stack exchange team for getting this going. It's an incredibly good idea, maybe you could patent it?
- ajiang 13y ago
  The patent trolls are already on it, patenting crowd-sourcing as a method of patent defense. This will inevitably result in the shut down of Ask Patents in a stunning fit of irony.
  - martin-adams 13y ago
    How about patenting the method of submitting a document to register a patent?
  - tomjen3 13y ago
    Unlikely. After all you have an entire site dedicated to finding prior art. I wouldn't want to get my patent killed over that.
  - adambard 13y ago
    If only some sort of prior art could be found...
  - cbhl 13y ago
    Unless SO itself gets issued said patent, and then turns around and issues a royalty-free worldwide license on it to everybody.
creamyhorror 13y ago
Good lord, it's actually working! Full steam ahead, boys! If only we'd done this a decade or two ago. How about some reevaluation of granted patents? edit: The original title, "Joel Spolsky, patent killer", was better :/
mathattack 13y ago
Wow - crowdsourcing the removal of ludicrous patents. This could be the killer app of StackExchange. Well done!
ISL 13y ago
Trouble is, what killed the patent was prior disclosure from the researchers. The same thing has happened to friends of mine; an undergraduate's summer research presentation may have betrayed patentable inventions. An effect of the 1-year prior art rule is to force researchers to keep mum about what they're doing and to generate greater numbers of incremental patents. If you're interested in the free flow of information, using a researcher's own publications to kill patents may not help the cause. Prior art from other work in the past? Bring it on!
- seldo 13y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "prior disclosure" here. They filed a patent application: those are supposed to be public. The prior art Joel used was the documentation of the Win32 API from 5 years previously (and I'm pretty sure we've been using variable-resolution apps since earlier than 2008, and not just in Windows -- this was just an example). Could you clarify what the problem is?
  - willyt 13y ago
    App icons in OS X are interpolated between about 4 different sized images. I remember reading about this in the developer docs back in about 2002. I'd be surprised if Apple don't have pretty much the same patent on this already but registered 10 years earlier :-)
    - dmdeller 13y ago
      Mac OS has done this since much earlier. The classic Mac OS needed at least two different representations of the same icon, one for the desktop (32x32) and one for the application switcher (16x16). The application switcher, initially called MultiFinder, was introduced in 1987[1]. If memory serves, the various sizes of an icon were stored together in the ICNS resource of the app binary's resource fork. There was a developer tool provided by Apple called ResEdit which allowed you to view or change the icons of any application, in a nice GUI editor (of course). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multifinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multifinder
  - 13y ago
Nux 13y ago
Brilliant! Too bad however that so much energy needs to be wasted on SHIT like patents.
- FurrBall 13y ago
  Absolutely. We should not have to waste time proving a patent is bad. The root of the problem, the patent system itself need to be abolished.
netcan 13y ago
This is really, really cool. Its actually some part of governing delegated to the public. A part they can be good at. I wonder if the crowd can be authoritative, rather than just helpful. That would let them tackle obviousness, not just prior art I could see a stackexchange-like. It might be that they can tackle it now, if good methods/guidelines exist for objectively determining obviousness.
jasonkester 13y ago
Pure Awesome. Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to existing software patents. There are plenty (~40k/year according to the article) of bad, obvious nonsense patents already out there. It'd be nice if there were a simple process to appeal and invalidate them with similar demonstrations of prior art and obviousness. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some Wikipedia-level-OCD focused on this site to stop the roughly 100% of bad applications for new software patents dead in their tracks. Imagine a 2014 where zero new software patents were issued. EDIT: Incidentally, patentlyobvious.com is just a parked domain at the moment. It seems like the obvious choice for a place to host a site like this.
- silvestrov 13y ago
  One thing missing in the patent system is that the patent seeker should pay a "fee" of $1000 if it is patentlyobvious that prior art exists. That would enable "Amazon Mechanical Turk"-style killing of most patents with prior art.
  - geoka9 13y ago
    And the person who found prior art should get a cut of that fee. Crowdsourcing at its best.
    - freyr 13y ago
      And then every patent would receive a deluge of obfuscated examples of prior art. And the patent office would become even less effective. Perhaps a good thing, unless you believe some things actually should be patentable.
      - zanny 13y ago
        Can you give an example of a patent being helpful in producing innovation and prosperity in the last 20 years? IE, a patent that was an original idea, someone else tried to duplicate in a blatantly rip-off way before the patent expired, and the ensuing lawsuit lets the patent creator (who has their patent to-market in a useful state) take the copycat off the market?
ChuckMcM 13y ago
This is an excellent result. I worried when the idea of helping the PTO uncover prior art would be controlled by the attorneys filing the patent (which is to say they would be a filter between the examiner and the external sources) but if the examiners are going directly to the source then this will really put a crimp in bad patents being issued.
skore 13y ago
> Since patent examiners rely so much on keyword searches, when you submit your application, if you can change some of the keywords in your patent to be different than the words used everywhere else, you might get your patent through even when there’s blatant prior art, because by using weird, made-up words for things, you've made that prior art harder to find. Wouldn't it also make sense to build up, maybe at the same time, a sort of "counter-thesaurus"? As in: If you find prior art where the thesaurus method has been used to obscure terms in the patent, enter those as an example into a database. When another patent is looked up, individual terms that show up in the database have a "there are alternative terms for this" marker applied to them. This might also make it a lot easier to make automatic search for prior art feasible again.
- bqe 13y ago
  I believe the tool you are looking for is a reverse dictionary. Several good ones already exist, but a tech-specific one would be helpful.
mcantrell 13y ago
This is a great first step, but can we sustain this and keep more patents from being granted. Everything hinges on community involvement, so hopefully we can build and sustain a community that does this every day.
DannyBee 13y ago
So, this sounds great and all, but I don't see any proof that it was ask patents that caused the examiner to find this, rather than the examiner's standard search? In fact, the search history, on PAIR (look for 4-11-2013 SRFW Search information including classification, databases and other search related notes) does not say ask patents was used, nor does the search strategy (document code SRNT). It could be the USPTO has not gotten around to noting this yet, but the only entry I see that could be related is the NPL entry, which of course, has no image available (god i love PAIR), and does not say it came from outside the search. Don't get me wrong, I think askpatents is great, but i'm skeptical considering how examiners actually work.
- jaydles 13y ago
  The USPTO explicitly asked us to set up this site to help get the public involved in getting prior art to the examiners. (Press release:http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2012/12-60.jsp. http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2012/12-60.jsp.) So, while it's entirely possible that the examiner might have eventually found this without us, which is far from certain, it seems reasonable to assume that they saw it on the site. Which means that even if you assume they would have found it without help - again, questionable, given the number of weak patents out there - at a minimum, we probably saved them a lot of time, which frees up more resources to look for prior art on the next crappy patent. And that reduces the odds that the clock runs out without them finding any, which leads to a lousy issuance.
  - casenelson 13y ago
    Is it the examiners who post some of the requests for prior art? If so, it would be nice if their accounts or requests could be badged so other users can be reasonably sure that the research they do will be seen by the USPTO.
  - DannyBee 13y ago
    I'm aware the USPTO asked you to set up ask patents. The USPTO has a number of pilot programs, and i'm involved in some. My only question is whether AskPatents was how it got to the USPTO. I don't see why it's reasonable to assume that they saw it on the site considering most examiners still don't do that sort of thing. Most of them search the USPTO approved databases, internally, and go about their way. This is in fact, what the search strategy/et al says happened. Given that, i think the burden falls on you to show some likelihood here. For example, do you have anything to say that any significant percentage of examiners (IE > 10%) use askpatents on a regular basis? I would be pleasantly shocked if you did. The rest is not the argument i am making, the only argument I am making is: "Do you have any evidence that your site is the reason the USPTO found this?" From what I can tell, your answer is "no". If you do, great! No offense meant, of course, my problem is if you declare victory when you were not actually involved, this will actually make things worse - people will think they are helping solve the issue, yet, if the PTO actually isn't using your data heavily, they aren't. Again, don't get me wrong, i think askpatents is a great idea, and i'd hope and love to find out it's actually being used heavily by the PTO. I can't find any stats on that, and given the history of prior pilot programs/etc, i'm very skeptical.
strudelfish 13y ago
The "How to Read a Patent in 60 Seconds" article mentioned seems to be down (danshapiro.com). Does anybody have a copy or a alternative link for it?
seeingfurther 13y ago
Isn't this the job of the patent examiner?
- klausjensen 13y ago
  Yes. And how does that seem to be working out?
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  Sadly a patent examiner (in the UK at least) gets less than a day to do a prior-art search on the most complex applications in the most complex subject matter areas; half a day is probably the standard. There are half-a-million patent applications per annum in the US alone (10 million since 1963). I'd estimate a global corpus of billions of patent applications. Prior art search extends though [in theory] to all publications. You can see why prior art submissions are allowed from third parties. If you want to ensure only valid patents, or perhaps as few patents as possible, are granted then making such submissions is in your own interests. Edit: Actually the gross figures are misleading, but remember these are complex 20+ page [in normal print size] documents on the whole. G06F11 - an IPC classification concerning error correction, detection and handling has ~9000 docs in the espacenet database for each of 2010/2011/2012.
chrisb808 13y ago
> How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt. I'm kind of surprised this isn't happening already.
rayiner 13y ago
> “Sometimes you have a picture that you want to scale to different resolutions. When this happens, you might want to have multiple versions of the image available at different resolutions, so you can pick the one that’s closest and scale that.” This is basically mip-mapping, and was described in a 1983 paper: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=801126 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=801126.
- rocky1138 13y ago
  I read that Lance Williams invented this technique in 1983, but I remember seeing a documentary on Tron where they had to come up with a technique during the lightcycle race to reduce the Moire effect on the grid and I could have swore that they invented mipmapping to do that, even though it was a year earlier.
eliasmacpherson 13y ago
I had a bad attitude dealing with patents in my last job, refusing to take part on the basis that I hadn't come up with anything novel. I noticed a member of staff with views on patents in line with mine taking a more active role. He took part in the patent meetings, but instead of merely offering nothing up, took active part in finding prior art, thus preventing time wasting patents going to the office. He took special pleasure in finding prior art by current employees at the same company, preferably in the same arm. I am impressed by Spolsky's positive attitude to do something about the problem, I bid ask patents continued good fortune!
maqr 13y ago
> The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two. Any idea to which two he might be referring?
- recursive 13y ago
  My guesses are garbage collection and Carmack's fast inverse square root.
  - zerohp 13y ago
    Carmack didn't invent fast inverse square root.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - recursive 13y ago
      Good thing it wasn't patented.
- spolsky 13y ago
  I sort of like http://www.google.com/patents/US4464650 http://www.google.com/patents/US4464650 (Ziv/Lempel compression), which doesn't seem obvious to me
  - Tyr42 13y ago
    Can't patent algorithms though, so, can't be that.
- msg 13y ago
  RSA? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(algorithm)#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(algorithm)#History
- cruise02 13y ago
  He mentioned on a podcast that Amazon's 1-click is one of them. http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/podcast-43-false-facts-blood-feuds/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/podcast-43-false-facts...
yummyfajitas 13y ago
One thing I don't understand. Suppose a patent examiner does not ask on Ask Patents about a patent application, but I would nevertheless like to submit prior art. How do I do so?
- spolsky 13y ago
  Ask yourself, then answer your own question.
  - cruise02 13y ago
    I think he means he wants to submit prior art directly to the patent examiner. Is there a way to be sure they'll see it?
    - spolsky 13y ago
      Oh. Yes. You can always submit it directly to the USPTO. See http://meta.patents.stackexchange.com/questions/105/i-want-to-make-a-difference-how-can-i-submit-prior-art-to-the-patent-office http://meta.patents.stackexchange.com/questions/105/i-want-t... for details
- BHSPitMonkey 13y ago
  The Ask Patents site was created in partnership with the USPTO; there is an expectation that examiners will search the site while researching a pending application.
gbog 13y ago
An idea that might help in killing patents: Have one daily sticky post on HN (ala job post) with a short description of a pending patent and a link on where to post prior art. It is very likely some reader will be able to provide this prior art.
- option_greek 13y ago
  Good idea. And this patent can be one that hasn't received any answers for sometime and is overly broad.
- SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
  At 40,000 software patents per year, it would require 110 posted patents per day to actually stop them, or a significant fraction of that to make a serious dent. One a day would be less than a 1% reduction in software patents. We need to shut them ALL down.
snowwrestler 13y ago
> An example might help. Imagine a simple application with these three claims: > 1. A method of transportation > 2. The method of transportation in claim 1, wherein there is an engine connected to wheels > 3. The method of transportation in claim 2, wherein the engine runs on water > Notice that claim 2 mentions claim 1, and narrows it... in other words, it claims a strict subset of things from claim 1. > Now, suppose you invented the water-powered car. When you submit your patent, you might submit it this way even knowing that there’s prior art for “methods of transportation” and you can’t really claim all of them as your invention. The theory is that (a) hey, you might get lucky! and (b) even if you don’t get lucky and the first claim is rejected, the narrower claims will still stand. I'm pretty sure this is not accurate. To my knowledge, the claims of a patent are considered only as a whole, not individually, so there should be no fear that this is somehow trying to patent "methods of transportation" broadly. To make a broad patent claim, you can't have any narrowing claims on the same patent. Put another way, the maximum scope of claim by a particular patent is defined by the narrowest claim in the list. Lawyers--correct me if I'm wrong.
- nissimk 13y ago
  Not a lawyer, but I'm pretty certain that you're wrong. There are 2 types of claims, dependent and independent. dependent are those that refer to a previous claim and expand on it, (2 and 3 above). Claim 1 above is independent. The dependent claims are taken together with those they reference, but the independent claims if accepted are taken independently. Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claim_(patent)#Basic_types_and_categories http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claim_(patent)#Basic_types_and_...
  - snowwrestler 13y ago
    Thanks
Stratoscope 13y ago
This is an awesome project. I've signed up and will see what I can do to help shoot down patents! There is one true and important point in the article that isn't supported by the example given: > This patent was, typically, obfuscated, and it used terms like “pixel density” for something that every other programmer in the world would call “resolution,” either accidentally (because Microsoft’s lawyers were not programmers), or, more likely, because the obfuscation makes it that much harder to search. The patent uses "pixel density" to refer to the physical size of the pixels on a display. This is a fairly common term, with over five million results in a Google search. I've used the same phrase myself for over 10 years with the same meaning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_density http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_density "Pixels per centimeter (ppcm), Pixels per inch (PPI) or pixel density is a measurement of the resolution of devices in various contexts: typically computer displays, image scanners, and digital camera image sensors." Of course here we can see where the terms get a bit confusing: "...pixel density is a measurement of the resolution..." But display resolution these days usually refers to the number of pixels, not their physical size: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution "The display resolution of a digital television, computer monitor or display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed." Advertisements and spec sheets almost always use "resolution" this way, for example the MacBook Pro specs on Apple's site: "Supported resolutions: 1440 by 900 (native), 1280 by 800, 1152 by 720, ..." Forgive me if this seems like nitpicking, and I completely agree with Joel's point here: patents often do use unusual terminology to obfuscate what they're talking about. This just isn't a case of that. The patent is using the correct term, and it even does a very good job of explaining what it means: > A particular characteristic of display components that may affect presentations rendered thereupon is the pixel density of the display component, such as a pixels-per-centimeter measurement. It may be appreciated that such characteristics may be independent of the size of the display component (e.g., two display components of the same size may present different pixel densities; conversely, two display components of different sizes may present the same pixel density) and/or the pixel dimensions of the display component (e.g., two display components displaying a presentation with a particular pixel dimensions may do so with different physical sizes).
- Stratoscope 13y ago
jackschultz 13y ago
> How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt. Wouldn't the result of this be that the company who finds out that they have the earliest implementation of the code in question be able to get the patent for it?
- mdda 13y ago
  But that could easily be for an idea that's proven to be over 17 years old (<1996 and counting up). So they'd be digging through the floor, and might fall through.
- mattip 13y ago
  The first publisher of an invention has a year to file a patent on it. Because of the length of time taken to get to a filing, by the time this prior-art shootout takes place more than a year will have gone by and the prior art will actually disallow anyone from patenting the invention, including the original inventor.
praptak 13y ago
It would be cool if there was a way to penalize high number and high ratio of rejected patents from a single company. OTOH I don't see a way that allows genuine mistakes from small shops while being immune from big bad corps acting via shell companies.
- tempestn 13y ago
  That is an excellent idea. (To clarify, you're saying a company would need to have both a high number and a high ratio rejected to be penalized.) More generally, it seems logical to have the size of the penalty increase at a quadratic or even exponential rate, based on the number of rejected patents within a certain trailing time period[1], and scaled by the rejected/submissions ratio. So every rejection would carry a penalty, but the more that were rejected (both in total and as a percentage), the larger the penalty would be, at an increasing rate. It might also be an idea to do this with individual claims as well as, or even instead of, entire patents, to also deal with the overly broad claims problem. [1] Or even for all time, but with a weighting factor based on recency. Wouldn't want to get overly complex though.
drpgq 13y ago
How about just increasing the costs for filing and maintaining a patent as a quick way of getting rid of some of the really weak ones? Say double the fees and see what happens.
- brandonbloom 13y ago
  Doubling the fee would further disadvantage the little guys. Maybe the fee should start low and then increase by some percentage with each new application you submit.
- r00fus 13y ago
  Any flat increase would just make it less likely that the big guys will have competition in their "most patents filed" competition. Also, given we just switch from first-invented to first-filed, it is particularly onerous for those garage-based small inventors as a big corp can easily justify the cost. What might make more sense is to tax intellectual property. We tax physical property with much less value than a "successful" software patent (ahem, Eolas?), why not tax the non-physical property as well? If you make it progressive based on the number of patents owned/controlled, it will also limit the usability of maintaining warchests of patents for controlling markets.
  - darkarmani 13y ago
    Perfect. Tax them heavier as they age. That way the people trying to create usable products are barely hurt, but by the last few years it costs a lot to hold on to. And you can release your patent to the public domain to release it. That's more likely to hit trolls than innovators.
neilk 13y ago
It would be great if others could attach bounties to certain patents. Of course then the patent examiner would have to pick "winners", answers that helped the most. Also, like Quora, does the StackExchange system allow one to register one's fields of expertise, to have questions suggested to you? (I'm not a big participant on SE but I know it may be hiding that feature from me, because it slowly reveals features based on karma). Anyway I'm sure this has been thought of before, just curious if it's on the todo list.
- ReidZB 13y ago
  StackExchange has a "favorite tags" feature which will highlight specific tags on the front page (and for busier sites, it may even bias its display on them, though I'm not sure about that). There is also an advanced "filters" functionality (visible at stackexchange.com/filters) which apparently lets you filter out all but certain tags, as well as have 15-minute/3-hour/daily emails with new questions in that tag. I have never used it, but it sounds like what you're aiming for.
- cruise02 13y ago
  You can post bounties on Stack Exchange if you have enough reputation to cover it. Whoever posts the bounty (not necessarily the patent examiner) gets to pick who wins the bounty. If they don't, it can be automatically awarded to the highest-scoring answer during the bounty period (one week). More details: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-b...
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
joshuak 13y ago
This is great! I don't truly believe that no software patent should ever be granted, but we should definitely weed out the bullshit ones. I would think mipmapping would be the core prior art, and that's from 1983. But I suppose anything over a year older then the application is good enough. Also note there is another technique for patent manipulation which is to provide a provisional patent application (to start the clock) which can't be granted, then continually refine and the application as time goes by. In a worse case scenario you could taller a general patent into a specific patent based on someone else work, and have a patent already in place that will predate the new invention.
shabble 13y ago
Does anyone know whether participating in a public forum like this could used in future proceedings against the user or their employer as evidence of 'willful infringement'? I vaguely recall something about large corporations discouraging engineers from reading potentially relevant patents due to the possibility of greater damages if they were later proved infringing, since demonstrating that they didn't take any inspiration or details from the patent is quite difficult. Not wanting to spread FUD or anything, but it strikes me as a potential exploit for patent trolls to discourage participation if it's a significant risk.
- ncallaway 13y ago
  I have been asked by my employer (a large software company) to avoid looking at patents in any form. It is precisely because, as you cite, it exposes the entire company to willful infringement claims around any patents that I were to view.
nixarn 13y ago
Would a reward system make sense? Money to the one who gets a patent rejected?
milkmiruku 13y ago
Like http://www.peertopatent.org/ http://www.peertopatent.org/ but with the momentum of the SE platform/network. Good stuff.
vishaldpatel 13y ago
Idea: Make reading patents a mandatory exercise for students. Assignment: squash a patent application.
throwawaykf 13y ago
somewhat active on Ask Patents. In fact, I've submitted an answer that is pretty sure to kill at least one Google patent application, and possibly another from Uniloc. A few comments on this article: 1) This is a very unusual case; most answers (and almost all questions) from "lay engineers" completely misunderstand the scope of the patent, since they don't even know what claims are. And even if they do, they are very lax at interpreting claims. And even then, most posters frequently misunderstand the terms used (case in point, Spolsky's very post! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6084884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6084884). All this leads them to post irrelevant prior art. That does not mean there are no useful answers at all; there are, but they mostly come from people who are somewhat versed in patent law (such as agents, lawyers and examiners). Some re-wording of claims, such as what Micah Seigel does in his posts, helps, but for the proportion of useful answers to go up, we need more education about how patents work for this to be useful. It's really not that hard; heck I did it! 2) It's wayyy too soon for a victory lap because that was only the first non-final rejection, for which a response has already been filed. Statistically, this application will undergo 2.5 more rejections [1] and (based on my guestimate) at least one Request for Continued Examination (RCE) before being abandoned or (more likely considering the applicant) issued with much narrower claims. 3) Patents are worded so not (primarily) to be obfuscating, but rather because of legal, technical and some silly historical reasons. For instance, pronouns are very rarely used because any indefiniteness can be cause for invalidation. Obfuscation will not help much, because you are not trying to get it past lay engineers, but patent examiners, who have a technical background and are (usually) adept at reading patentese. Complaining about how hard it is to read patents is like a Blub programmer complaining about Lisp. You simply need to learn the language to appreciate what you are reading. 4) Most "software" patents (which can't even be cleanly categorized as such) are not crappy, at least with respect to all other patents. There are studies presenting this view [2, 3], but it's also based on my experience having read hundreds of patents. Almost none are revolutionary, but just as few are really as bad as the media portrays. The PTO has gotten pretty good at finding prior art (interestingly around the same time Google came around), and the really broad patents are dying out. The "crappy software patents" view is common mostly because tech media routinely publishes uninformed (or disinformed? [4]) rhetoric, mostly because they garner some easy rageviews, and audiences accept it without critical thought. I do think the bar for non-obviousness should be different, but solving that is a difficult, almost-philosophical problem. 5) In response to various comments on this thread regarding pay-for-prior art schemes, initiatives such as Article One Partners already exist. I am not a patent lawyer or an agent, but I believe in the patent system, as I have actually worked for the mythical small-guy firm that was ripped off by the big guys and almost died, but eventually prevailed with patents. You don't hear these stories much because typically the small guys don't have the PR budget for it [4]. (And also because many of those with patents turn to trolls, who like to keep a low profile.) I have only recently become personally invested in the patent system, but I want all inventions, including mine, to be truly novel and worthwhile. And I want people to get off their butts and do something rather than complain about patents on HN. This is why I support Ask Patents. [1] http://www.uspto.gov/dashboards/patents/main.dashxml http://www.uspto.gov/dashboards/patents/main.dashxml [2] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=650921 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=650921 [3] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=970083 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=970083 [4] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
maximilianburke 13y ago
I like the concept of Ask Patents but at the same time I wonder if it is possible that participation on Ask Patents could be leveraged by malicious litigants to seek treble damages. For example, if the company I work for is being sued by a troll for infringement, could the troll see that employees have been participating on Ask Patents and therefore a reasonable assumption could be made that they're reading/reviewing/participating in discussions on patents, and therefore they knowingly are infringing? Would this something that either I or my employer should be worried about?
- Schwolop 13y ago
  From my brief experience, you're probably better off assuming that the default price will be triple damages, and any reduction from this is a lucky discount.
ThomPete 13y ago
If you want to get an insight into that world I can really recommend when Patents attack Part Two. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/496/when-patents-attack-part-two http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/496/w...
zmmmmm 13y ago
There was an extremely depressing AMA on reddit a while ago where a patent examiner explained that what all of us consider "prior art" will be completely ignored by a patent examiner: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ww982/iama_patent_examiner_i_want_to_answer_questions/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ww982/iama_patent_e... The bar for prior art is very high - it has to be published in a recognized medium. Most specifically, unless it has a date that the patent officer can verify and cite (and a self stated date on a web site is not "verifiable"), it can't be considered because it is not possible say for sure it came earlier than the patent filing. So - some random thing on the internet - not published. Even an actual real product made and sold by a company - not published. Even standard industry practise, established for years, if not written up and "published" somewhere, may not qualify as prior art. In one comment he says: "You may be right, that is how everyone does it. But if there is no documented prior art for us to search, we are out of luck rejecting it." This explains why so many things that software developers routinely do end up in patents. Some of them are just so obvious that publishing it in a formal way is redundant. Yet that is the same bar that the USPTO is applying for rejecting patents. So the patent system itself is enriching the pool of obvious patents that get through. Anyone using this Ask Patents site really needs to sit through a mini-tutorial explaining these things before they start, or they will waste more time than they save.
- mr_luc 13y ago
  Wait. What about the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine?[0] And how can making a physical product not count -- surely any physical product sold in the United States has some kind of qualifying documentation associated with it which counts as publishing, even a manual? [0] http://archive.org/web/web.php http://archive.org/web/web.php
  - rational_indian 13y ago
    Even a receipt.
  - axman6 13y ago
    The wayback bachine is used routinely, at least in Australia, to show that a web document was publicly available before the priority date of an application. One problem is that if the document happens to be from the domain of the applicant (more common than you'd think, some applicants are dumb like that), they can have it removed by archive.org. This is why examiners will make copies of the page from a date before the priority date when using documents accessed through the wayback machine.
flaktrak 13y ago
Nice win but I have to say the bit that really got me excited was this "My dream is that when big companies hear about how friggin’ easy it is to block a patent application, they’ll use Ask Patents to start messing with their competitors. How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents?" How great would that be?
jacques_chester 13y ago
In another patent thread some time ago I identified what I think is the core problem with software patents, which is abstractability. I used the example of a tractor being generalised into transportation, so I was nodding along with Joel's example. This is because that's how software development often proceeds. We start with the concrete problem, then notice a pattern that encompasses a class of concrete problems, then a pattern that describes a group of classes of problems and so on. Building abstractions is literally what we do as a profession. Now, as Joel points out, the rational strategy is to take the highest-level, most abstract version of your invention to the patent office to see what will get passed in. So patent applications are written like matrioshka dolls, with a super general case on the outside, and progressively more concrete descriptions as you go deeper. Somewhere near the bottom is the original thing that started the ball rolling.
pjdorrell 13y ago
Be aware that there is a backlog of "secret" patent applications in the US, where the patent application can be kept secret until such time as it is granted, at which point the easy invalidation described by Joel is not allowed. For example the Twitter patent was granted, even though there is prior art (mine), and even though I submitted my prior art as soon as I found out about the patent. But I got a reply along the lines of "too late, the patent has been granted". It turned out that the application was kept secret until it was granted, thus guaranteeing protection from any prior art not already known to the patent office employee assigned to that patent. The "new" US patent laws require an application to be made public after 18 months, but there could be thousands upon thousands of older patent applications benefiting from the secret option.
jingo 13y ago
The original title on this was: Spolsky, Patent Killer
linuxhansl 13y ago
This! What the author describes is exactly what happens. Our lawyers even admit that. The company I work for gets sued for a bogus patent every week(!), so we were all ask to file patent applications. I didn't, but I got involved in some applications as co-inventor anyway. This isn't - and not been for a long time - about inventions.
wiseleo 13y ago
Check out the caption I got for this article from USPTO ;) http://prntscr.com/1h0c3u http://prntscr.com/1h0c3u It says "Resolution"
kazagistar 13y ago
If the patent office cannot do this work themselves, they should offload to the private sector: small bounties for prior work, paid out of a fraction of the filing fee. It costs a few hundred dollars to submit a patent... thus, they could easily afford to give out a hundred or so for each comprehensive dismantling. TLDR: Give people financial incentive to destroy patents, and they will be ALL over it.
wavesounds 13y ago
Why is this acceptable? Would we allow police detectives to out source solving a crime or garbage men to outsource picking up the trash? Why can't the patent office just hire good people like this guy who can figure this stuff out in 10 minutes? Perhaps the cost of filing a patent should increase each time you do it so the same people don't just keep flooding the patent office with this junk.
TempleOS 13y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGPD0ZBiMs0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGPD0ZBiMs0 God says... C:\TAD\Text\YANKEE.TXT and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation's families--_including his own_. They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know; that they had never thought about it before, and it hadn't ever occurred to them that a nation could be so situated that every man _could_ have a say in the government. I said I had seen one--and that it would last until it had an Established Church. Again they were all unhit--at first. But presently one man looked up and asked me to state that propositi ----- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln8-Y-fIbqM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln8-Y-fIbqM
mooreds 13y ago
From my friend who is a patent examiner: "The Mexican standoff bit would be neat. The AIA allows for third-party submissions directly into the patent application file. I am not sure that any of the larger companies would do this, but I think a devoted engineer in some of the smaller companies could use askpatents to stave off predatory patents."
dgesang 13y ago
Two quick thoughts: 1. Swap the burden of proof: couldn't much of these issues with software(!) patents be avoided just by forcing the "inventors" to check for prior arts themselves and prove (somehow) that they actually did do that? 2. Make them pay: What about a (huge) fine when the patent does not get approved eventually or when prior art was found during the approval process?

1075 points by jaydles 13y ago

Congratulations to the stack exchange team for getting this going. It's an incredibly good idea, maybe you could patent it?

ajiang 13y ago
The patent trolls are already on it, patenting crowd-sourcing as a method of patent defense. This will inevitably result in the shut down of Ask Patents in a stunning fit of irony.
- martin-adams 13y ago
  How about patenting the method of submitting a document to register a patent?
- tomjen3 13y ago
  Unlikely. After all you have an entire site dedicated to finding prior art. I wouldn't want to get my patent killed over that.
- adambard 13y ago
  If only some sort of prior art could be found...
- cbhl 13y ago
  Unless SO itself gets issued said patent, and then turns around and issues a royalty-free worldwide license on it to everybody.

creamyhorror 13y ago

Good lord, it's actually working! Full steam ahead, boys! If only we'd done this a decade or two ago. How about some reevaluation of granted patents? edit: The original title, "Joel Spolsky, patent killer", was better :/

mathattack 13y ago

Wow - crowdsourcing the removal of ludicrous patents. This could be the killer app of StackExchange. Well done!

ISL 13y ago

Trouble is, what killed the patent was prior disclosure from the researchers. The same thing has happened to friends of mine; an undergraduate's summer research presentation may have betrayed patentable inventions. An effect of the 1-year prior art rule is to force researchers to keep mum about what they're doing and to generate greater numbers of incremental patents. If you're interested in the free flow of information, using a researcher's own publications to kill patents may not help the cause. Prior art from other work in the past? Bring it on!

seldo 13y ago
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "prior disclosure" here. They filed a patent application: those are supposed to be public. The prior art Joel used was the documentation of the Win32 API from 5 years previously (and I'm pretty sure we've been using variable-resolution apps since earlier than 2008, and not just in Windows -- this was just an example). Could you clarify what the problem is?
- willyt 13y ago
  App icons in OS X are interpolated between about 4 different sized images. I remember reading about this in the developer docs back in about 2002. I'd be surprised if Apple don't have pretty much the same patent on this already but registered 10 years earlier :-)
  - dmdeller 13y ago
    Mac OS has done this since much earlier. The classic Mac OS needed at least two different representations of the same icon, one for the desktop (32x32) and one for the application switcher (16x16). The application switcher, initially called MultiFinder, was introduced in 1987[1]. If memory serves, the various sizes of an icon were stored together in the ICNS resource of the app binary's resource fork. There was a developer tool provided by Apple called ResEdit which allowed you to view or change the icons of any application, in a nice GUI editor (of course). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multifinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multifinder
- 13y ago

Nux 13y ago

Brilliant! Too bad however that so much energy needs to be wasted on SHIT like patents.

FurrBall 13y ago
Absolutely. We should not have to waste time proving a patent is bad. The root of the problem, the patent system itself need to be abolished.

netcan 13y ago

This is really, really cool. Its actually some part of governing delegated to the public. A part they can be good at. I wonder if the crowd can be authoritative, rather than just helpful. That would let them tackle obviousness, not just prior art I could see a stackexchange-like. It might be that they can tackle it now, if good methods/guidelines exist for objectively determining obviousness.

jasonkester 13y ago

Pure Awesome. Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to existing software patents. There are plenty (~40k/year according to the article) of bad, obvious nonsense patents already out there. It'd be nice if there were a simple process to appeal and invalidate them with similar demonstrations of prior art and obviousness. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some Wikipedia-level-OCD focused on this site to stop the roughly 100% of bad applications for new software patents dead in their tracks. Imagine a 2014 where zero new software patents were issued. EDIT: Incidentally, patentlyobvious.com is just a parked domain at the moment. It seems like the obvious choice for a place to host a site like this.

silvestrov 13y ago
One thing missing in the patent system is that the patent seeker should pay a "fee" of $1000 if it is patentlyobvious that prior art exists. That would enable "Amazon Mechanical Turk"-style killing of most patents with prior art.
- geoka9 13y ago
  And the person who found prior art should get a cut of that fee. Crowdsourcing at its best.
  - freyr 13y ago
    And then every patent would receive a deluge of obfuscated examples of prior art. And the patent office would become even less effective. Perhaps a good thing, unless you believe some things actually should be patentable.
    - zanny 13y ago
      Can you give an example of a patent being helpful in producing innovation and prosperity in the last 20 years? IE, a patent that was an original idea, someone else tried to duplicate in a blatantly rip-off way before the patent expired, and the ensuing lawsuit lets the patent creator (who has their patent to-market in a useful state) take the copycat off the market?

ChuckMcM 13y ago

This is an excellent result. I worried when the idea of helping the PTO uncover prior art would be controlled by the attorneys filing the patent (which is to say they would be a filter between the examiner and the external sources) but if the examiners are going directly to the source then this will really put a crimp in bad patents being issued.

skore 13y ago

> Since patent examiners rely so much on keyword searches, when you submit your application, if you can change some of the keywords in your patent to be different than the words used everywhere else, you might get your patent through even when there’s blatant prior art, because by using weird, made-up words for things, you've made that prior art harder to find. Wouldn't it also make sense to build up, maybe at the same time, a sort of "counter-thesaurus"? As in: If you find prior art where the thesaurus method has been used to obscure terms in the patent, enter those as an example into a database. When another patent is looked up, individual terms that show up in the database have a "there are alternative terms for this" marker applied to them. This might also make it a lot easier to make automatic search for prior art feasible again.

bqe 13y ago
I believe the tool you are looking for is a reverse dictionary. Several good ones already exist, but a tech-specific one would be helpful.

mcantrell 13y ago

This is a great first step, but can we sustain this and keep more patents from being granted. Everything hinges on community involvement, so hopefully we can build and sustain a community that does this every day.

DannyBee 13y ago

So, this sounds great and all, but I don't see any proof that it was ask patents that caused the examiner to find this, rather than the examiner's standard search? In fact, the search history, on PAIR (look for 4-11-2013 SRFW Search information including classification, databases and other search related notes) does not say ask patents was used, nor does the search strategy (document code SRNT). It could be the USPTO has not gotten around to noting this yet, but the only entry I see that could be related is the NPL entry, which of course, has no image available (god i love PAIR), and does not say it came from outside the search. Don't get me wrong, I think askpatents is great, but i'm skeptical considering how examiners actually work.

jaydles 13y ago
The USPTO explicitly asked us to set up this site to help get the public involved in getting prior art to the examiners. (Press release:http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2012/12-60.jsp. http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2012/12-60.jsp.) So, while it's entirely possible that the examiner might have eventually found this without us, which is far from certain, it seems reasonable to assume that they saw it on the site. Which means that even if you assume they would have found it without help - again, questionable, given the number of weak patents out there - at a minimum, we probably saved them a lot of time, which frees up more resources to look for prior art on the next crappy patent. And that reduces the odds that the clock runs out without them finding any, which leads to a lousy issuance.
- casenelson 13y ago
  Is it the examiners who post some of the requests for prior art? If so, it would be nice if their accounts or requests could be badged so other users can be reasonably sure that the research they do will be seen by the USPTO.
- DannyBee 13y ago
  I'm aware the USPTO asked you to set up ask patents. The USPTO has a number of pilot programs, and i'm involved in some. My only question is whether AskPatents was how it got to the USPTO. I don't see why it's reasonable to assume that they saw it on the site considering most examiners still don't do that sort of thing. Most of them search the USPTO approved databases, internally, and go about their way. This is in fact, what the search strategy/et al says happened. Given that, i think the burden falls on you to show some likelihood here. For example, do you have anything to say that any significant percentage of examiners (IE > 10%) use askpatents on a regular basis? I would be pleasantly shocked if you did. The rest is not the argument i am making, the only argument I am making is: "Do you have any evidence that your site is the reason the USPTO found this?" From what I can tell, your answer is "no". If you do, great! No offense meant, of course, my problem is if you declare victory when you were not actually involved, this will actually make things worse - people will think they are helping solve the issue, yet, if the PTO actually isn't using your data heavily, they aren't. Again, don't get me wrong, i think askpatents is a great idea, and i'd hope and love to find out it's actually being used heavily by the PTO. I can't find any stats on that, and given the history of prior pilot programs/etc, i'm very skeptical.

strudelfish 13y ago

The "How to Read a Patent in 60 Seconds" article mentioned seems to be down (danshapiro.com). Does anybody have a copy or a alternative link for it?

seeingfurther 13y ago

Isn't this the job of the patent examiner?

klausjensen 13y ago
Yes. And how does that seem to be working out?
pbhjpbhj 13y ago
Sadly a patent examiner (in the UK at least) gets less than a day to do a prior-art search on the most complex applications in the most complex subject matter areas; half a day is probably the standard. There are half-a-million patent applications per annum in the US alone (10 million since 1963). I'd estimate a global corpus of billions of patent applications. Prior art search extends though [in theory] to all publications. You can see why prior art submissions are allowed from third parties. If you want to ensure only valid patents, or perhaps as few patents as possible, are granted then making such submissions is in your own interests. Edit: Actually the gross figures are misleading, but remember these are complex 20+ page [in normal print size] documents on the whole. G06F11 - an IPC classification concerning error correction, detection and handling has ~9000 docs in the espacenet database for each of 2010/2011/2012.

chrisb808 13y ago

> How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt. I'm kind of surprised this isn't happening already.

rayiner 13y ago

> “Sometimes you have a picture that you want to scale to different resolutions. When this happens, you might want to have multiple versions of the image available at different resolutions, so you can pick the one that’s closest and scale that.” This is basically mip-mapping, and was described in a 1983 paper: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=801126 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=801126.

rocky1138 13y ago
I read that Lance Williams invented this technique in 1983, but I remember seeing a documentary on Tron where they had to come up with a technique during the lightcycle race to reduce the Moire effect on the grid and I could have swore that they invented mipmapping to do that, even though it was a year earlier.

eliasmacpherson 13y ago

I had a bad attitude dealing with patents in my last job, refusing to take part on the basis that I hadn't come up with anything novel. I noticed a member of staff with views on patents in line with mine taking a more active role. He took part in the patent meetings, but instead of merely offering nothing up, took active part in finding prior art, thus preventing time wasting patents going to the office. He took special pleasure in finding prior art by current employees at the same company, preferably in the same arm. I am impressed by Spolsky's positive attitude to do something about the problem, I bid ask patents continued good fortune!

maqr 13y ago

> The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two. Any idea to which two he might be referring?

recursive 13y ago
My guesses are garbage collection and Carmack's fast inverse square root.
- zerohp 13y ago
  Carmack didn't invent fast inverse square root.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - recursive 13y ago
    Good thing it wasn't patented.
spolsky 13y ago
I sort of like http://www.google.com/patents/US4464650 http://www.google.com/patents/US4464650 (Ziv/Lempel compression), which doesn't seem obvious to me
- Tyr42 13y ago
  Can't patent algorithms though, so, can't be that.
msg 13y ago
RSA? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(algorithm)#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(algorithm)#History
cruise02 13y ago
He mentioned on a podcast that Amazon's 1-click is one of them. http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/podcast-43-false-facts-blood-feuds/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/podcast-43-false-facts...

yummyfajitas 13y ago

One thing I don't understand. Suppose a patent examiner does not ask on Ask Patents about a patent application, but I would nevertheless like to submit prior art. How do I do so?

spolsky 13y ago
Ask yourself, then answer your own question.
- cruise02 13y ago
  I think he means he wants to submit prior art directly to the patent examiner. Is there a way to be sure they'll see it?
  - spolsky 13y ago
    Oh. Yes. You can always submit it directly to the USPTO. See http://meta.patents.stackexchange.com/questions/105/i-want-to-make-a-difference-how-can-i-submit-prior-art-to-the-patent-office http://meta.patents.stackexchange.com/questions/105/i-want-t... for details
BHSPitMonkey 13y ago
The Ask Patents site was created in partnership with the USPTO; there is an expectation that examiners will search the site while researching a pending application.

gbog 13y ago

An idea that might help in killing patents: Have one daily sticky post on HN (ala job post) with a short description of a pending patent and a link on where to post prior art. It is very likely some reader will be able to provide this prior art.

option_greek 13y ago
Good idea. And this patent can be one that hasn't received any answers for sometime and is overly broad.
SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
At 40,000 software patents per year, it would require 110 posted patents per day to actually stop them, or a significant fraction of that to make a serious dent. One a day would be less than a 1% reduction in software patents. We need to shut them ALL down.

snowwrestler 13y ago

> An example might help. Imagine a simple application with these three claims: > 1. A method of transportation > 2. The method of transportation in claim 1, wherein there is an engine connected to wheels > 3. The method of transportation in claim 2, wherein the engine runs on water > Notice that claim 2 mentions claim 1, and narrows it... in other words, it claims a strict subset of things from claim 1. > Now, suppose you invented the water-powered car. When you submit your patent, you might submit it this way even knowing that there’s prior art for “methods of transportation” and you can’t really claim all of them as your invention. The theory is that (a) hey, you might get lucky! and (b) even if you don’t get lucky and the first claim is rejected, the narrower claims will still stand. I'm pretty sure this is not accurate. To my knowledge, the claims of a patent are considered only as a whole, not individually, so there should be no fear that this is somehow trying to patent "methods of transportation" broadly. To make a broad patent claim, you can't have any narrowing claims on the same patent. Put another way, the maximum scope of claim by a particular patent is defined by the narrowest claim in the list. Lawyers--correct me if I'm wrong.

nissimk 13y ago
Not a lawyer, but I'm pretty certain that you're wrong. There are 2 types of claims, dependent and independent. dependent are those that refer to a previous claim and expand on it, (2 and 3 above). Claim 1 above is independent. The dependent claims are taken together with those they reference, but the independent claims if accepted are taken independently. Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claim_(patent)#Basic_types_and_categories http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claim_(patent)#Basic_types_and_...
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  Thanks

Stratoscope 13y ago

This is an awesome project. I've signed up and will see what I can do to help shoot down patents! There is one true and important point in the article that isn't supported by the example given: > This patent was, typically, obfuscated, and it used terms like “pixel density” for something that every other programmer in the world would call “resolution,” either accidentally (because Microsoft’s lawyers were not programmers), or, more likely, because the obfuscation makes it that much harder to search. The patent uses "pixel density" to refer to the physical size of the pixels on a display. This is a fairly common term, with over five million results in a Google search. I've used the same phrase myself for over 10 years with the same meaning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_density http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_density "Pixels per centimeter (ppcm), Pixels per inch (PPI) or pixel density is a measurement of the resolution of devices in various contexts: typically computer displays, image scanners, and digital camera image sensors." Of course here we can see where the terms get a bit confusing: "...pixel density is a measurement of the resolution..." But display resolution these days usually refers to the number of pixels, not their physical size: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution "The display resolution of a digital television, computer monitor or display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed." Advertisements and spec sheets almost always use "resolution" this way, for example the MacBook Pro specs on Apple's site: "Supported resolutions: 1440 by 900 (native), 1280 by 800, 1152 by 720, ..." Forgive me if this seems like nitpicking, and I completely agree with Joel's point here: patents often do use unusual terminology to obfuscate what they're talking about. This just isn't a case of that. The patent is using the correct term, and it even does a very good job of explaining what it means: > A particular characteristic of display components that may affect presentations rendered thereupon is the pixel density of the display component, such as a pixels-per-centimeter measurement. It may be appreciated that such characteristics may be independent of the size of the display component (e.g., two display components of the same size may present different pixel densities; conversely, two display components of different sizes may present the same pixel density) and/or the pixel dimensions of the display component (e.g., two display components displaying a presentation with a particular pixel dimensions may do so with different physical sizes).

Stratoscope 13y ago

jackschultz 13y ago

> How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt. Wouldn't the result of this be that the company who finds out that they have the earliest implementation of the code in question be able to get the patent for it?

mdda 13y ago
But that could easily be for an idea that's proven to be over 17 years old (<1996 and counting up). So they'd be digging through the floor, and might fall through.
mattip 13y ago
The first publisher of an invention has a year to file a patent on it. Because of the length of time taken to get to a filing, by the time this prior-art shootout takes place more than a year will have gone by and the prior art will actually disallow anyone from patenting the invention, including the original inventor.

praptak 13y ago

It would be cool if there was a way to penalize high number and high ratio of rejected patents from a single company. OTOH I don't see a way that allows genuine mistakes from small shops while being immune from big bad corps acting via shell companies.

tempestn 13y ago
That is an excellent idea. (To clarify, you're saying a company would need to have both a high number and a high ratio rejected to be penalized.) More generally, it seems logical to have the size of the penalty increase at a quadratic or even exponential rate, based on the number of rejected patents within a certain trailing time period[1], and scaled by the rejected/submissions ratio. So every rejection would carry a penalty, but the more that were rejected (both in total and as a percentage), the larger the penalty would be, at an increasing rate. It might also be an idea to do this with individual claims as well as, or even instead of, entire patents, to also deal with the overly broad claims problem. [1] Or even for all time, but with a weighting factor based on recency. Wouldn't want to get overly complex though.

drpgq 13y ago

How about just increasing the costs for filing and maintaining a patent as a quick way of getting rid of some of the really weak ones? Say double the fees and see what happens.

brandonbloom 13y ago
Doubling the fee would further disadvantage the little guys. Maybe the fee should start low and then increase by some percentage with each new application you submit.
r00fus 13y ago
Any flat increase would just make it less likely that the big guys will have competition in their "most patents filed" competition. Also, given we just switch from first-invented to first-filed, it is particularly onerous for those garage-based small inventors as a big corp can easily justify the cost. What might make more sense is to tax intellectual property. We tax physical property with much less value than a "successful" software patent (ahem, Eolas?), why not tax the non-physical property as well? If you make it progressive based on the number of patents owned/controlled, it will also limit the usability of maintaining warchests of patents for controlling markets.
- darkarmani 13y ago
  Perfect. Tax them heavier as they age. That way the people trying to create usable products are barely hurt, but by the last few years it costs a lot to hold on to. And you can release your patent to the public domain to release it. That's more likely to hit trolls than innovators.

neilk 13y ago

It would be great if others could attach bounties to certain patents. Of course then the patent examiner would have to pick "winners", answers that helped the most. Also, like Quora, does the StackExchange system allow one to register one's fields of expertise, to have questions suggested to you? (I'm not a big participant on SE but I know it may be hiding that feature from me, because it slowly reveals features based on karma). Anyway I'm sure this has been thought of before, just curious if it's on the todo list.

ReidZB 13y ago
StackExchange has a "favorite tags" feature which will highlight specific tags on the front page (and for busier sites, it may even bias its display on them, though I'm not sure about that). There is also an advanced "filters" functionality (visible at stackexchange.com/filters) which apparently lets you filter out all but certain tags, as well as have 15-minute/3-hour/daily emails with new questions in that tag. I have never used it, but it sounds like what you're aiming for.
cruise02 13y ago
You can post bounties on Stack Exchange if you have enough reputation to cover it. Whoever posts the bounty (not necessarily the patent examiner) gets to pick who wins the bounty. If they don't, it can be automatically awarded to the highest-scoring answer during the bounty period (one week). More details: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-system-work http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-b...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

joshuak 13y ago

This is great! I don't truly believe that no software patent should ever be granted, but we should definitely weed out the bullshit ones. I would think mipmapping would be the core prior art, and that's from 1983. But I suppose anything over a year older then the application is good enough. Also note there is another technique for patent manipulation which is to provide a provisional patent application (to start the clock) which can't be granted, then continually refine and the application as time goes by. In a worse case scenario you could taller a general patent into a specific patent based on someone else work, and have a patent already in place that will predate the new invention.

shabble 13y ago

Does anyone know whether participating in a public forum like this could used in future proceedings against the user or their employer as evidence of 'willful infringement'? I vaguely recall something about large corporations discouraging engineers from reading potentially relevant patents due to the possibility of greater damages if they were later proved infringing, since demonstrating that they didn't take any inspiration or details from the patent is quite difficult. Not wanting to spread FUD or anything, but it strikes me as a potential exploit for patent trolls to discourage participation if it's a significant risk.

ncallaway 13y ago
I have been asked by my employer (a large software company) to avoid looking at patents in any form. It is precisely because, as you cite, it exposes the entire company to willful infringement claims around any patents that I were to view.

nixarn 13y ago

Would a reward system make sense? Money to the one who gets a patent rejected?

milkmiruku 13y ago

Like http://www.peertopatent.org/ http://www.peertopatent.org/ but with the momentum of the SE platform/network. Good stuff.

vishaldpatel 13y ago

Idea: Make reading patents a mandatory exercise for students. Assignment: squash a patent application.

throwawaykf 13y ago

somewhat active on Ask Patents. In fact, I've submitted an answer that is pretty sure to kill at least one Google patent application, and possibly another from Uniloc. A few comments on this article: 1) This is a very unusual case; most answers (and almost all questions) from "lay engineers" completely misunderstand the scope of the patent, since they don't even know what claims are. And even if they do, they are very lax at interpreting claims. And even then, most posters frequently misunderstand the terms used (case in point, Spolsky's very post! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6084884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6084884). All this leads them to post irrelevant prior art. That does not mean there are no useful answers at all; there are, but they mostly come from people who are somewhat versed in patent law (such as agents, lawyers and examiners). Some re-wording of claims, such as what Micah Seigel does in his posts, helps, but for the proportion of useful answers to go up, we need more education about how patents work for this to be useful. It's really not that hard; heck I did it! 2) It's wayyy too soon for a victory lap because that was only the first non-final rejection, for which a response has already been filed. Statistically, this application will undergo 2.5 more rejections [1] and (based on my guestimate) at least one Request for Continued Examination (RCE) before being abandoned or (more likely considering the applicant) issued with much narrower claims. 3) Patents are worded so not (primarily) to be obfuscating, but rather because of legal, technical and some silly historical reasons. For instance, pronouns are very rarely used because any indefiniteness can be cause for invalidation. Obfuscation will not help much, because you are not trying to get it past lay engineers, but patent examiners, who have a technical background and are (usually) adept at reading patentese. Complaining about how hard it is to read patents is like a Blub programmer complaining about Lisp. You simply need to learn the language to appreciate what you are reading. 4) Most "software" patents (which can't even be cleanly categorized as such) are not crappy, at least with respect to all other patents. There are studies presenting this view [2, 3], but it's also based on my experience having read hundreds of patents. Almost none are revolutionary, but just as few are really as bad as the media portrays. The PTO has gotten pretty good at finding prior art (interestingly around the same time Google came around), and the really broad patents are dying out. The "crappy software patents" view is common mostly because tech media routinely publishes uninformed (or disinformed? [4]) rhetoric, mostly because they garner some easy rageviews, and audiences accept it without critical thought. I do think the bar for non-obviousness should be different, but solving that is a difficult, almost-philosophical problem. 5) In response to various comments on this thread regarding pay-for-prior art schemes, initiatives such as Article One Partners already exist. I am not a patent lawyer or an agent, but I believe in the patent system, as I have actually worked for the mythical small-guy firm that was ripped off by the big guys and almost died, but eventually prevailed with patents. You don't hear these stories much because typically the small guys don't have the PR budget for it [4]. (And also because many of those with patents turn to trolls, who like to keep a low profile.) I have only recently become personally invested in the patent system, but I want all inventions, including mine, to be truly novel and worthwhile. And I want people to get off their butts and do something rather than complain about patents on HN. This is why I support Ask Patents. [1] http://www.uspto.gov/dashboards/patents/main.dashxml http://www.uspto.gov/dashboards/patents/main.dashxml [2] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=650921 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=650921 [3] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=970083 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=970083 [4] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

maximilianburke 13y ago

I like the concept of Ask Patents but at the same time I wonder if it is possible that participation on Ask Patents could be leveraged by malicious litigants to seek treble damages. For example, if the company I work for is being sued by a troll for infringement, could the troll see that employees have been participating on Ask Patents and therefore a reasonable assumption could be made that they're reading/reviewing/participating in discussions on patents, and therefore they knowingly are infringing? Would this something that either I or my employer should be worried about?

Schwolop 13y ago
From my brief experience, you're probably better off assuming that the default price will be triple damages, and any reduction from this is a lucky discount.

ThomPete 13y ago

If you want to get an insight into that world I can really recommend when Patents attack Part Two. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/496/when-patents-attack-part-two http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/496/w...

zmmmmm 13y ago

There was an extremely depressing AMA on reddit a while ago where a patent examiner explained that what all of us consider "prior art" will be completely ignored by a patent examiner: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ww982/iama_patent_examiner_i_want_to_answer_questions/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ww982/iama_patent_e... The bar for prior art is very high - it has to be published in a recognized medium. Most specifically, unless it has a date that the patent officer can verify and cite (and a self stated date on a web site is not "verifiable"), it can't be considered because it is not possible say for sure it came earlier than the patent filing. So - some random thing on the internet - not published. Even an actual real product made and sold by a company - not published. Even standard industry practise, established for years, if not written up and "published" somewhere, may not qualify as prior art. In one comment he says: "You may be right, that is how everyone does it. But if there is no documented prior art for us to search, we are out of luck rejecting it." This explains why so many things that software developers routinely do end up in patents. Some of them are just so obvious that publishing it in a formal way is redundant. Yet that is the same bar that the USPTO is applying for rejecting patents. So the patent system itself is enriching the pool of obvious patents that get through. Anyone using this Ask Patents site really needs to sit through a mini-tutorial explaining these things before they start, or they will waste more time than they save.

mr_luc 13y ago
Wait. What about the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine?[0] And how can making a physical product not count -- surely any physical product sold in the United States has some kind of qualifying documentation associated with it which counts as publishing, even a manual? [0] http://archive.org/web/web.php http://archive.org/web/web.php
- rational_indian 13y ago
  Even a receipt.
- axman6 13y ago
  The wayback bachine is used routinely, at least in Australia, to show that a web document was publicly available before the priority date of an application. One problem is that if the document happens to be from the domain of the applicant (more common than you'd think, some applicants are dumb like that), they can have it removed by archive.org. This is why examiners will make copies of the page from a date before the priority date when using documents accessed through the wayback machine.

flaktrak 13y ago

Nice win but I have to say the bit that really got me excited was this "My dream is that when big companies hear about how friggin’ easy it is to block a patent application, they’ll use Ask Patents to start messing with their competitors. How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents?" How great would that be?

jacques_chester 13y ago

In another patent thread some time ago I identified what I think is the core problem with software patents, which is abstractability. I used the example of a tractor being generalised into transportation, so I was nodding along with Joel's example. This is because that's how software development often proceeds. We start with the concrete problem, then notice a pattern that encompasses a class of concrete problems, then a pattern that describes a group of classes of problems and so on. Building abstractions is literally what we do as a profession. Now, as Joel points out, the rational strategy is to take the highest-level, most abstract version of your invention to the patent office to see what will get passed in. So patent applications are written like matrioshka dolls, with a super general case on the outside, and progressively more concrete descriptions as you go deeper. Somewhere near the bottom is the original thing that started the ball rolling.

pjdorrell 13y ago

Be aware that there is a backlog of "secret" patent applications in the US, where the patent application can be kept secret until such time as it is granted, at which point the easy invalidation described by Joel is not allowed. For example the Twitter patent was granted, even though there is prior art (mine), and even though I submitted my prior art as soon as I found out about the patent. But I got a reply along the lines of "too late, the patent has been granted". It turned out that the application was kept secret until it was granted, thus guaranteeing protection from any prior art not already known to the patent office employee assigned to that patent. The "new" US patent laws require an application to be made public after 18 months, but there could be thousands upon thousands of older patent applications benefiting from the secret option.

jingo 13y ago

The original title on this was: Spolsky, Patent Killer

linuxhansl 13y ago

This! What the author describes is exactly what happens. Our lawyers even admit that. The company I work for gets sued for a bogus patent every week(!), so we were all ask to file patent applications. I didn't, but I got involved in some applications as co-inventor anyway. This isn't - and not been for a long time - about inventions.

wiseleo 13y ago

Check out the caption I got for this article from USPTO ;) http://prntscr.com/1h0c3u http://prntscr.com/1h0c3u It says "Resolution"

kazagistar 13y ago

If the patent office cannot do this work themselves, they should offload to the private sector: small bounties for prior work, paid out of a fraction of the filing fee. It costs a few hundred dollars to submit a patent... thus, they could easily afford to give out a hundred or so for each comprehensive dismantling. TLDR: Give people financial incentive to destroy patents, and they will be ALL over it.

wavesounds 13y ago

Why is this acceptable? Would we allow police detectives to out source solving a crime or garbage men to outsource picking up the trash? Why can't the patent office just hire good people like this guy who can figure this stuff out in 10 minutes? Perhaps the cost of filing a patent should increase each time you do it so the same people don't just keep flooding the patent office with this junk.

TempleOS 13y ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGPD0ZBiMs0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGPD0ZBiMs0 God says... C:\TAD\Text\YANKEE.TXT and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation's families--_including his own_. They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know; that they had never thought about it before, and it hadn't ever occurred to them that a nation could be so situated that every man _could_ have a say in the government. I said I had seen one--and that it would last until it had an Established Church. Again they were all unhit--at first. But presently one man looked up and asked me to state that propositi ----- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln8-Y-fIbqM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln8-Y-fIbqM

mooreds 13y ago

From my friend who is a patent examiner: "The Mexican standoff bit would be neat. The AIA allows for third-party submissions directly into the patent application file. I am not sure that any of the larger companies would do this, but I think a devoted engineer in some of the smaller companies could use askpatents to stave off predatory patents."

dgesang 13y ago

Two quick thoughts: 1. Swap the burden of proof: couldn't much of these issues with software(!) patents be avoided just by forcing the "inventors" to check for prior arts themselves and prove (somehow) that they actually did do that? 2. Make them pay: What about a (huge) fine when the patent does not get approved eventually or when prior art was found during the approval process?