BlackBerry was first to (mass-)market with many of these features, and validated that customers wanted them and would use them. You would assume that a startup-oriented community would understand that that’s often the hard part, and that many good ideas are obvious in retrospect.
BlackBerry blundered e.g. by not opening up BBM earlier, but that wasn’t a failure of the technology nor the product-market fit.
The exclusivity of BBM was one of the big selling points for blackberries. That and their integration with corporate IT infrastructures. For a while that worked really well, and BBM was the reason to buy a blackberry after the keyboards and the security features.
I recall at the time there was huge demand from executives to have IT support their iphones. Once the path had been found for that to happen, others followed.
The other major thing that reduced the advantage that BBM gave RIM was that SMS costs reduced drastically in price, with many even lower-end contracts moving to unlimited SMS as mobile data and MMS became the new means of extorting customers. As such, the cost of BBM being exclusive to blackberry was no longer offset by the benefits it gave.
It's worth noting that one of the other things that the blackberry gave us was probably the first example of widespread mobile zero rating. I recall if you bought a blackberry on some contracts, your BBM data usage was unmetered.
Both of the features in the patent claim are obvious or there is prior art.
Density maps have been used for a long time. Weather maps are a great example of this where they are often used to show rain probability or cloud density.
It just seems we have just moved from x on a computer patents to x on a mobile device patents.
In my part of the world once Whatsapp was discovered messaging changed pretty quickly from BBM to Whatsapp. Then the main advantage BB had was the keyboard. But soon after smart phone apps started to rule and that was that.
However, you're not supposed to be able to protect that knowledge with a patent. If I start making cheeseburgers where the buns are replaced by croissants, and it turns out to be so compelling that a billion people are hooked on it, should that be something that can be protected?
No, of course not. We want many entrepreneurs to be able to make these burgers so that everyone can have them at a sensible price, in whatever varieties are popular, and where and whenever they are in demand. Allowing one entity to have control over this "discovery" (cheeseburger + croissant = heaven) will mean that consumers cannot have any of those things until the discoverer has built up the business empire required.
However, you're not supposed to be able to protect that knowledge with a patent.
In general, IP laws are a recognition of the phenomenon that making something for the first time is difficult and/or expensive, but once it exists it is cheap to reproduce. This differs from tangible goods in that much of the value has gone into the sourcing and manipulation of physical materials.
Once again I find it bemusing that a startup-oriented community doesn't get this. The system is far from perfect in execution, I'll admit, but it's all that means that a small company can innovate without immediately being crushed by an entrenched firm with superior manufacturing and distribution capabilities.
Ultimately most anti-IP arguments boil down to "I want to be paid for what I create but I want what everyone else creates for free". That's not sustainable.
> In general, IP laws are a recognition of the phenomenon that making something for the first time is difficult and/or expensive, but once it exists it is cheap to reproduce.
You are mixing up a number of things into "IP Laws". Some things make sense, others do not.
- For instance, it's perfectly reasonable that people who make some product can do so under their own brand without other people pretending to be the same brand. We can't have some new entrant calling themselves McDonalds and selling Big Macs.
- Patents are indeed meant to address the issue you are on about. But the "invention" of cheeseburger + croissant is not hard to produce for the first time. In this case the patent is pretending to be doing something difficult, but what it's actually protecting is the first person who happens to test some random market (what about chicken wings + marmite?). And that is the distinction you need to be thinking about. Another example of this was the lawsuit about the "rubber band" effect on UIs. In no way is it hard to produce the item in question, you just need to know that someone wants it. And the fact that there is a market for something should not be patentable.
> Once again I find it bemusing that a startup-oriented community doesn't get this.
I doubt that anyone doesn't understand this. What's happened is a nuanced view has developed over the years.
- People can see that IP is in the first place not easily attributable. Ideas are like nature: they mix together, things are added and removed by different people, new ideas are formed on top of old ones. You don't need to actually make a product to get a patent but if you're first at the PTO you can ride on everyone who does make a product. Doesn't seem right.
- What was thought to be protecting the little guy is doing the opposite. If you're a little guy, most likely you are the employee of some firm that makes you put all your patents in their name. If you want to go on your own, good luck with the lawyers. If you look at your average success story here on HN, try to categorize them: The firm created some item that was patented and turned it into a major success on the back of that patent, or the firm found some market that was probably already not virgin, and managed to address it without particular importance of some patent.
- Patent seem to be abused easily. I did a patent a few years ago and the day it got issued the guys I was working with started talking about finding a good patent troll lawyer. It seems the system has created an unhealthy culture.
> Ultimately most anti-IP arguments boil down to "I want to be paid for what I create but I want what everyone else creates for free". That's not sustainable.
No, they don't. If what is created is easily duplicated (eg general knowledge like the area of a circle) then why should it be paid for? I want to be paid if I'm going to paint someone's circular table, because I can only paint so many in my working life. But if I invented A = pi * r * r, which all the painters need, should I be paid?
> Also speaking of croissants
Yes, that was my inspiration.
Ultimately, where you stand on this depends this: Is it a question of recognizing what effort people have put in, "costs, investment", of invention, or is the important thing what consumers get out, "value"? And that is why the HN crowd leans the way it does.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Software patents do not further progress. Neither do retroactive copyright extensions. Our current atttude on IP law has shifted entirely to rent seeking.
Generally such discoveries require a lot of trial and error, aka R&D.
It’s certainly possible to accidentally stumble upon the croissant idea, but it’s also possible that you tried countless iterations and spent boatloads of money to test buns. If you don’t protect that it simply disincentivizes intentional R&D.
Well I'm no expert on it, but it would seem that patents are not justified in a great number of industries.
There's a bunch of businesses where capital and knowledge exists, and can be turned to making more or less anything. For instance, if you come up with some new shape of plastic coathanger, you can find some guy in China to make it for you, in millions. The key isn't that you're smart and can make a clever shaped coathanger, the key is that you are able to convince people it's useful and worth buying for more than what it costs you to open a webshop and pay the factory. You shouldn't be able to patent that. Some other person may be able to make it without your help, cheaper, and for more consumers.
Or you could make software. Pretty much any old UI innovation can be made by anyone in the field for peanuts. If it turns out everyone wants a circular knob to scroll up and down, it would not take long before every browser, application, and mobile app could implement that. You shouldn't be able to patent that; it's an obvious thing that takes no input from the original "inventor" to make.
I already had an example from the food industry. You can mash together any number of foods, pretty much anyone can.
Pharma is one area where it is perhaps legitimate, due to the cost of research. If you don't have someone doing tests to show some molecule works, nobody will know what works. And if you don't have someone showing you how to make a particular molecule, it may take a long time before consumers have that drug. I'm still reserved about it in this area though. The potential for abuse is considerable.
Even if we are to take that for granted, which I don't think we should with software patents because many companies and developers could invent the same feature in parallel independent of each other, and I don't think it's fair for just one to get a 20 year monopoly, I do still think that the longevity of the patent should be granted based on the difficulty to implement of the invention.
Something as easy to implement as a read-receipt shouldn't receive a 20 year monopoly, because there are like a million other features like it that could also receive a 20 year patent monopoly, and then we get into this situation where rent-seeking even from companies that didn't invent the thing in the first place, get to sue others for "copying them" (but again, could have been independently developed).
If there are a million patents on stuff like read-receipt it also doesn't help innovation, but hurts it. The big companies will acquire as many of those patents as possible and then crush the newcomers.
The first reason this doesn't happen as often as it should based on how many useless patents are out there, is because most companies aren't assholes and don't enforce their patents against others.
The second reason is because most companies don't waste time looking at all the other companies' code and patents to see if they can sue them for infringement. Only a certain class of companies do that.
The third reason is that among the big established players that somehow avoided getting crushed in the early days because enforcement of patent infringement couldn't be perfect, there is a certain "mutual destruction agreement", so even if they infringe on ton of each other's patents, they can't practically sue each other, because it would be pointless, most of the time. However, this mutual destruction agreement was never supposed to be part of the patent system, it's just the natural outcome of a broken system that grants patents for everything.
I think it was Bloomberg that had an article once saying that there are like 250,000 patents for building a smartphone. If everyone wanted even 1 cent for each of those patents, and the enforcement would be 100% perfect, the smartphone would never even be invented (as an aggregation of all of those patents).
Even if we are to take that for granted, which I don't think we should with software patents because many companies and developers could invent the same feature in parallel independent of each other
Everyone says this but I don't think it's true. I could probably have come up with Bresenham's algorithm myself, but no way could I have conceived of Duff's Device - that's sheer voodoo.
I suspect that Duff’s Device is more or less obvious to someone who started out working in assembly language on constrained systems. It’s a direct translation of a simple computed jump.
I don't think it's self-contradicting to understand good ideas are one of the hard things to come up with and validate, but also believe that they shouldn't be patentable for long, if at all. Just because something is hard doesnt automatically make it deserving of large profits and legal protection.
That's a pretty controversial statement, considering it contradicts what most people think about the issue, including people who study it, and also contradicts common sense.
Patents have an important role in some industries, e.g. pharma. Not that I'm a fan of the industry but without patents, developing a drug over 10+ years would make no sense as anyone could copy it immediately after its release. Same for product design. Why hire designers and engineers if you can just copy a competitor?
One problem with our patent system is that the patent duration of a multi billion dollar drug is the same as a trivial algorithm or design. Why not have 3,5,10,15 year patents that reflect the complexity/sophistication and cost.
Math has not been patentable under any scheme until recently, where over a series of lawsuits the US courts have effectively made a subset of it (software) patentable.
And it all started thanks to seeing a computer operated manufacturing process as something patentable over the same process done without a computer...
I don't believe the math patentability rebuttal holds, otherwise it can be readily extended to the real world through assembly instructions for tangible inventions, especially with the advent of 3d printing.
I'm not saying the patent system is bug-free, but I am saying it'll be a lot harder to drive the kind of innovation we're used to seeing here with no patent protection at all (copyright only protects the implementation, and trade secrets are things you don't share e.g. as client-side code).
Full disclosure: I've got a few to my name. I don't think any of the inventors I know would've even bothered inventing the patterns they/we did if the protection didn't exist. Unpopular opinion, I'm certain.
I'm sure I'm missing something, but where would the economic incentive to develop the majority of (specifically) client-side applications have come from especially in the era before the .com boom?
You still have copyright protecting your code. All a patent does is let you have a lot of time and money for an option to sue some types of companies trying to clone your idea. But companies are all about the execution. There's clones of every successful company, patents didn't change that. But most fail. It was easy to clone Facebook the website way back when or Snapchat the app. Good luck beating them at their own game though.
For any startups here thinking patents are a good use of their time - think again.
I'd initially contested the idea of copyright protecting code in my above comment but decided to redact it to see which direction this conversation would take.
(Tangent: Trade secrets protect knowledge implemented within my spheres of trust, i.e. "my systems.")
Copyright protects the literal documentation/expression of knowledge, such as an algorithm, not the knowledge itself. As an example, reimplementing a novel algorithm in a different language or over a different framework will likely be enough to subvert copyright protection over the code itself.
Copyright will ineffectively protect novel algorithms, whereas patents do a good job of protecting these algorithms in well-exposed contexts e.g. client-side from unauthorized imitation and usage day zero (or, more realistically, day 30). Barring a tactical or strategic error in the approved patent — a wonderful example of this, if I recall correctly, is the Swype patent¹ which prompts the user to pick a word rather than guess one for the user — the patent will effectively cover the algorithm in any implementation for the statutory duration.
A separate issue: "All a patent does is let you have a lot of time and money for an option to sue some types of companies trying to clone your idea. But companies are all about the execution."
That's the use case that garners the most press coverage. The sort that's more prevalent and far less noisy is licensing, and this happens far, far more often, and generally with not so much as a peep in the press. In fact, this is one survival strategy used by some startups as they pivot when they've created novel technologies but have devised ineffective business models around them. This moots the following statement: "For any startups here thinking patents are a good use of their time - think again." — it really depends on how the patents are acquired, such as through deferred equity compensation. I'd argue against doing so in cash, but doing so with equity could make sense especially if the startup's novel ideas are expected to be executed in untrusted (read: client, or "not my systems") environments.
My main argument is that software patent durations need to be cropped. Could be three years, could be five, but given the pace of software development, twenty is patently (ahem) anti-competitive in the software world. That's the argument I'll stand by unless anyone has a proposal to protect and incentivize the creation of novel algorithms without the use of patents.
Source: the numerous IP lawyers I've worked with during both my day job and consulting engagements. But I'm not an attorney, which means there's a nontrivial chance I got some of the nuances wrong, but I'm willing to attach my name to the overall message.
I agree that copyright won't be effective in protecting novel algorithms. That's what patents should be good for. But mostly they end up being a tool used by extortionists who produce nothing, parasites basically making the whole system sick. In their current implementation, whether the patent duration changes or not, they're horribly broken. I suspect we agree there. That's typically common ground in the software business.
But I would go further and say that patents are largely a waste of time and money for startups. With some exceptions, the Swype patent being one. The things is unless you have a novel algorithm for which there is no substitutions, it grants you very little protection.
For example, I have a novel database index algorithm that uses SIMD instructions to do more operations in parallel. But if I patented it, it would largely be a distraction from the insanely complex task of building a full database product and a successful business model and sales channel around it. Sure that algorithm might give me an enduring performance edge over the competition, in the best case scenario. But whether my competitors copy that innovation or not, it's such a small part of the whole, and one for which there are plenty of substitutes - even if somehow mine happens to be the best (the odds are against that!) it's still a minor contribution and likely a waste of resources to patent.
You'd need something that's core to the business and which you can't substitute. If you have an invention like that, by all means patent it. By and large that's rare though.
And the whole system is so terrible, so utterly broken, so abused by bad actors and corrupt courts (District of East Texas, I'm looking at you!) It's impossible to write any substantial amount of code that doesn't infringe patents. So basically everyone infringes, and some have the bad luck that others will use that to extort money from them. I wish the whole system would die in a fire.
I've often wondered how I would react if that happened to me. I'd probably find the cheapest lawyer I could in the district hearing the case, and instruct him to draw the proceedings out to the maximum possible extent - run up the bill as high as possible for the bastards.
The “software is math” line of reasoning doesn’t make sense to me.
Is it math because numbers and logic are involved? In that sense, chemistry is just as much math, yet new compounds and drugs are readily patentable. Ditto for physics or mechanical engineering, both of which can produce patentable goods. The only difference for software seems to be that it’s trivially copiable and adaptable.
This isn’t to say there aren’t massive problems with software patents today. Regardless of how you feel about the concept generally, the patent on timestamps seems roughly equivalent to a patent on painting something red, a trivial and obvious product refinement.
It's because numbers and logic are all that's involved. Unlike those other disciplines, any "result" in computing could be derived and executed entirely inside one's head, the computer, in principle, is just saving us time by doing the calculations for us. This is what makes software analogous to math. I have no idea why math should be immune from the otherwise ridiculous and overreaching patent system.
That’s all true for chemistry and physics too, once there’s an understanding of the princples. Yet new chemical compounds are patentable.
And software is hardly pure numbers and logic. Many aspects of algorithms (and patents) are related to real world elements of the _machine_ executing instructions. The concept of a “space-efficient” algorithm is only meaningful because space has a real world cost and imposes constraints. There are no implications for space in pure “numbers and logic”.
I recommend a book on software patents, Math You Can't Use. It has been more than 10 years since the author so eloquently argued why software patents should be abolished completely. Sadly not much has changed.
then big corporations with money will have an edge over smaller companies to file for more patents with longer terms. do you think Apple with $30B sitting in bank is going to save on patent cost?
The cost could be scaled further based on company size/net revenue/assets. So Apple's $30B nest egg would make it more expensive for them to file a long-term patent than a startup with $30 in the bank.
Patents need to be renewed when the entity that owns them no longer exists (e.g. acquired). If they are not renewed, then they expire and become public domain.
Tebahpla, Inc -- a small company with 3 employees a gross yearly income of ~450k files for a patent and gets it granted for 20 years. Tebahpla then licenses that patent only to Google, for 20 years, for $10 a year.
Not reliably. International corporate ownership is very complex. And consider the following: Apple instructs one of its employees to quit and start a new company. That company files the patent and gets it approved for cheap. Apple buys the company the next day. It's very hard to create a system here that's not readily gameable.
That’s already true now though. If the startup can take a cheap short patent and renew it later once they’ve made money, it doesn’t sound too bad to me.
Yes the total revenue fell, but I specifically mentioned software revenues in my comment which is growing - "revenue from its enterprise software and services business rose about 19 percent to $108 million".
What gets me about the patent system is that there seems to be no requirement for due diligence on the side of the patent holder. You'd think if BB cared about these technologies, they'd have sent a letter to the companies years ago before they amassed millions of users. They could have put out an ad saying that other companies are using patent protected tech and so you should use BB to make sure your service isn't disrupted. Or they could be making money now licensing the tech. For example, WhatsApp sold for billions. It'd have a very different value if they had to pay a per user license fee, which BB could have asked for years ago. I think a forgotten patent should be considered abandoned.
Suing early would make them not use their tech... waiting until their tech is entrenched so you can seek damages and future licencing is the jam nowdays. Its a legal grey area, but seems to work out more often than not.
I understand the incentive, but if there is an obvious violation and you ignore it for years, without even a letter to the violator, you should probably not be allowed to decide to enforce it after that tech has become entrenched. It should be on the patent holder to explain why they didn't complain when the problem was small. Trademark owners can lose if they don't stand up early with a crew and desist.
speaking from experience with patents I created during my phd tenure and the univeristy's inabiity to licence them (even as the FANG companies build products around it and reference the patents in their own patents)
Blackberry is getting comfortable at patent trolling. Non coincidentally, they also don't produce anything of value these days. Someone should sue them for protection racket.
Option b) sue the companies that do that
Hooray for patents.