Once again the Supreme Court has stepped in to curb the Federal Circuit Court and bring a level-headed interpretation to the relevant statute defining how damages are computed for infringing patent rights to a component that is part of a larger article of sale.
The precise legal issue involved here is primarily of interest to the immediate parties to the dispute (and, of course, similarly situated parties dealing with like claims). It is not a legal issue that stirs much public debate.
Yet the reining in of the Federal Circuit has major public consequences. The Federal Circuit basically has been on on a bender for the past 20+ years in interpreting the patent laws such that basically everything under the sun became patentable with the enforcement rights of patent holders utterly maximized. This led to the plethora of software and other process patents that has caused so many to throw up their hands in despair and to conclude that all patents are evil and should be abolished. Whether they should or not is a policy question for which there are decent arguments on both sides, in my view. But, assuming one agrees that patent protection can be useful for the right cases, the law is now coming around much more to the point where far more defensible patents are being granted, upheld and enforced and where such enforcement is more reasonably tailored to the purposes of patent law as envisioned in the U.S. Constitution. And that is a very good thing.
Apple is and has for years been very aggressive in attacking competitors with patent claims. In this case, their patent was upheld and the question remained as to how much they had been injured. With this decision, the U.S. Supreme Court helps ensure that Apple will get compensation but not a windfall for the wrong done to it.
Patent law may be right or it may be wrong in a social-justice sense but, as far as the U.S. law is concerned, if it is to be upheld and enforced at all, it should be done in a way that actually furthers its proper purposes and not in a way that promotes shakedown suits and opportunistic legal claims. So kudos to the Supreme Court for getting it right and for putting proper bounds on patent laws in general in a way that helps bring sanity to the field.
Beyond ethics, there's also geopolitics involved. Weaker patent guidelines in USA gives a competitive advantage to the USA over the rest of the world. Of course any country is free to submit patents as they please (in accordance with the WTO), but USA companies de facto submit more patents, the same way as a USA citizen has more indemnities in case of plane crash, which ensures an ongoing dominance for the rolling 20 years. See it this way: As a French person I'd love that your guidelines become more strict, because it would give more opportunity for the smaller French startups to grow; If I were American, I would love if patents were used to bring money back from the French companies to USA. The irony is, patent trolls attack other Americans more often than foreign countries, which hasted the debate about patent trolls.
Hence, Kudos to the Supreme Court for putting better bounds on patent laws, especially since that means losing a little leverage for American companies.
> Once again the Supreme Court has stepped in to curb the Federal Circuit Court and bring a level-headed interpretation
Surely you don't count Alice among the "level-headed" opinions? Supreme Court opinions relating to patent law almost invariably feel (to me) like they're written by a bunch of people who don't know much about patents and don't care to learn.
Alice is surprisingly workable. It's not an academically satisfying case, but having applied it in several cases now I think it is a useful analytical framework (which is miles ahead of what we had before it).
The idea of a case being an analytical framework is intriguing. Care to elaborate? (Should I just go read it? Does it propose some kind of multi-pronged test?)
It's not a multi-factor test in the sense of "weigh these four factors and then do what you were going to do anyway." It gives you a process for thinking about whether a patent covers ineligible subject matter. First, you ask: "is the patent directed to some abstract matter?" If it is, then you ask: "when the claims are considered as an ordered combination, do they add something more to the abstract idea so the patent isn't just a patent on the idea itself?"
It does a pretty good job of capturing the idea that, e.g., you can't patent "packet filtering" but you may[1] be able to patent a specific process for packet filtering that, say, minimizes how many bytes of each packet you have to process.
[1] Whether you should be able to patent a specific process for packet filtering is a different question. I'm not saying Alice is a good articulation of what the law should be. But I think it's a decent way of thinking about patents and coming up with the "right answer" as section 101 intends to define what the right answer is.
The problem is the question "is the patent directed to some abstract matter?" Because every patent claim abstracts from a particular implementation to a broader category of covered subject matter. That's literally the entire point of a claim, to capture the new idea instead of just a particular device.
Then we get into questions about whether it's an "improper" type of abstractness, which is totally unworkable and hasn't been fleshed out by the courts.
The Supreme Court should have just said what they appear to have meant--that business methods are ineligible subject matter.
Oh, come on. It's been a decade since the patent holder was in a strong position. We effectively don't have injunctions or punitive damages any more, and infringement claims get tied up in all those new post-grant review procedures.
If you believe patents make any economic sense, then the term patent troll is basically just an epithet meant for rhetorical effect.
If the function of patents is to incentive capital markets to invest in products and processes that otherwise wouldn't see any investment because of the lack of a profit motive, then patent trolls are a good thing. The whole point of a patent is to grant a monopoly. Whether a patent holder enforcing the monopoly is a non-practicing entity (NPE) is immaterial.
Indeed, by the logic of the patent system so-called trolls are an unmitigated positive. They add liquidity to the patent system. Liquidity means the patent system, theoretically, is more efficient at incentivizing research and design.
If you have a problem with patent trolls, then it means you have a problem with something _else_ fundamental to the patent system. Maybe if you followed your beliefs to their logical end, you would question the validity of the necessity of patents. Alternatively, maybe what so-called patent trolls are exposing is the fact that patents are too freely granted, or granted for too long. Or that being able to sell patents at all, whether to NPEs or other companies, is just an end-run around anti-trust laws, which would otherwise blunt how rigidly a company could leverage patent rights in a market.
In any event, there's nothing negative about patent trolls, per se. They're simply exposing fundamental flaws in the patent system. I fear that focusing on so-called patent trolls will simply result in superficial legislative and judicial solutions.
One variety of patent troll is not interested in the legitimate goals of the patent system at all.
All they want is a credible threat and easy prey - a patent that will hold up in court long enough to bankrupt their victims, who lack the resources to fight back, and will therefore settle.
Fighting this variety of patent troll requires acknowledging that patents have (unintended) uses other than "incentivizing capital markets to invest in products and processes that otherwise wouldn't see any investment because of the lack of a profit motive".
Even legitimate and narrowly drafted (but inapplicable to the defendant) patents can be abused in this way, because the process of responding to a patent infringement claim is expensive.
There are many flaws that should be fixed in how patents are granted, but patent trolls rely on one serious flaw in how patents are litigated: the median cost to defend against an infringement claim is $1 million.
That's a good point, for example when many individual app developers were being sued / threatened for the use of in-app purchases, it could be argued that the root of the problem is that something like in-app purchases is not an idea that otherwise wouldn't see investment due to the lack of a profit motive, and that it shouldn't be covered by the patent system in the first place.
For the idea that patent trolls add liquidity to the invention marketplace, I'm under the impression that the cost of acquiring the patent in question is often only a minor component of the operation, and the major cost is litigating it. Which seems to suggest that the primary economic effect is something else (what that is I'm not sure).
I think part of the problem with NPEs is that in practice there is a natural disincentive for large companies to sue over (possibly) frivolous patents, since they generally each have large patent arsenals and can countersue causing a loss to both companies. So there is an incentive to have some degree of restraint except in particularly egregious cases, and for total patent wars not to go on forever. NPEs obviously don't have this incentive, and it's not clear to me how a change in patent law could effectively replicate it.
> For the idea that patent trolls add liquidity to the invention marketplace, I'm under the impression that the cost of acquiring the patent in question is often only a minor component of the operation, and the major cost is litigating it. Which seems to suggest that the primary economic effect is something else (what that is I'm not sure).
The phrase you are looking for is administrative overhead. Which suggests that obtaining "liquidity" via patent trolling is highly inefficient and should be discouraged, because the bulk of the money is going to overhead and not incentive for innovation.
~80% of programmers don't think software patents make sense.
Did you see the design patents at issue here? It's literally rounded edges and a grid-like UI for apps.
>then the term patent troll is basically just an epithet meant for rhetorical effect.
The term came about due to corporate lawyers taking issue with using the term "extortionists".
> They're simply exposing fundamental flaws in the patent system. I fear that focusing on so-called patent trolls will simply result in superficial legislative and judicial solutions.
Agreed, we should settle for nothing less than ending patents on software, especially when the cost of reproduction is nil.
Mathematics is not patentable either, and there are many "significantly new" innovations there.
The position of whether software should be patentable depends mostly if you think of it like math, or like pharmaceuticals. The former requires mostly just a lot of thinking, and very little money. The latter requires massive quantities of cash, expensive equipment, trials, lawyers, etc.
A large number of software patents don't even require a lot of thinking- the majority of the work goes into writing the patent, rather than the creating the system to be patented.
Short patents on truly new software inventions could be overall a benefit to the software industry. But the crappy ones are unquestionably a significant drag.
You're confused thinking that a patent troll is just a non-practicing entity.
A patent troll is not just a "non-practicing entity" - it's an organization that attempts to use a granted patent to charge tolls on a range of later invention which was neither enabled by nor anticipated by the patent.
There should be absolutely no incentive nor mechanism for patent holders to block and extract tolls from inventions they did not enable.
It's perfectly fine for a bridge builder to authorize someone else to charge tolls (a non-practicing entity), but it is unacceptable for an unrelated party (troll) to set up camp charging tolls on a bridge, just because they had an idea for a similar bridge somewhere else.
Exactly. In your definition a patent troll refers to any patent holder doing something you don't approve of, no matter that it's legal.
IOW, the term is purely rhetorical, like pro-life/pro-choice, right-to-work, etc.
Stopping so-called patent trolls could be done with real, substantive change, or it could be done superficially by rejiggering the rules so the system is less susceptible to easy criticism. That is, you can clamp down on patent trolls (i.e. high-profile abusers), without actually changing how easily patents are granted or the scope of what they encompass. And without changing the fundamental balance of power in the high-tech economy between small upstarts and large, established players.
In reality, for young companies patent trolls are an imaginary boogeyman. A patent troll won't sue until you're actually successful. "Legitimate" patent holders are going to kill you in your crib. As an entrepreneur I'm far more concerned with the latter than the former.
It behooves large corporations to keep the focus on so-called patent trolls.
() The big problem we have had, particularly as regards software patents, is that it has been much too easy to get one. They need to be restricted to actual technological advances, and not just cases where changes in the landscape enable applications that are novel but obvious, like sending document scans over email. (A document scan is digital data; email is a transmission medium; sending data over a medium has been done since the telegraph.)
() It's not at all clear that the existence of NPEs per se is a problem. As long as we allow patent rights to be sold at all -- and I don't really see how we could prevent it; any rules we came up with could be gamed -- I don't see how we could prevent their sale to NPEs. And then, the fact that an entity is non-practicing doesn't seem to me to justify denying it its rights.
() "I fear that focusing on so-called patent trolls will simply result in superficial legislative and judicial solutions." -- I share this concern to some extent.
However, I don't entirely dismiss the patent troll problem either. I think the rules around patent litigation have made it too easy for NPEs, armed with low-quality patents, to shake down innocent businesses. There's just not enough risk to filing an infringement suit in bad faith. I think judges have to be empowered to fine plaintiffs for abusing the system, at least to the point of requiring them to pay the reasonable attorney's fees of the defendant if the suit is unsuccessful. It would have to be at the judge's discretion, as we don't want to discourage independent inventors from filing legitimate infringement suits against large companies. Specific evidence of abusive litigation would have to be present, such as:
() Suing end users of a product, who are much less able to defend themselves than the manufacturer.
() Inability to provide specific evidence of actual infringement: to say exactly what the defendant has done that infringed what claims of the patent.
A well stated point that I hadn't myself considered, and has changed my perspective on the topic enough that "I changed my mind" would be an accurate statement if it wasn't for the binary it would otherwise imply.
(Indeed, it's comments like these that give me pause when thinking about votes in moderation systems)
I shutter to think what you believe a "strong position" would be if you do not believe patent holders today do not have one.
I am personally favor abolishing all patents, especially true for "design" and software patents. I feel Patent holders today have FAR FAR FAR too much power to the point where the patent system is HARMING innovation instead of encouraging it
(All: sorry for the offtopic digression, but this thread was bound to be about this whether I posted the below or not. There are fine comments about the Supreme Court ruling elsewhere on this page, and you can always click [-] to collapse a subthread you don't want to read.)
HN has been running a no-politics-for-a-week 'experiment' [1]. Although it hasn't been a week, I think we've learned as much from it as we're going to, so it can be over now.
Among what we learned is that it's impossible to define 'politics' with any consensus because that question is itself highly political, and that HN is at its best when it can meander through all the (intellectually) interesting things, some of which inevitably have political dimensions. The current story is a good example: it's not apolitical, but it isn't purely political either, and it's clearly on topic for HN.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404. I put 'experiment' in quotes because people understand that word differently. We mean 'trying something for a little while, just to see what will happen'.
A political science prof once laid out the scope of politics as anything regarding the exchange of power or money. That seemed like an overbroad statement at the time, but now it seems like I was under-perceiving the political aspect of pretty much everything at the time.
I have read that the modern usage of the word "economics" is a replacement for the older term "political economy." It seems our ancestors were more wordy but also more accurate.
Both were originally "moral philosophy". "Political economy" mostly split into "economics" and "political science" in the 1880s, though the odd department of political economy can still be found.
One of Adam Smith's shortest sentences in Wealth of Nations is "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power." It's all about power and its distribution.
I'm going to have to think on that definition for a while. It does seem like an oversimplification but those two things do bring in human competition. The competition is social more often than not. Social competition is the basis of political action. Professor might have had it right.
There is a rather strong quote by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht that for me drives home the point of how economics and politics are inseparable.
“The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.”
I fully agree with him. I've long maintained that a healthy democracy requires the populace to be politically informed and active, regardless of stance or belief.
It is deeply disturbing that 100M+ Americans didn't vote in the most recent election. I bet a lot of those were people who, as Brecht points out, are proud of the fact that they hate politics and don't care about it. They always spout ignorant bullshit like "both parties are the same anyway" and they say that with a smug, holier-than-thou attitude, as if they've discovered some hidden insight. It really rustles my jimmies.
How do you feel about the people who voted contrary to your political choices? Do you view them with more or less disdain than you appear to have for those who sat this one out?
I can't speak for the parent, but in general I have a great deal more respect for people who vote for things I disagree with than people who share my values but can't be fucked doing anything to effect them.
That's interesting, do you still feel that way when they're voting in favor of things that have the potential to significantly degrade your quality of life?
I'm not the person you responded to, but here's my take.
I can respect someone I personally dislike. I can also respect someone who disagrees with me. I can even respect someone who makes my life harder, though I might dislike them for it.
But I lose respect for a person for many other things.
Once you tally up all of the factors, I do have trouble respecting most of the Trump voters I've personally encountered so far (not many) because I sensed too much intellectual laziness or cognitive dissonance.
Once you tally up all of the factors, I'm not sure that Trump voters come out ahead of non-voters in aggregate.
When it comes to issues I care about most (mass incarceration, surveillance, war, poverty, torture and corruption) both parties are effectively identical.
On a purely scientific level, US is about to run an experiment where they're handing power completely over to one side of the aisle for at least 2 full years after having a split government for the last 6. You're likely to get sufficient data during this period to make your determination whether your (IMHO ill-informed) opinion is indeed true.
This thread could rapidly veer out of control, so rather than add my counterargument here, can I (as an ordinary user not affiliated with HN) suggest that we stop here, or at least hold ourselves to a minimum length and point/counterpoint format?
Not true. Both final candidates supported and benefited from the causes of most of that list. They also mocked various Constitutional amendments. Tyrants that are just the same for that list and what supposedly empowers them.
So the end game for dang's experiment was "the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.”
I daresay not. The problem was that unless we're talking hardcore science/engineering, there is always a political shade to things that affect the real world. But as a non-american, I wouldn't have minded if the experiment continued since a lot of the political discourse here is extremely US-centric and repetitive.
In the context of Dang's experiment, I think a better definition of politics is "anything which involves coercion onto an unwilling party."
Politics is etymologically related to policy. Which is a set of norms over a group. I.e. all policy is group policy.
The role of the governmemt to set and enforce those policies. Governance
is generally preferable to anarchy because governance allows us to reap economies of scale. Which is invaluable in a universe of scarce resources. But due to conflicts of interest, optimal policy is often disagreed upon. Therefore, it is common that policy is forced upon one or more parties which believe the policy suboptimal, in the name of compromise.
I personally dislike when someone forces something upon me. Likewise, I dislike when I must force something upon someone else. As a result, negotiation of policy can feel frustrating and exhausting. This sentiment is where I suspect the desire for "politics-free spaces" originates from.
Regarding Dang's flag experiment. I cautiously propose the rule that: any article whose thesis asserts "a normative statement which may affect an unwilling party" is worthy of a flag. E.g. while most think of the Supreme Court as an inherently political entity, and while litigation involves an unwilling party (whoever loses), the above article's thesis is informative rather than persuasive. Therefore, I would not flag the above article. This flag policy would aim to target the inciteful, rather than the insightful.
I agree. "Polis" is the root of both "politics" and "policy" [0]. The modern definition of policy extends to groups both larger or smaller than cities. I don't know which claim is under dispute.
This is a very political (and ideological) definition of "politics". Excellent example of how definitions themselves are not, and cannot possibly be, apolitical!
But is it inaccurate? Whatever its ideological biases, I nonetheless believe my definition is more accurate than "anything regarding the exchange of power or money". Such a wide definition includes the purchase of groceries. Yet a typical grocery purchase is hardly an illocutionary political statement.
More importantly, is it unproductive? I.e. would my threshing-method fail to reliably discriminate? I honestly believe my criterion is practical. Otherwise, I would not have made the suggestion. I challenge someone to find a case where the predicate returns a controvertible result.
This kind of stretches what people think of as politics. I mean it was an 8-0 decision. Or did where you thinking of patents in general as politics or any governmental function?
Sorry, I have no problem with it, but stopping on day 2 for this kind of story seems to be a little soon. How about clarification?
Some people, but not all. This story would be off the front page right now if we hadn't just turned flagging off on it, because we asked users to flag political stories (and err on the side of flagging) for a week. So it's clear that many people think of this story as 'politics'. Even if you don't classify it that way, it's clear that the story has political dimensions, as your comment indicates. (Also, it was day 3, not day 2, but yes, earlier than planned.)
A possible lesson is that any anonymous ranking/suppression mechanism can be used for reasons unrelated to the original motivation for the mechanism.
E.g. the many shades of SEO in an attention economy, or downvoting for quality vs disagreement. Once a mechanism exists, it acquires multiple identities through use.
That's great, thanks. Have you seen contemporary academics who are applying elements of cybernetics and systems thinking to social media and IoT feedback loops?
I haven't, but it sounds like it would be great research. I think systems thinking provides a powerful epistemology for scientific and mathematical inquiry.
It's more complicated than that. If a judge under common law thinks you're trying to abuse the letter of the law to violate its spirit, they could very well deem it a loophole and reject the reasoning. In civil law a judge is expected to uphold the law as close to how it's written as possible. In both cases we have the corollary which many don't acknowledge that the law is not what's written on paper, it is a system that includes human components.
Yup, in a time when "should the US federal government actually do anything at all regarding X ∀ X" is so controversial, it swallows up anything having to do with IP law, and I don't believe it was the intent of the moderators to remove IP case law from the scope of permitted discussions on this site. Fully agree with the decision to roll back the experiment.
I submitted this story yesterday and it doesn't show as flagged. At least not for me. Maybe randomly different audience didn't think it political then?
'dang, thanks for the announcement. Are you going to write up what else you learned from the experiment?
Also, when you say the guidelines have it about right, there's a lot of evidence that the current implementation favors people who want to bury stories that relate to politics (or other hot-button topics like diversity). Are there plans to look at this?
The main thing we learned is that a change like that won't solve HN's civility problem, which was the big question we had. But we learned other interesting things too, like that a week is too long for trying out an idea like this. Also, if we say we're trying out an idea briefly, some people think we mean permanently. Communication on the internet is hard.
We're definitely going to consider tweaks to the guidelines, but substantive stories on e.g. diversity are already not off topic. Some do get flagged, but we've often turned off the flags or reduced them (which is standard practice on HN for a whole range of stories) and many have appeared on the front page.
I think one of the reasons that people think that trying something out leads to permanence is that there's a pretty long established trend of that being the case on websites that HN shares membership with. You may be paying the social price for actions inflicted by Digg and Reddit, years ago.
That's quite interesting. What would you suggest by way of differentiating from this, if we decide to do something like this again? I don't mean something like a no-politics week, I just mean some short-term variation with no intention of permanence. I'd hate to give up our ability to try out ideas.
I don't think there's a short-cut to differentiating yourself there: you just have to run experiments and not use that language to roll out new features (ie, never make an experiment permanent at the end, but roll it back for a few days/week/month, discuss it, and then redeploy). I would actually trust a website that made too big a deal about how they weren't like those other guys less, because that's an old marketing trick.
Maybe add a notice to the site header listing currently-running experiments. Apart from making it easier for people who don't read every post to keep up with rule changes, that'd emphasize that there's something out of the ordinary going on, and not the new normal.
PS: How do you feel about adding a "rationale" text box to the flagging process + some eventual feedback on whether moderation agrees with the flag/rationale? I basically never flag comments because I'm not sure I'm the same page with y'all.
I wanted to see the criteria that the experiment was going to be evaluated on. I feared that since the metrics for the pro side would be more readily available (like measuring how many fewer flamewars there are or how they quickly get flagged instead of sprawling through the comments) than the "it isn't a good change side" (fewer meaningful discussions or a subtle bias towards one side in an issue), that the experiment would provide all the evidence needed to extend the ban.
I know I am also really sensitive and jumpy around things they perceive as censorship, even for a week.
How about politics friday's or no politics Ndays. Where the rule is in general no X in general unless its something like "politician bans encryption" type stuff.
That way if people want to do politics, fine, but if we restrict it to a specific day or days so those of us that are sick of politics can just focus on getting things done. And then post about what we did on the day after.
Maybe politics day on, no politics day off in a series.
I think there will always be resistance to change, so perhaps there should be a visible indication that some idea is being tested out, with an option for users to disable it.
I mistakenly thought of the change as a software change, since I've yet to use the flag button.
It might be useful to tie changes in community standards to something concrete and trackable. Taking the detox week as an example, there would be a way to flag something and specify "detox week" as a reason.
That being said, can you give an example of changes in community standards on this site which effects cannot be tracked in software?
EDIT: Clarified scope of "changes in community standards" to this site.
I'd hope that at least some experimentation is still possible. Wouldn't a lack thereof lead to stagnation? I have a hard time believing that, as great as it is, HN has found the global maximum of community design.
Thanks for the response; those seem like good learnings.
In terms of hot-button-topic stories getting buried, it's not just flagging - the flame war detection logic also plays a role. On diversity stories, for example, once they reach the front page we often see a large number of strongly worded (but clearly legitimate) anti-diversity posts. When people reply, heavy discussion ensues; and in any case, there's often a lot of piling on in agreement. Pretty soon the post is back to page 3 or 4. Of course there's the option of not replying, but leaving the anti-diversity viewpoint unchallenged strongly reinforces the stereotype of HN as a place that's hostile to diversity. So right now there isn't any good answer.
Yes, this is a problem. I think the solution might be to have a 'vouch' style link on stories that get penalized this way, so users can say whether they really are flamewars or not. If they aren't, the penalty should come off. We do this manually today, but we don't always see the thread in time.
Of course that leaves the harder problem that some of those threads are flamewars rather than civil conversations, as the guidelines call for. But fortunately that's not always true.
That could help. And maybe adjusting the threshold for flamewar detection - with the "hide subthread" functionality the cost of a flamewar might be somewhat lower.
Thanks again for sharing your learnings. Unsurprisingly I have some thoughts of my own, but first I'm curious about what others have learned ...
"Anti-diversity" is a rather uncharitable term to use; it takes people who, say, dislike bullying tactics or prefer meritocracy and lumps them in with racists. One reason threads on the topic often degrade into flame wars is the attitude that there is only one moral way to view the situation.
If you think there's a better term, I'm certainly up for suggestions.
But why do you think it's uncharitable? People who say they "prefer meritocracy" are in fact taking an anti-diversity position. Maybe they don't understand it's anti-diversity, in which case pointing it out may encourage them to think more about it and understand why. Or maybe they don't care, in which case they certainly wouldn't take it as a moral judgement.
I think I follow what you're saying. It's a framing issue, similar to the pro-life/pro-choice, which encourages false dichotomies. I agree that "anti-diversity" is sub-optimal. Do you have suggestions for more neutral terms to apply to the topic?
I would cautiously argue that the two sides don't define themselves internally so much by what they are for as by what they focus on opposing. So maybe anti-racism and anti-activist? Or anti-politics?
Naming is tough :/ Trying to name concepts in programs is tough enough. Thanks for giving it a shot. I don't have any better ideas. It'd be nice to be for something, though, right? Maybe I should convene a focus group! :)
No, the mainstream explicit, self-proclaimed position is that these positions should be allocated on a meritocratic basis, not on the basis of racial quotas.
That is the mainstream, but paradoxically, the mainstream is the quietest right now. Public debate has ended up being between people who want quotas for the "minorities" and people who want to re-homogenize an already diverse workforce.
Does HN have a civility problem? It's one of the most civil online places of discussion I can think of. Probably the most civil, although I don't frequent any strictly scientific forums which I imagine are much more "professional" if not necessarily civil.
I'll be the first to admit that I can be a little snarky at times, particularly about things I'm passionate about, but I think most people could say that about themselves.
I was rather enjoying the peace. I do appreciate not hearing about politics for once. It's everywhere. The tv, the radio, the printed news, the internet..
The place where it really gets bitter is the associated tribalism that political issues bring. A variety of research studies have found that people who identify with a given party will be much more favorable to the exact same topic if told that their party supports it vs if they're told the "enemy" party supports it.
What might have made this experiment more sustainable would have been to scope it to "No partisan politics". Some topics, such as education reform are very political but have no strong consensus in either party. For others, such as IP laws, both major parties come down on one side and many techies on the other. Those topics were common on HN for years before the political discussions here really got nasty.
It's the wedge issues (whatever they may be in a given cycle) and culture wars where the site has really gotten acrimonious. If people are talking about an issue, it's fine. When they're fighting with their allies against the "other tribe" it's not.
Wasn't it already obvious that it's impossible to define 'politics' with any consensus? What makes a 'no politics' idea nice anyway is that it doesn't have to be defined with consensus to work. Whatever multi-dimensional definitions people have still end up converging an awful lot on actual items. Plus as moderators you can always use your own personal judgment, which you don't have to justify, and which is necessary to help drive the site in a direction you want it to go. Otherwise it will drift towards being like every other site. (http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/) Still, I hope for more experiments in the future, and maybe even re-runs. (Going to ever try the 'pending comments' experiment again?)
> Wasn't it already obvious that it's impossible to define 'politics' with any consensus?
Oh yes, but what wasn't possible to foresee was the community reaction, and whether a functioning consensus would develop in practice. It did not.
I don't think moderators have quite the power you describe. We can take that approach, but only if the community supports it overall. That proved not to be the case here in two or three important ways, and we're fine with that.
> I hope for more experiments in the future
I'm glad we're not the only ones who feel that way!
> Going to ever try the 'pending comments' experiment again?
"Pending comments" morphed into what we called "modnesty" for a while and is now known as vouching, and has been probably our biggest single success in terms of introducing new mechanisms.
Thinking it through, I think a happy middle ground would be to have a 'this is political' button that, after a certain threshold, would flag the post as 'political', and would only be visible to those who have 'show_political' enabled in their profile.
Any chance of seeing what happens if the needle is moved the other direction? That is, see what happens if you actively discourage people from flagging stories simply because they are political, and reserve flagging for comments that are incivil and abusive?
I think user 'opsiprogram' describes it well here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13111900. It's unlikely that the outcome will be ideal, but like this experiment I think there might be useful lessons that can be learned in a short time.
It doesn't, but the thread was guaranteed to be include this no matter what, since if I hadn't posted, people would be talking about it being off topic this week while we were trying out the no-politics idea. If you missed that one, the original post is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404.
It will take a long time for us to heal the chasm between those of us who want to temporarily ban politics on HN and those of us who don't. May I suggest a one week moratorium on discussing this topic?
So is it over? Can you make a new main post about this so everyone knows and it can be discussed? I, for one, am sick of overly broad interpretations of "politics" being used to flag interesting apolitical articles.
Well, it was more peaceful while it lasted. Next tine be more specific, perhaps. The problem was US federal politics and the tribalism there, not 'politics however it may be defined'.
People tell us a lot of things, including a lot of contradictory ones.
If it were simply a matter of being told, I could have just told myself, since I've made that argument myself on HN for years. But the point was to try the idea for a little while and see what happened. Now we have actual experience to point to.
Perhaps we're using the word "experiment" differently. I don't mean a controlled experiment, I mean making a change for a little while to see what happens. One doesn't need a precise definition to do that. In fact, if we had one it would have been useless, because in complex social systems like HN such information doesn't transmit. People would have flagged whatever they thought of as 'politics', no matter what we said. Which is what they did.
I won't say it didn't cross my mind. But if you're arguing that everything should have been obvious, that was far from the case. People have very different, shockingly different, way-more-different-than-you'd-expect assumptions about things that seem obvious to you (i.e. any one of us); since our job is to serve the community as a whole, we can't just go by our own. It's a constant struggle.
HN is large enough that if the outcome had been wildly different, other users would be thinking that had been obvious all along, and telling us so.
Keep in mind that the important question was how the community would react, and complex social systems aren't straightforwardly predictable. I've been working with HN for years now, and a participant for years before that, and much of it remains counterintuitive to me.
It's a good idea to think through ideas before attempting them.
This experiment was like asking people to flag "news", and getting surprised that people were flagging tech news, when they really wanted to avoid crime news.
I meant coward in a more technical sense of a leader who won't stand by their decision and caves to pressure against it, rather than actual argument, and supported that position within my comment -- no different than saying poor judgment. It certainly was not an ad hominem argument, and not the main thrust of my comment.
I think that many readers are simply being uncharitable in interpretation because they don't like the message.
That aside, Ill omit such language in the future (though Ill leave it here for posterity sake).
If you smack someone or tweak their noise while talking, it doesn't matter if that was your 'main thrust'. Please just don't be uncivil here.
My decision was to try out an idea briefly and learn from it. We achieved that, and what we learned stabilized quickly, so the value of continuing was small. Meanwhile the cost of continuing was nonzero, and possibly high. It turns out that when you tell people you're going to try an idea out briefly just to see what happens, many hear "this is a permanent change". That was not intended, and I didn't want to do damage by allowing that misconception to linger for another several days.
I don't believe that accurately labeling poor behavior is uncivil, but I should have used a phrase like "showing cowardice" (more in line with my phrasing of poor judgment) to make it about the specific behavior (and faults with it), rather than a comment about you. I also will, in the future, pick less emotionally charged synonyms or phrases, because they're clearly distracting.
I appreciate the time you've taken to engage with me and explain your thinking (though I disagree with your choices still).
I hope you'll make a post explicitly about the experiment, so we can talk more fully (and civily!) about why I disagree with you.
That's probably the inappropriate part. In fact, your comment would have probably been better off without the entire first sentence. I don't believe the point you're trying to express is reinforced by your introductory sentence at all.
Being an outlier here, I don't disagree with you're using the word "coward". If someone acts cowardly, they are a coward. If someone lies, they are a liar. Anyone downplaying such talk may do so for a number of reasons (pride, emotion, to name a couple), but I think the best reason is that they know it's better to build people up than tear them down. Also, some things are subjective and calling someone out on, say, "being stupid" is relative (to one's idea of stupidity) and demeaning.
The overall tone of your post could be read (by some) as insulting in a sense. I wouldn't call them cowards for backing out before a week. It seems more a matter of didn't-have-a-choice. The community ran away with it. So they aren't perfectly honest, so some people would rather be the captain who goes down with his ship, but sometimes it's better to face the inevitable and try to make the best of it.
In short, I can see why your post was downvoted, but I wouldn't downvote it myself. You stated your mind. Just that even geek culture is sensitive it seems (or at least it is here).
From a toxicity point of view, I believe that is the part of politics that should be avoided here. Specifically all the sludge that revolves around candidates competing with each other, instead of focusing on the issues themselves. In fact, if politics consisted of only discussing the pros and cons of various policies, laws, and positions, then it may actually be informative.
We can no longer empathize, I don't think it's about people living in some alternate reality. Take the example of second amendment rights vs. gun control. What one needs in the city, versus the middle of Montana are going to be very different. If an urban professional can't imagine themselves in Montana, and a Montana rancher can't imagine themselves in Chicago then you've got problems.
I agree that there are problems with empathy, but when people disagree on basic questions of physical science and recorded history, alternate realities are indeed in conflict.
I'm no climate change denier, but should anyone who seeks to question the research be labeled as living in an alternative reality (now politicians who spread reearch that have been shown to suffer from measurement errors and what not is whole different thing)? That's not exactly how the scientific method work.
The point is that the word means so many things to different people that the most we can say is that "most stories about politics" are off-topic, as the site guidelines have said for years.
People slide their phones into and out of bags and pockets. A sharp corner is really bad for that. A rounded corner only makes sense. Cars, tables, cutting boards, children's books, and all manner of other items have had rounded corners for decades to centuries for the very reason that you don't want sharp corners and edges on things you're handling a lot.
There's nothing novel here and in fact it should have been filed as a functional patent then swiftly declined as obvious and ordinary.
Hell, every flip phone I had had rounded corners. There's nothing novel about rounded corners in a cell phone. Or, a "regular" phone -- I recall rounded corners on any number of landline phones -- some cordless handsets even pocket-able.
There needs to be some career downside for such abusive legal maneuvering.
"Steve suddenly got more intense. "Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!". And sure enough, there were lots of them, like the whiteboard and some of the desks and tables. Then he pointed out the window. "And look outside, there's even more, practically everywhere you look!". He even persuaded Bill to take a quick walk around the block with him, pointing out every rectangle with rounded corners that he could find."
The design patent in this case doesn't cover the corners of the device, it only covers the face of the device. The patented design of a design patent application are the solid lines---broken lines are used to denote additional context and are not part of the claimed design.
Should it matter? Rounded corners are obvious and ordinary. Does changing the diameter affect how useful it is? If you patent 0.505" diameter corners am I allowed to patent 0.515" if I can show it increases $METRIC?
If I sound argumentative it's not intentional, I know sometimes multiple questions in a row like that can be taken the wrong way.
It matters in as much as one of the functions of a design patent is to prevent confusion in the market. Like trademarks, design patents are intended to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in the free market so consumers can more easily determine the providence of goods and services.
The less providence can be quickly, reliably, and consistently determined by consumers, the weaker will be feedback mechanisms in the market. When knock-offs flood the market, the original company will have less incentive to manufacture products with better quality, longevity, or whatever characteristic is desirable in the market. That's because they capture fewer of the dollars consumers fork over for those differences.
It follows that there's nothing per se illogical about making such fine distinctions as fractions of an inch. What matters is if the distinction serves the purpose of make the product distinguishable in the market to the degree that optimizes the market function of design patents.
The patents in question seem to consist of essentially just pictures. Can anyone more familiar with design patents clarify whether there are more specifics beyond what Google Patents and the USPTO website show, or if this is all there is to it?
To a first approximation, design patents confer the right to stop others from making/using/selling things that look too much like what is in the picture of the patent and not enough like what existed before the patent. How it functions does not matter-just how it looks.
Design patents do not last as long as utility patents, typically only 14 years, rather than 20.
Design patents are generally much easier to design around than utility patents -- you could use a sufficiently different corner radius, put a curve in one side, add a hood ornament, etc.
Most notably, and key in this case, the measure of damages is different: Disgorgement of profits for a design patent, versus a reasonable royalty for a utility patents.
The issue in this case was profits on what--the whole phone, or just the component of the phone to which the design is applied. A reasonable reading of the statute suggested the former.
Google Patents is giving you the whole thing. Most design patents are just a picture and some boilerplate text. And there's little or no review before issuance. If you can draw, you can get one.
They are just pictures, but they are very specific pictures. The USPTO's Design Patent Application Guide (https://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-started/patent-basics/...) might be of interest. Of specific interest is that broken lines are not considered part of the patent claim.
I'm not a patent lawyer, but I have dealt with patents. The important part is the claims, because that lists what it is they are actually patenting. But since their only claim is about the design the only real relevant information is those pictures and the short descriptions of them.
Note that I'm not attempting to argue over where that should be a valid patent or not, just why it is so bare. If there were more specifics, you'd see them on that page.
Yes, that's my point. There's not much specifics because there's not much other details that need to be provided to explain the claims. IE. The claim basically just says "look at the pictures".
Would a particular diameter lead to a usable patent?
The patent holder would have a hard time defending their patent if it relied on some arbitrary level of precision. Either it is useless because there is no diameter and thus too vague or it specifies a diameter and is useless to the holder.
A meaningful patent on corner shape would have some reason for the shape. Perhaps the ornamentation related to the company's logos or style in some way or they deduced that something special about the size and shape of some special rounded corner has some better function... Perhaps the ideal corner shape for insertion into skinny jeans without sacrificing screen size (could be a minimum level of fu).
The position of the home button, the speaker, the diameter of the corners, the use of a particular bezel, these were all considerations in the design of the iconic iPhone.
Prior to that style phones came in a dizzying multitude of shapes, sizes, and styles. If there was a consideration for fitting into jeans surely Motorola or Nokia or Palm or RIM would have taken it into consideration.
The Blackberry device is another iconic design. It had rounded corners, but it also had other distinctive design features that made it obviously not an iPhone, such as the somewhat unique bottom curve on the device.
Samsung went out of their way to copy. I can't believe people are defending Samsung here. It's an insult to actual innovators.
Design patents are drawings of ornamental aspects of an item. No one specifies technical details. A jury is responsible for determining if the drawings match based on their layman's judgement.
It's not an engineering process nor is it intended to be one. In particular, the results are not predictable or reliable.
Is this type of thing always available for supreme court rulings? This is a great idea to get people involved.
I remember reading the transcript for a recent politicized ruling regarding voting rights and finding out from the judgement that the issue was far different from what the media portrayed. For example, it was a lengthy debate the role of state vs federal law, the legal justifications for government interference, and the quality of the data supporting each side.
It really gave me hope in the 'system' - that at least the judicial body is a source of rationality while the political body is ideologically capricious and often fails to use data to support decision making.
Supreme Court decisions are actually quite readable. They tend to be extremely intelligent and I often end up reading both the majority, as well as the dissenting opinions – and agreeing to both :)
That being said, I also disagree with a blanket indictment of "the media". Yes, court cases often turn on details that the public debate doesn't focus on, such as federal vs. states' powers in regards to the voting rights act. But that's because they focus more on the motivation, and the impact, of these cases. The southern challenge of the voting rights act wasn't motivated by concerns of federal overreach, or a drive to introduce evidence-based decision-making into politics.
> The southern challenge of the voting rights act wasn't motivated by concerns of federal overreach
“Congress — if it is to divide the states — must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions. It cannot rely simply on the past,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
> or a drive to introduce evidence-based decision-making into politics
“If Congress had started from scratch in 2006, it plainly could not have enacted the present coverage formula. It would have been irrational for Congress to distinguish between states in such a fundamental way based on 40-year-old data, when today’s statistics tell an entirely different story,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote.
Beyond singling out southern states, and deciding whether individual court cases could be sufficient rather than having special federal oversight, the core arguments made against the act was that the current data doesn't support the need for such an act in 2016.
The justices who dissented even agreed that racial discrimination was still an issue in the country. But they found this law and the arguments supporting the continuation of special federal powers over specific states to be a poor and outdated means to confront this issue.
In this case SCOTUS invited Congress to revise the formula... twice. Congress couldn't get their act together.
I'm reasonably confident that is why Roberts voted to uphold Obamacare, among other decisions. The justices know that if they strike something down the odds of Congress fixing it are virtually nil, so they try to craft compromise decisions.
Oyez does this for all cases. They also publish the oral arguments (which the Supreme Court itself releases) as a podcast feed, which I highly recommend. It's great listening even if you're not legally trained.
That's not unusual. The media often portrays things very differently from the actual issues, as your example shows. Part of the problem is that media (particularly TV) has to keep people's attention, therefore it's necessarily in their best interest to sensationalize and simplify.
To answer your question, yes, the Supreme Court's oral argument audio is always posted online.
For example, it was a lengthy debate the role of state vs federal law, the legal justifications for government interference, and the quality of the data supporting each side.
If that kind of thing appeals to you, you may have a future in civil procedure and litigation!
Apple's argument is simple. Before the iPhone, nothing looked like the iPhone. After the iPhone, everything looked like the iPhone. Perhaps the most revolutionary design change since HMS Dreadnought.
> Apple's argument is simple. Before the iPhone, nothing looked like the iPhone. After the iPhone, everything looked like the iPhone. Perhaps the most revolutionary design change since HMS Dreadnought.
The obvious flaw in the argument being that it wasn't a design change in the sense of a design patent. It was a functional change -- phones now have a large touchscreen.
The screen is bigger than you would otherwise want the phone to be (an iPhone is taller and wider than flip phones were), so the design goal becomes making the phone as small as possible given the screen, so the phone will take on the shape of the screen. And screens have always been rectangles.
That's Apple's argument for trade dress damages, which are set in an equitable process in accord with damages suffered by Apple. And those damages will now probably be set in a retrial and Samsung will still have to pay them—as a minimum.
This appeal was about design patents. The old interpretation of the design patent law required the entire profits earned by the infringer be automatically turned over to the patentee, no matter how small the patented design was in relation to the product. Entire profits is a lot more than anyone gets from trade dress copying damages.
The trial judge had not separated different damages calculations before because total profits encompassed all the other damages Samsung owed and was easiest to judge.
HMS Dreadnought: all big guns, centralized fire control, heavy armor, steam turbine propulsion. Previous battleships had guns of various sizes sticking out all over the place, aimed by their own gun crews. Being under-powered, they were either sluggish or under-armored.
HMS Dreadnought made all those ships obsolete. All later battleships had the same basic features as HMS Dreadnought. Compare a picture of HMS Dreadnought with a USS New Jersey class battleship, the last battleship class. The New Jersey looks like a bigger, better Dreadnought, with similar lines and turrets.
The iPhone did that to mobile phones.
(After WWI, all the major naval powers were building Dreadnought-type battleships. The US Navy hit a snag. The patent holder on steam turbines got an injunction stopping Navy turbine production. This resulted in the frantic enactment of 28 USC 1498, which exempts the U.S. Government from patent injunctions. Because it was a rush job, 28 USC 1498 is a headache for inventors. It's not part of patent law. It's not part of procurement law. Claims under 28 USC 1498 are handled outside of both systems and never paid without litigation.)
Nonsense. That's like saying Windows was the first OS with GUI and windowed applications. There were many before Apple, like Palm devices, they just weren't that successful.
Wait, so all of that had the sole outcome of kicking a hornets nest?
If you're going to change the site rules on a daily basis you need to actually communicate it.
All you've managed here is mass confusion and frustration, and you've eroded my trust, and I'm sure others, in your ability to run this place.
I feel like I've been trolled.
Also, not hijacking, responding to a political comment when I thought we'd banned political discussion.
Calling out users for shit you can plainly see they've done at your bidding: not cool.
Having to edit this as I can't write another reply, cheers for the throttle for disagreeing.
Yes, I posted it three times in three political threads because dang asked that we flag/call out political discussion in a major front page thread, and you then asked that we don't in a random comment buried in a political article.
Can you honestly not see how this might not be fantastically clear communication, and how while this is as plain as day to you it's utterly opaque to Joe user?
Ok, I'm sorry you felt like you were trolled—that's not pleasant—and believe you that you weren't doing the topjacking thing.
I probably gave you less benefit of the doubt about this because your account has a history of being snarky and uncivil in comments. It would be good for all of us if you'd work on eliminating that; it lowers the level of discourse we're trying for here, and (case in point) fosters misunderstanding.
This ruling [ianal] renders null and void any design patent on components. The infringing party merely has to refrain from selling that component. To be assured of patent protection, the design pretty much has to resist extension or incorporation.
Now where does this leave UI design and UI components?
The precise legal issue involved here is primarily of interest to the immediate parties to the dispute (and, of course, similarly situated parties dealing with like claims). It is not a legal issue that stirs much public debate.
Yet the reining in of the Federal Circuit has major public consequences. The Federal Circuit basically has been on on a bender for the past 20+ years in interpreting the patent laws such that basically everything under the sun became patentable with the enforcement rights of patent holders utterly maximized. This led to the plethora of software and other process patents that has caused so many to throw up their hands in despair and to conclude that all patents are evil and should be abolished. Whether they should or not is a policy question for which there are decent arguments on both sides, in my view. But, assuming one agrees that patent protection can be useful for the right cases, the law is now coming around much more to the point where far more defensible patents are being granted, upheld and enforced and where such enforcement is more reasonably tailored to the purposes of patent law as envisioned in the U.S. Constitution. And that is a very good thing.
Apple is and has for years been very aggressive in attacking competitors with patent claims. In this case, their patent was upheld and the question remained as to how much they had been injured. With this decision, the U.S. Supreme Court helps ensure that Apple will get compensation but not a windfall for the wrong done to it.
Patent law may be right or it may be wrong in a social-justice sense but, as far as the U.S. law is concerned, if it is to be upheld and enforced at all, it should be done in a way that actually furthers its proper purposes and not in a way that promotes shakedown suits and opportunistic legal claims. So kudos to the Supreme Court for getting it right and for putting proper bounds on patent laws in general in a way that helps bring sanity to the field.