A Sailfish developer (third party, so not affiliated with Jolla) has developed a swipe keyboard for Jolla. It’s essentially done and ready to go, but he was too afraid to release it. The reason?
I’d like to release this as an open source project, but at the moment I’m not comfortable with the patent issue (I’m interested in any advice on this topic). I live in a country outside the US (and without software patents), so should I just find a code hosting service with no relation with the US?
Fellow Sailfish developers and users chimed in, arguing he should be fine with releasing it as open source and hosting it outside of the US, with a warning that it should not be used in the US. He has accepted this advice, and is currently working on releasing it. While this is great news for Sailfish users, this does highlight the destructive nature of software patents.
Since he’s going to release the code as open source, we can be 100% sure that none of the code in there is stolen from Swype and that none of it violates the open source license governing possible other swipe-like functionality (e.g. Google’s Android keyboard). Ergo, he has developed this on his own, and has produced his own code, or used code that is freely available. It’s a fruit of his labour, possibly infused with code that was meant to be used in a sharing manner.
And yet, despite the above, it’s very likely that yes, he is violating a bunch of patents by producing this keyboard, and is, potentially, running a risk. I’m not so sure the legal advice given in the thread holds up – I’m not a lawyer, and neither are (I’m assuming) the people in the thread – but I’m at least happy he is willing to run the risk for us.
Now, I ask you: is this fair? Is this the future that we want for developers and programmers? Is this the message that the United States government, its technology companies, and said companies’ public advocates want to send to aspiring hobby developers the world over? Should Europe, India, China, and the rest of the world just accept this?
I’m sure the proponents of software patents will wave this away to solve their state of cognitive dissonance, but I’m honestly and seriously worried about the developers who have not released, are not releasing, or will not release their code because of the bribes changing hands from Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Google, and the rest to Washington legislators.
Patents are supposed to spur innovation, not hinder it.
A great outcome would be if the software was posted and usable in many countries – with huge protests that users were missing out on healthy progress and innovation in those countries where it was banned.
Suddenly it the economic and technology leaders would feel like very second class citizens.
And pressure would build to fix the patent system that wasn’t working for those who felt they deserved the best of everything.
Edited 2014-07-04 13:11 UTC
project_2501,
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that you are being optimistic. The thing is that none of this is new, there has been tremendous outcry against software patents for many years already. Personally I had to abandon a commercial multimedia idea over a decade ago when I discovered how much I would owe in patent royalties over *my own code*. I’ve been jaded ever since. Software patents are terribly unpopular in the field and yet all we’ve gotten are duds like the America Invents Act to placate the public while serving corporations by maintaining the status quo.
Developers have long recognized that the patent system is useless in terms of encouraging software innovation, yet it’s really the corporate lawyers who find them most useful for controlling competitors, especially smaller ones who don’t have a sizable portfolio of their own to bargain with.
This is yet another rant on software patents, probably preaching to the choir. Alas, in Washington, it’s often corporate money and not public opinion that decides these things. What is going to change this time?
How ironic that I’m reading this (in Texas) on American Independence Day.
Despite the 130+ year old public disinformation campaign that copyrights and patents are “intellectual property”, and that violating them are somehow “stealing”, the US Constitution makes clear that copyrights and patents are an artificial monopoly temporarily granted by the government to authors and inventors only to the extent that they promote creative work:
“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.”
This makes retroactive copyright obviously bogus, as is copyrights that extend for literally hundreds of years (“since Mickey Mouse was first drawn until eternity” is my usual phrase), and patents on trivial combinations of existing inventions or software of any kind.
It’s bad enough that Americans let our government get away with such blatant abuse merely to win corporate “campaign contributions” (which IMHO can’t be constitutionally protected since corporations are created by statute, despite SCOTUS’s bizarre ruling), but it makes me sick to see us infecting other parts of the world with this nonsense.
Frankly, if a US creator can’t earn their investment back in around 15 years of actual sales opportunity (e.g., to account for new drugs and other regulated tech), they ain’t gonna – so I don’t see a case for copyrights or patents extending longer than that. And if you want protection, you better ensure that others can benefit after your protection expires (as the constitution clearly requires) – which means providing manufacturing methods and source code as a precondition for protection.
Just my humble opinion…
Patents are supposed to spur innovation, not hinder it.
And what’s the innovation in this case, he is just copying a patented concept and implementing it in its own device, there is no innovation. And he is aware that he is using a patented idea, why doesn’t he pays like all the other phone makers? Is not about lack of resources, since they launched a phone so they should have the resources.
Edited 2014-07-04 14:40 UTC
Software patent, algorithm patent, idea patent, all the same ?
Remember Jobs vs. Kildall, Mac OS vs. Gem ? Same patent war about something looking too closely the same. Rounded corners ? Bwaaaah, Apple specific.
I can understand a company to seek for uniqueness, but by using broad ideas, concepts and shapes ? Come on…
Kochise
But where is the innovation here? I don’t see it.
Edited 2014-07-04 14:45 UTC
The innovation is definitely not with Swype, as here are three examples of decidedly prior art:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFf9Mw3nlsY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtlyuuYmFN0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XJodxC1GQs
Message Ease is the first example and probably the fastest, but it’s keyboard was designed for such a process (unlike a qwerty keyboard).
Evidently, the idea is obvious enough that quite a few folks appear to have had the same idea independently (as it often occurs with software implementations).
Even if this developer did “copy” Swype, Swype has no legitimate claim to the idea, in view of the prior art.
Of course, like I said, the lenguaje had changed from “Changing the code is innovaating” to “Swipe is not even innovation”, Is good that you have your opini~A^3n, but we disagree.
Not sure where you said that nor what it has to do with the point of my post.
It’s not an opinion that prior art appeared long before Swype’s implementation — that is a fact proven by the linked videos.
Thus, Swype cannot legitimately be considered the original inventor of the software idea in question. That conclusion is basic logic, not opinion. By simply extending that logic, it is clear that the developer in question should not be bound by any license responsibility to Swype (regardless of whether or not he was inspired by Swype or other prior art).
In regards to whether or not the idea is obvious, that matter is much more subjective. However, with a bunch of folks independently coming up with the same/similar idea, it certainly seems to reduce the idea’s novelty.
A lot of people do not understand innovation and make rash judgments about it. Those with direct experience in a field generally have the most valid opinions. Most here have little experience with actual creativity/inventing, hence, we get naive arguments such as “ideas are not patentable,” and misguided notions such as “X ‘copied’ the idea from Y, so X owes Y, even though Z invented the idea long before Y.”
Such misjudgment is especially prevalent with Apple fanboys who always have to be pro-IP, as their beloved company constantly attacks others based on Apple’s weak/obvious patent claims.
Swype cannot legitimately be considered the original inventor of the software idea in question
Then hire a lawyer and fight in a court, I can bet you’ll lose, but that is not relevant here, the question is if this guy is making innovation, not if the swipe kb patent is valid, well, it is valid cause it is patented, if you don’t like it at the end that is your problem.
Agreed. Your point about whether or not someone would win fighting Swype in court is certainly irrelevant.
However, I would not bet on someone losing such a fight against Swype. That linked prior art looks especially devastating, especially if Swype’s claims are broad.
Let’s assume that “making innovation” = “inventing.”
In regards to inventing the “swiping” keyboard entry technique, that guy did not invent it… nor did Swype.
In other words, neither Swype nor the developer in question are the original inventors of the “swiping” keyboard entry technique. They could have invented the technique independently, but such a point is irrelevant, in light of the prior art.
I believe that this sort of reasoning is known in the common parlance as “circular logic.”
Keep in mind that a lot of patents have been declared invalid by the courts.
I don’t like the fact that lots of broad/obvious notions get patented these days. However, this situation is everybody’s problem, and things are getting worse.
Edited 2014-07-05 20:07 UTC
Interesting how you are still evading the discussion, so, lets start all over again, how is making a carbon copy of the swipe kb innovating? since that’s the question I made in the beginning, not if the patent was valid, I made a simple question, and you people started to ramble, so, can you answer that simple question?
Edited 2014-07-05 20:11 UTC
I did not evade anything. I directly answered two versions of your question — I even isolated both of those questions by quoting them separately and giving a direct answer to each. I can’t help it if you do not understand that the matter is more complex than a single sentence. Most of my other statements were necessary to address your subsequent secondary points, which I also separately quoted and directly answered.
I will once again directly answer your primary question, repeating what I said using your terms:
There is nothing “innovating” about the developer in question using the swiping keyboard technique. His mere use of the technique is not innovative, as he was not the original inventor. He did not even apply the technique to a new, different discipline.
The paragraph directly above is your answer (in case you missed it).
Now, a crucial extension of that answer is this point:
Whether or not he “copied” Swype is irrelevant, because sweeping prior art exists for the Swype implementation — Swype is not the original inventor, as well.
You see, to give credit in the real world of inventing, we generally do not consider intangible things, such as intentions or inspiration. We can only determine who had the idea first, and that is really all that matters.
(Incidentally, the US Patent Office has recently implemented their infamous policy of “first to patent” — a change from the more reasonable “first to invent” policy — to the detriment of small inventors, and slowing the progress of innovation.)
If you can’t understand how this logic works and/or what it means in relation to real-life innovation, I will turn your question around for you (three times) in hopes that you will begin to comprehend:
1. How is Swype’s carbon copy of the ShapeWriter swiping keyboard innovative?
2. How is Swype’s carbon copy of the SlideIT swiping keyboard innovative?
3. How is Swype’s carbon copy of the MessagEase swiping technique innovative?
Edited 2014-07-05 21:32 UTC
If I read the Swype patent correctly, the innovative part was not the swipe part of the keyboard, it was using a database to lookup words in order to make it simpler to use the keyboard.
That’s an obvious feature, considering the zillions of previous predictive keyboard/keypad systems.
In addition, here are two examples of prior art showing predictive look-up with the swipe part:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtlyuuYmFN0&feature=youtu.be&t=1m15s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XJodxC1GQs&feature=youtu.be&t=0m33s
It could be that I am reading the claims of the swype patent incorrectly. I am not a lawyer, nor did I review all of the patents. We also don’t know who owns what and who is enforcing their patents.
Innovation also comes from competition. When there is an alternative, then the market forces the first company to improve and hence innovate its product.
To the public, it does not matter where the innovation comes from, as long as it’s there.
Maybe you’re trolling then.
He’s developed an open source version. That’s the innovation. Everyone (who cares) will be able to read the code. You can’t really know what “Swipe” does with the information it reads. By being open source I’ll be able to add my modifications. A clear innovation on extensibility and security, not to mention it works on a novel platform.
This is innovative, as there was no such version available.
cyber_fusion,
I’m not sure I agree with using “innovation” this way. To me it’s just not relevant since nobody should get monopolies on software, period. In principal a developer should be entitled to code his own version of the software regardless of if it’s more or less innovative than a competitor.
That said, it’s very likely that the open source version will open up the doors to more innovation.
Absolutely, having different choices is the best outcome for consumers (*). Even users of swipe should appreciate this since swipe will improve as a result of market competition. This is how innovation works.
* well, maybe not for US based consumers, where the patent system grants monopolies.
Edited 2014-07-07 16:03 UTC
The point wasn’t that there was necessarily innovation in this case, the point was that in the grand scheme of things patents hinder development, not aid it.
He never launched a phone, he’s a single person.
I’m still making the question, what is the innovation here? what is that heroic act that makes patents evil in this case?
Nothing, he is just copying something, so don’t put this in the context of innovation, is not.
Edited 2014-07-04 14:49 UTC
The innovation, of the obvious lack thereof, is that a lone man without much resources other than FOSS succeeded in creating a Swype alternative without the help of the first implementor of the said idea.
If a lonesome code is able to reproduce what a giant software developer sells for high tag, I’m wondering where is the prior innovation.
BTW, copying ideas has always been Jobs’ moto for the success of his company.
Kochise
That’s not innovation, you are inventing that out of thin air, anyone with a computer and the knowledge can do the same (copy a pattented concept), there is no innovation, I found that excuse really pathetic.
So, I’m asking again, what is the innovation in this case?
Edited 2014-07-04 15:09 UTC
He created new code. Therefore, it is innovative.
Your argument is akin to telling George RRRRRR Martin his work isn’t innovative because other people have written fantasy before him.
He created new code. Therefore, it is innovative.
That’s his innovation? really?, now, you guys make the more silly excuses just to justify the loop holes in your cause, now, I see that this just became for you an obsession beyond reasoning.
Btw, is not the code that is patented in this case, it is the idea, the code may be different but he copied the same idea w/o innovating.
So I ask again,what is the real innovation here?
Edited 2014-07-04 15:27 UTC
He created something new, did he not? Code is language, and thus new code is an innovation – not entirely unlike how words can be rearranged to form a new book.
Let me rephrase my earlier statement. Even though none of the concepts are new and have all been used before numerous times in books, films, games, and more, is George RRRRRR Martin creating something new, yes or no?
Edited 2014-07-04 15:31 UTC
I don’t buy it, I think you are trying to justify a loophole with the most ridiculous answers.
And you can quote or rephrase who ever your want, it doesn’t make your point valid.
Edited 2014-07-04 15:51 UTC
You refuse to answer the very simple and straightforward question, which tells me all I need to know.
Just for the sake of fun, though, the next question I was going to ask you is this: do Disney’s cinema cartoon movies (Snow White, Alice in Wonderland, etc.) which are almost all mere adaptations of existing, public domain stories count as new, innovative material?
Despite my dislike for Disney, I think so. I’m curious about your answer, but it’s clear you’ve dug your heels in, unwilling to explore this any further.
I don’t care about Disney or whatever, that is not the discussi~A^3n here (actually it is a way to evade it), I’m asking where is the innovation here, and the answers I’m getting are pathetic.
Edited 2014-07-04 16:01 UTC
I gave you the answer several comments ago, you are just not willing to accept it, or you do not undertstand it – hence my follow-up questions designed to take you by the hand and explain it to you.
Just to repeat: his code is new. That code is, therefore, innovative. It’s that simple. Just like if I write a new detective novel, that book is new, innovative – despite the millions of detective books that have come before.
YOU are the one evading the obvious answer here.
Edited 2014-07-04 16:20 UTC
Yeah, you gave me an answer, a very unconvincing one, now, just becuase his code is different, doesn’t make it an innovation, because is not the code what is patented, it is the idea, and this guy is making a carbon copy of that idea, it may be different code, but is the same functionality.
And I can repeat 1000 time how his code is new, still it does the same, it doesn’t add nothing to the idea, it is actully different by default because it is implemented in other language, C++ with QML, MS implements it in C#, Google in Java, so is not something remarkable worth of innovation, but our obsession or arrogance, whatever it is, won’t let you admit it.
Edited 2014-07-04 16:28 UTC
The code he created did not exist before he created it. How is something that is new, something that did not exist before he conjured it up, not innovative?
The fact that the code didn’t exist before doesn’t make it an innovation, lets see what innovation means:
As you can see it is very self explanatory, what he is doing is not innovation, yet you are trying to convince me of the contrary, not today.
Edited 2014-07-04 16:47 UTC
Innovation is about finding a better way [better code] of doing something [swipe keyboard].
Seems straightforward to me.
Edited 2014-07-04 17:08 UTC
Better code is arguable, and already told you that is not the code what is patented, it is the idea, and he has not contributed to the idea, he made a carbon copy of it, I really think I’m arguing with some one who is not actually looking for the truth, but just trying to win an already lost debate, and the way you are trying to do it is pathetic.
Edited 2014-07-04 17:20 UTC
So you agree with me that code can be innovative.
Thanks. You’re arguing against yourself now.
Nope, just pointing that your assumption is wrong, but again, you are just running in circles chasing your own tail, you haven’t been able to demostrate where is the innovation, just repeting over an over that is different code, and I already pointed out how different code is not innovating.
This debate only has demostrated what we already knew, that your obsession with software patents has become irrational, and is not about reason anymore, is about something sick and emotional.
Dead wrong. The author himself says his implementation is not as good as the original. Nothing anywhere says it is better code. It is just different code.
Innovation would have been if this was faster, or more efficient, or more accurate. None of that is true.
Today I had a bowel movement. It is unique and did not exist before I created it. Therefore, I have innovated. Your logic is flawless.
Wait, so because you don’t care about it, it’s not a relevant point? I’m sorry, I forgot we are living in a world of your construction and aren’t following your arbitrary rules.
Sorry dude, but just because you don’t like an otherwise valid example, doesn’t invalidate it. You don’t get to make the rules the rest of the world lives by. Deal with it.
I don’t care because is not the topic of the discussion, in the contrary, it is a wasy to evade it, we are talking about something concrete, where is the innovation in this, and he tries to change the subject, that is whatb I don’t care this time. Disney is not on trial here.
The fables from which Disney stole ideas were neither patented nor copyrighted. As you yourself say, they were in the public domain. Had those stories been covered by copyright, Disney would have found itself in hot water, and rightly so, IMO.
I have to say, I agree with the OP in this case. There is no innovation here. And no, merely cloning something (like writing new code to do a patented thing) does not count as innovation. If the Rubik’s Cube is patented, I don’t get to make and sell Rubik’s Cubes, even if I make them myself out of wood instead of plastic. That’s just loopy.
Wow Thom. I’m truly amazed that you don’t understand what innovation is. Obviously copying an existing implementation is not innovation. The fact that it is written in a different programming language is not innovation.
Your comparison to George RR Martin writing a fantasy novel is ludicous. Here’s a better comparison: George RR Martin writes Game of Thrones. Then I write Game of Thrones using a different font and a different typewriter. Is that innovation? Nope, just straight copying.
Now let’s turn the scenario around. Let’s say some guy writes a brand new free keyboard that reads your mind and patents the idea. Then Apple writes their own mind-reading keyboard and puts it into iOS 12 without paying the inventor anything. Let’s all imagine what kind of article you would write about that situation.
I don’t actually agree with Thom on this one, but…
But that is a rather poor analogy that doesn’t fit the facts. A more apt analogy would be that he had Game of Thrones described to him by a friend and then he wrote it… Is that copying?
He never actually read it himself (i.e. he never saw the original source code), but he did have the benefit of a fairly accurate description (i.e. having used the software he could more or less see how it worked).
I’m just saying, viewing the software itself (i.e. using it) and writing an original implementation is not “copying”. It absolutely doesn’t violate copyright, because copyright doesn’t cover the software (just like it doesn’t cover a friends description of the plot of a book), it covers the actual source code.
Now he may well violate the patent, but that wasn’t Thom’s point I think.
That has happened at least 5 times I can think of over the last few years… I’m sure Thom did some write ups at the time, you can go look them up
Ideas cannot be patented. It’s the implementation of an idea that can be.
I can’t patent the idea of a vehicle that goes above the pavement anything between 2cm and 2m without touching it (no wheels), and wait for someone to actually invent a way of doing it to sue him for patent infringement.
Ideas are cheap. The hard part is to make them real, with a viable technique (which also has to be non-obvious). That specific and non-obvious implementation of the idea is what you can patent.
In the case of software the implementation of an idea is… the code itself. So yes, you cannot copy someone’s code. The problem here is that the code is already protected by copyright. And moreover, patented code is usually not publicly available, so how could someone copy it unless they stole it somehow?
If this guy wrote his own code without copying any patented code (which seems clear, since that patented code is closed source), it means that his implementation is original and unique. Even if we found great coincidences between his code and the patented code it could easily be argued that it means that those specific parts of the implementation are obvious, that’s why both did it the same way without copying each other. Obvious things cannot be patented.
In this specific case we’re taking about you might say that the patents are not hindering innovation (though we don’t really know – the code this guy wrote might really be innovative in some ways and much better than the patented one), but they do hinder competition, which is equally bad.
As someone said above, if we applied this patent system to arts (literature, painting, music, cinema), they would mostly cease to exist in their multiple forms as we know them. Someone would patent “a story where a man falls in love with a woman and they live a good story together but in the end they split up and suffer”, and that would be the end of all movies, music and books.
Hmmmm… honestly, I wouldn’t have started this as your premise is wrong. Writing code is not innovative. I wrote a Palm OS style input method for BeOS/BeIA, that was 100% free and my own code. I based it on ideas borrowed from a gesture library for Linux (but used 100% my own code) and used general Graffiti style input shapes in the pattern database. All of this seems fairly similar to the general “thing” this guy did. None of what I did was innovative. Nothing. Nada. It was copying other people’s ideas, pure and simple. The only innovative thing was that BeOS didn’t have such an input method previously, but that is really clutching at straws.
Hiev,
Maybe you don’t realize this, but the vast majority of the code software developers write is NOT innovative. Far from it, hundreds or thousands of developers use same software ideas, even those who are developing their software independently. And yet, if patents are granted over these software ideas, now a few patent holders get to control not only the rights to their own implementation (which is already protected by copyrights), but also the rights to other developer implementations as well. This is a big problem when you have many developers needing to solve similar problems.
It’s totally unrealistic to expect each one to have a completely unique solution to the problem because good developers naturally tend to converge on good ideas and that’s a good thing! Let’s not forget the goal here, we want the best ideas to spread around… with software, the patent system is a hindrance to it’s own underlying purpose.
So IMHO it’s utterly ridiculous to impose mutual exclusivity on software ideas and to not allow the market to develop competing implementations of them.
Edited 2014-07-04 15:46 UTC
In this case what is patented is not software, it is an idea implemented with software, so is not in the scope of software patents, the reality here is that he just took that idea, w/o innovating in the basic concept, just making a carbon copy, so yeah, I find pathetic and ridiculous when you people try to put this as an nnovation just because the code is different, pathetic really.
Edited 2014-07-04 15:51 UTC
Hiev,
How is it not software? The fact of the matter is I can take any generic touchscreen hardware, make my own swipe keyboard software implementation, but it would still infringe. You can play whatever semantic games you want to, but it is still a software patent. And like all other software patents, it results in artificial restrictions to what developers are allowed to implement on a generic computer.
Did you even read my post before responding with your generalization? Quoting myself: “the vast majority of the code software developers write is NOT innovative. Far from it, hundreds or thousands of developers use same software ideas”. How can you possibly construe anything I said as “try to put this as an nnovation just because the code is different, pathetic really.”?
You seem to be attacking your own generalization of the anti-software-patent view rather than what I’ve actually said, and it seems you are doing the same thing with WereCatf’s posts too. If you want to disagree, then so be it, but I do ask that you at least get opposing views right before labeling them as “pathetic”.
Edited 2014-07-04 18:41 UTC
And that, right there, is what’s wrong with software patents: most cover the idea as opposed to the implementation.
Patents are meant to protect specific implementations of ideas … NOT the idea itself.
And that‘s why even the idea of patenting software is absurd.
Ideas are not subject to patent protection, neither technically or in the spirit of existing patent law. Inventions are what patents are applied to, in this case the invention is a method of doing something. Since the method describes, from beginning to end, the actions of software, it is a software patent.
If you do the exact same thing in a very different way, you are not violating the patent.
There is little point in elaborating any further, you are just completely and totally wrong.
I already replied, there is no specific innovation here as far as I know, patents limit innovation in the grand scheme of things. As for what makes patents evil? Well, do I even need to point out the concern people have about releasing code they’ve made? People don’t even try to release stuff to the public or innovate things because they’re always at the risk of then being sued for this or that. If there was no such risk associated with such acts there’d be a whole lot more interest in trying out new things and to innovate.
I didn’t, you’re the one harping on it like a broken record.
Blah blah blah, yeah patents kill innovation, it is funny how you people have passed from “software patents kill innovation” to “patents in general kill innovation”.
I already told you what is the problem with your theory, and you haven’t been able to told me what the innovation here is, you people are just creating a smoke curtain.
Please say “innovation” again. That never gets old!
And how that statement contributes to the discussion? oh yeah, it doesn’t.
You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself…
You have become a joke.
Says the clown.
Here’s how to summarize the popular double standard on patents in a nutshell: If a big company copies a little guy’s patented idea, that is a terrible thing. Yet if a little guy wants to copy a big company’s patented idea he should be able to.
Can’t have it both ways. We can abolish patents but that also means the big companies will go back to stealing innovative ideas (the reason patents were introduced).
That’s not the “reason” why patents were invented, it may be the original PR narrative used to sell the concept to people however.
Also, big companies never stopped stealing “innovative” ideas. Your comment makes it seem as if somehow they had stopped doing so at some point.
leos,
Did anyone actually make this claim or is it a straw man? I have to ask who you are referring to because I really don’t recall anyone on osnews guilty of this double standard. I’m still against software patents regardless of the parties involved.
I don’t care who either party is. Copying ideas is the lifeblood of capitalism, and I have no interest in the concept of protecting them with monopolies. Patents don’t protect ideas anyway (and never have), but as far as software goes I don’t think patents should be applicable.
What do you mean “go back”??? I hate to tell you but if that is the reason for patents (its not by the way) then they are not working
Maybe there is innovation? Maybe he’s improved on the idea of a Swype keyboard by implementing features the original one doesn’t have. But you’ll never know because by your reasoning he should never be allowed to release it for you to try. And by your reasoning, only one company should be allowed to add features, and therefore only one company can decide what features we need in their software.
Now, does that make more sense to you or are you just going to drone on repeating yourself and ignoring perfectly valid responses?
Maybe? he adminted that his version is inferior, what are you smoking?
Edited 2014-07-05 15:10 UTC
Yeah, but think about the future of it. Why would he ever bother trying to make it better if it’s never allowed in the marketplace. Maybe not now, but in the future it’ll be better. Or at least different. Sometimes something different suits different people, what I find better for me could be worse for you for example. Try to think beyond your own rigid little world.
What is he copying? Swipe to enter text? Yeah, sorry but ideas can’t be patented so unless he implemented his keyboard in the exact same was as the patent holder he’s not infringing anything.
Unless, of course, the USPTO screwed up once again and let someone patent “swipe to enter text”.
Ideas can’t be patented? Where did that silly concept come from. Ideas are what is patented. They are outlined in the claims of the patent. That is US law. The infringement comes when someone builds something that infringes on a granted claim, as simple as that. If someone has a patent with claims outlining concepts of a “Swipe” styled keyboard, then it’s infringement.
Someone I know of invented a rubber worm for fishing that had a particular unique motion action to it. It was a very successful product that attracted more fish. It was so successful that it also attracted the attention of other lure manufacturers… they copied the action into their own products. The idea was stolen, he sued all of them and protected his idea and ended up doing well enforcing his patent claims.
Exactly, ideas can’t be patented.
The fact that the idea was “stolen” has nothing to do with this. They apparently copied the exact functionality of is rubber worm and that’s why he won, not because they made moving rubber worms.
You are agreeing with me. His “idea” was that the action would attract more fish. It was a claim in the patent. The action was not hard to implement, but it was still covered in his claim.
https://www.google.com/patents/US4998372
Edited 2014-07-05 05:55 UTC
Wow, you still don’t get it.
The problem was not that the other lure manufacturers made moving rubber worms, the problem was that they moved the exact same way as your friends. Had they made theirs move differently it would not have been a problem. The idea “moving rubber worm” is not what is patented, it’s the specific way which the rubber worm moves.
The keyboard patent covers “swiping keys” in claim 6. This is not the same as the worm patent. The scope of the claims are completely different between the two examples. You can’t make another swype-type keyboard aplication because of Claim 6 in that patent. You can make a rubber worm that moves with a different action, because the claims in the worm patent just cover that particular action. I understand it completely.
Change the word “idea” for “invention” then, my point still stands.
It’s hard to keep the multiple accounts separate, ain’t it?
tylerdurden,
I hadn’t noticed that, it’s hilarious!
What is he copying?
He is making a carbon copy of a patented invention,you may not agree that is a fair patent, but is not the point here, the question is if what he is doing is inovation or not, I say is not.
I guess what you’re implying is that the original swype keyboard (or whichever came up with that idea first) was innovative and therefore deserves to be able to patent the idea.
The problem comes in defining what counts as being “innovative”? Many ideas are actually quite obvious, and would have been arrived at independently by many people, so is it right to grant exclusive rights to the person who happened to come up with it first?
If we do this, we just end up with a world where everyone has to come up with different sub-optimal ways of doing obvious things, or pay fees for things that have no merit (Amazon 1-click for instance).
So now the lenguaje has changed from “he is innovating by changing the code” to “swipe keyboard is not something innovative anyway”.
Of course it is innovative, I can be more productive with it, it is a great idea.
But you haven’t able to demostrate where is the innovation in copying the swipe keyboard, and you won’t, becuase there is no innovation here.
Edited 2014-07-04 16:08 UTC
The U.S. patent office works to determine if the claims in a patent are original (not prior art or in the public domain) and now grant the original idea to the first person who files the patent. It used to be that if you had an idea and you kept good records that proved that you had the idea first, you could contest someone else’s similar patent with your records whether you file a disclosure not. This is not the case any longer. Now the first filer owns the granted patent and can not be contested with records from other persons, which loaded down the patent office with research cases.
Edited 2014-07-05 03:34 UTC
Ideas can not be patented.
Edited 2014-07-04 19:25 UTC
Ideas are not supposed to be patented. However, since all software is an abstract idea until it has been coded and patents do not cover the code (the realization of the abstract idea), then patents on software do cover ideas. That is precisely the reason that software developers hate them and why most sane countries do not allow them.
OK, change the word “idea” for “invention”, he is still making a carbon copy of his “invention”.
Where’s the innovation in the original idea? A swipe keyboard is based on the idea of a keyboard, a keyboard based on written text, text based on language.
A swipe keyboard is the one that is patented yet out of language, text, keyboards and swipe keyboards which is the insignificant incremental improvement?
I can just about see the case for patents if the encourage innovation obviously here they don’t.
This guy, apparently all alone with no serious investment or money, recreated an almost complete facsimile of the patented invention. It took a bit of time and work on this part, but he didn’t spend any significant amount of either in doing it and he certainly didn’t spend any serious money on it.
I’m curious as to whether or not he has ever read the patent. Is there any open source code out their that implements Swype’s patented method that he had the benefit of learning from? I can’t find the answer…
But lets, for the sake of argument, say he didn’t read the patent or was never given the benefit of seeing an implementation. He just used Swype and created a clone…
I would say it makes a pretty good case for the patent being a joke to begin with. Why should Swype deserve a government monopoly on an invention that some random developer recreated from scratch all by himself with no investment other than a small bit of time. Obviously, someone “sufficiently trained in the art” was able to whip this up all by themselves – should it have been patented in the first place?
I don’t know the whole story here, so I might be totally wrong and this guy just copied some code from Android or something. In that case he should rightly be worried… But if he didn’t, I think it can be safe to say there was no innovation in the first place.
Patents are not supposed to protect ideas or concepts, they are legal constructs granted to inventors for their inventions (the result of investment into their idea) meant to protect capital (i.e. recoup on that investment and hopefully proft from it). Without investment there is nothing to protect.
If some guy can just recreate your invention in his basement in his spare time maybe you didn’t really do enough work to warrant a patent in the first place…
As you said, he “recreated” not inovated, the question is what he is doing is inovating or not, and the economic status doesn’t matter here, he doesn’t get any more points just because he have less resources, because anyone with a computer and a programming knowledge can do the same.
Let me put it this way. I don’t think creating a functional clone of someone else’s product is innovative, but I also think it is something that, for the sake of argument, should not be discouraged or legislated against – especially in cases like this.
Swype isn’t going to bother porting their software to Jolla any time soon. This guys product fills a market need. If it is the result of his own work (he didn’t pilfer someone else’s code) than I see no harm in it at all. If Swype feels like he is cutting into their market they are free to respond with a product of their own – otherwise why should they be able to block him from selling his own work? Because it was “their idea”??? Ideas are like assholes…
So it all boils down to the patent and this notion that it is “bad” to steal other people’s “ideas” when it comes to software. I’m sorry but that is just an ignorant and myopic view of things. We work in an industry built on decades of people stealing other people’s ideas… It happens everyday, all the time, whether we have software patents or not. Most patents are trivial to work around, the ones that aren’t in the software world are pretty rare. The only thing software patents do is make life difficult for the little guys – the big corporations just hire army’s of lawyers to work around the system anyway.
Sure, you can look at suits like Apple vs Samsung and say that patents won the day, except it doesn’t seem that it has slowed down Samsung one bit, has it? Because whether it is Samsung or Microsoft or Apple, they will honor patents only up to the point where it makes business sense to do so – if the reward is big enough patents don’t protect squat. You think a patent is going to protect some independent developer’s wonderful software from someone like Apple if they see dollar signs from it? Your either getting bought or getting run over – patents or not…
“he is using a patented idea”
You cannot patent ideas!
OK, change idea for invention, my point still stands.
he has created a piece of unique(from a code standpoint) software from scratch and he doesn’t want any patents on it just release it
he has copied nothing he has created a piece of software that has the same function(think hammer)
He is aware that creating a piece of software is really dangerous
because he isn’t a million dollar company and does not make money from this
This developer does not have a phone. He made a software keyboard for an OS he likes.
Let me repeat it again, is not code what is patented here, so it doesn’t matter if his code is different, how hard is that to understand?
You don’t seem to get the point everybody is making against your arguments
– we are against patents on: software and ideas
– even if swype has a real patent on swyping to input text we are against it
– we think that if the programmer has made this program without copying swipes code it is his work and he should be able to do with it as he pleases
No, the question is if software patents are killing innovation, I asked what is the innovation in making a carbon copy of the swipe kb, the answers I’m getting are pathetic, since “The code is different” to “The developer has litle resources”.
If the patent is valid or not, is not what is in question, the question is if a carbon copy of the swipe kb is innovation, and is not.
If the programmer is duplicating something that is covered by a claim, some of you guys just don’t care. That is a huge problem because by not enforcing patent property rights, you are invalidating the patent process entirely, which is what some of you are advocating. The problem is in doing this it will actually reduce innovation because it removes the financial incentive to develop new things. That does not mean that new things will not be developed, it just means that all of the things that are done for financial gain and the patent system itself will not exist. I think that giving people the choice to go through the patent process is a risky endeavor in itself as opposed to just open sourcing everything. Like it or not, people need to be able to profit from their patents; if they have valid claims and can enforce the rights to their claims they defend their claims just to make some profit from their solution.
Edited 2014-07-05 20:05 UTC
This guy developed this software without financial incentive. The guy that developed swipe now has another incentive to make his version better.
This guy did not steal anything from swype. He made it himself. If two guys make a product with the same function you shouldn’t give a monopoly to the first guy that files a patent. Does swype want to profit from his work?
So basically infringing is ok as long as you say that it is? Why work on something if you have to let everyone else use your method?
Edited 2014-07-05 21:20 UTC
Dano,
Fergy is actually in the majority. You’ll find most software developers have the same sentiment against software patents, but to understand why you really have to understand the other half of the picture as a software developer.
Consider this: in order for one developer to have a right to an exclusive patent monopoly, thousands of other developers have to loose the right to implement it themselves. Software developers *hate* the notion that software solutions are off limits to them even when they funded their own research and development without anything from the patent holder. The majority of infringement is incidental because when you have many developers within a problem domain, overlap becomes statistically unavoidable. This phenomenon is made several times worse due to the fact that many permutations of an invention get patented making it extremely unlikely to not infringe in one way or another.
This is an old exchange between IBM and Sun, but it’s still every bit as relevant today:
http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html
This is a real sour point among developers, almost any software of sufficient complexity is going to infringe some patents that we aren’t even aware of. It’s often the developers being taken to court who are actually being denied the fruits of their own labor.
You never responded to my other post, but I already addressed incentives. Software patents are not a major incentive for developers who produce software. It’s really the non-practicing entities who would loose a reason to exist without patents, but then nobody’s going to shed a tear for them if they disappear.
Edited 2014-07-06 03:31 UTC
Personally, I don’t believe patent infringement is ok. What I believe is that software (in particular) doesn’t deserve patent protection, and the law needs to be changed. That isn’t the same thing. I’m not an anarchist – the law is the law and I both acknowledge it’s existence and follow it (even to the point of studying how to read patents to a degree). I simply think that software is adequately protected by both copyright and trademark law, patent law just doesn’t make sense when applied to software (for a multitude of reasons I would rather not elaborate on here because I’m trying to keep my post brief).
Because I’m not terribly interested in a shortcut to cheat the market. Ideas are cheap, everyone has them, and in my experience they are almost worthless in isolation. Its the work that counts, not the idea, and the work is it’s own reward. if you are good at it, act ethically, and treat it as a craft instead of a means to and end, you can make a very comfortable living as a software developer.
I have nothing against making money, but that doesn’t mean I think the right way to win in the market is to deny others the opportunity to compete with me. Competition is good, even if you loose sometimes.
So yeah, stealing ideas is fine with me, just don’t steal my work. The point is that in the software world, the actual work is and always has been covered by copyrights, not patents. Patents don’t protect work, they have nothing to do with work – they are artificial constructs meant to block competition and protect capital investment. Its an archaic model when applied to software, because there really is little or no capital investment to protect…
It’s funny because I often find I get called a communist/socialist because of my stand on software patents… That’s incredibly ironic to me since what I want is practically the textbook definition of market capitalism
His social or economic status is irrelevant here, it doesn’t matter, he won’t get any preference, is not innovation.
Just be glad “using the word ‘innovation’ until it become meaningless” isn’t patented.
Since we are discussing if a carbon copy of the swipe kb is innovation, it is spected to read that word a lot, if you don’t like it why are you even here?
Edited 2014-07-05 19:36 UTC
Haha!
I’m not in favour of software patents, and I agree the way patents work (especially the very long monopoly period, low bar for invention and high cost of application) is a big problem.
However, I also think it’s dangerous to come to general conclusions from specific cases.
It looks like the conclusion here is that people in the US (which has software patents) are being denied access to useful software in contrast to people in other countries (where the patents don’t apply).
However, there are no doubt cases where patents have had economic benefits for the USA (it’s hard to cite examples, but Google’s PageRank might be one to look at) or which have allowed development to be funded that might not have otherwise.
My point is that neither of these specific cases proves the argument. I’d love to see some proper statistics about the benefits and drawbacks of patents in general and software patents in particular. What are the quantifiable consequences for spurring innovation in general. What are the overall impacts on lost revenue opportunity?
These numbers aren’t the only thing to consider of course. I love open source, and if patents are restricting access to good ideas then there are ethical dimensions which could override the economic/innovation considerations. To add to the complexity, one of the reasons why patents exist is to encourage inventors to make their ideas public (through the patent process which requires disclosure) rather than keep them as trade secrets (which might otherwise be lost to society if a company folds or the inventor dies).
As a SailfishOS user outside the US, I’m glad this software will be made available. But the issue of patents has far more dimensions and making utility judgements based on single cases doesn’t strike me as the correct approach.
I don’t want to dismiss Thom’s thoughtful comments and this is an interesting story!
How do you propose to do that? We do not know what sorts of inventions would’ve been done if there was no such hindrance on innovation and as such we have no way or form of making even educated guesses. Who knows, we might have nothing new or innovative, or we might already have fusion-power, telepathy and androids in our everyday lives. There is no sane way of answering your qestion.
I agree: it’s really hard to answer questions like this. But it’s not always impossible using good research methods. For example, the following paper from 2004 suggests there’s evidence that software patents are associated with lower R&D intensity:
Bessen, James, and Robert M. Hunt. “An empirical look at software patents.” Journal of Economics & Management Strategy 16, no. 1 (2007): 157-189. http://ffii.fr/IMG/pdf/swpat.pdf
But either way, my point is that it’s dangerous to form general conclusions from specific cases. Sadly it doesn’t follow that I’ve a solution for finding the actual truth!
In the US, patents are valid for 20 years, which IMHO is in the right ballpark (it’s copyrights that continue freaking forever).
The problem with software patents IMHO is your second point – they are granted for trivial “innovations” that are reasonably obvious and require little research and development effort to implement.
The cost of patent applications worries me less than the cost of defending against a bogus patent. We need a more efficient mechanism for weeding out bogus patents up front. No idea what that is.
But I’m fine with patenting true innovations that require large capital investments to develop – that’s the whole point of patents.
You make a really good point. Although you do have to do a patent search before a new patent is granted, the current process does seem to assume the check for validity occurs later in court, rather than at the time the patent is granted. I also don’t know the solution, but this definitely looks like something to be fixed.
My initial point about cost relates to this too. If you’re going to allow patents, you don’t want them to be the preserve of large organisations. Current costs for world-side patents can be prohibitive for individuals with good ideas.
Ah, right, patents are affordable primarily for large corporations when trying to protect R&D results worldwide. Fixing that for the individual innovator would be great, too. Good point.
To me, 20 years seems too long in computing: it’s long enough to make a whole branch of innovation completely irrelevant by the time the patent expires.
If it were, say, five years, it’d be long enough for the inventor to establish a lead and make money – and yet have to keep innovating to stay ahead.
What are your reasons for preferring 20 years?
I would say:
Patent accepted
-> normal development time (or proven in court it took longer)
-> normal lifespan of device it is used on (proof in court average users use it that long)
-> patent invalid after that.
That’s a really great question! If you read my earlier posts, I actually prefer 15 years, not 20 – but still longer than 5.
A primary reason for believing 5 years is too short is for the upstart entrepreneur. Once his or her patent is granted, it takes time to line up venture capital, design a product, get regulatory approval, and launch in the market place. If they only get a 5 year window, the patent will be almost expired by the time they launch, allowing large corporations to happily incorporate the innovation into their existing product line and drive the entrepreneur out.
It’s hard to monetize an invention, and I just believe that 5 years wouldn’t ensure enough time for someone with a great idea to recover expenses and build a market.
And this is one of my biggest gripes with the current system. Go read a software patent and try to translate it into English…
Software patents in particular are written in a very specific form, one which has come about through trial and error over the years by attorneys as a result of trial experience. They are almost gibberish to anyone but another lawyer, as their sole purpose is to hit upon certain key words and phrasing that has established usage in legal precedent while remaining as broad as possible so as to cast a wide net for infringement suits.
The lawyers writing patents don’t want anyone to understand them, it is a form of self preservation. The only way to determine if your software is really violating a patent is hire an attorney to read it for you…
How does this form of “disclosure” benefit anyone? The point was supposed to be that when you filled a patent you were in effect sharing knowledge for the benefit of society. Software patents seldom contain anything that can be construed as useful knowledge, and if no one but lawyers can read them, whats the point?
If you came up with the swipe keyboard concept originally and wanted to profit from it, and users found it more efficient as an input method, shouldn’t you be compensated? Or if you wanted to leverage the technology and only make it available on a specific platform in order to further your interest in that platform, you should not be able to maintain your competitive advantage for at least the length of the patent? If it wasn’t for patents, many new things would not get developed because the motivation to profit from them would be eliminated. Any programmer can duplicate a functionality once it’s established how it should work. Patents actually push people to develop new technologies and methods that are better or more efficient than the current ways of doing things. Not everyone wants to release their hard work as open source. I imagine that open source software may be missing functionality unless some patent involvement is relaxed because of patents, and that infuriates open source supporters. Which is why people try to work around the patent systems by releasing software in particular geographic areas and not others. Taking patents away destroys motivation for developing new technologies. Besides I thought people osnews really want hardware keyboards back d"Y~S
Edited 2014-07-04 17:37 UTC
Yes, it’s called selling your app for $X to recoup your costs. No one ever said you shouldn’t be compensated for your specific piece of software.
And the problem with that is … ? You copyright your specific source code and make sure that it’s not being used by anyone else.
But, you should not be able to prevent others from doing similar things using different source code, methods, and technologies, simply because you patented an idea. Patents are supposed to cover implementations, not generic ideas.
Hells yes!
But if another programmer quickly copied your concept with another implementation, you might not have time to sell your app… the guy who copied and stole your idea could undercut you using your original idea. How is that fair? It’s not especially when the infringer is a larger, richer entity than yours might be!
It’s not the code that you are protecting, its the output concept that the code implements. A patent is backed by granted claims, no matter what the code is. If someone’s secondary implementation infringes on a claim, then that is basically infringement…. stealing of another person’s original idea.
Wrong. Patents cover ideas backed by claims… and claims outline concepts. Implementation has nothing to do with it. You could file a software patent and even without writing a program, if the patent was granted, you own the inventions claims… the idea described in the claims. You don’t even have to write the program to own the concept if the patent office believes that the concept is unique and implementable. This is true with any patent and not just a software patent. You don’t have to build or modify a car to patent an intermittent window wiper concept for example.
Edited 2014-07-05 03:21 UTC
…and that’s perfectly fine from a patent standpoint. He implemented the same idea in a different, and maybe even better, way than you did.
Again, ideas are not protected by patents.
“A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for detailed public disclosure of an invention. An invention is a solution to a specific technological problem and is a product or a process”
So what is patentable is a specific solution (or implementation) for solving a problem.
Edited 2014-07-05 04:00 UTC
You are mis-reading court judgments concerning patents. “Abstract ideas” are not the same as ideas. Ideas that are outlined in claims make up a patent. You do have to patent a solution, but a swype keyboard actually is a solution concept. Ideas for the implementation are outlined in a patents claims.
Here is the official page of what the US patent office says can be patented:
http://www.uspto.gov/inventors/patents.jsp#heading-3
Just re-implementing the same solution with unique code does not protect a programmer from infringement.
Edited 2014-07-05 04:15 UTC
No he is not.
I don’t think he ever stated they were. But neither is eligible for patent.
No. In the case of software patents what is outlined is a method of producing a desired result. That is why they are called method patents. In this case the idea is essentially “using continuous finger swipes to generate touchscreen keyboard input”, the patent outlines a set of claims on a particular method of doing that.
The concept of using finger swipes to generate touchscreen keyboard input is NOT protected by the patent, a particular method of doing so is. That is why the title of the patent is “A System and method for continuous stroke word-based text input”.
It has nothing to do with code. Patents do not cover “code” and almost never reference any. The question is are the claims of the patent violated. That’s it.. All this talk of “stealing ideas” is just ignorance of the law. Patents don’t cover ideas and never have.
In the particular case being discussed, it almost certainly violates the patent. But it isn’t because the “idea” of using swipe based input is protected, it is because the method of doing so was copied (i.e. he created a functional clone).
Were someone to create a sufficiently different method of using swipes for input, one that does not work in the same manner outlined in Swype’s patent, they would not be in violation of the patent…
No, I’m reading the definition of “patents”.
No, the methods and processes used to achieve a certain outcome is what makes up the patent.
Edited 2014-07-05 05:32 UTC
Dano,
That’s the thing though, if an idea can be implemented so quickly/cheaply, then it’s probably not worth the cost/benefit tradeoff in granting an exclusive patent monopoly on in the first place. Of course I understand why the patent holder may *want* an exclusive patent. However issuing exclusive government monopolies is only a means to an end, not a goal in itself. The real reason for the patent system is supposed to be to maximize public utility through public disclosure and to give an incentive to bring products to market that would otherwise not be possible under the free market.
Now, the public disclosure of information in patents is such a terrible joke that I presume that nobody is actually going to defend that justification. So that leaves patents as an incentive. I concede it’s hard to get factual data connecting patents to the incentive for product development. Never the less, the majority of software developers avoid the patent system as much as possible, so at least for these developers, the patent system is *clearly* not necessary to provide motivation. Historically software was still profitable prior to the proliferation of software patents in the 90s, again suggesting that software patents are not necessary as motivation.
Would swype have produced a virtual keyboard without software patents? Although I couldn’t prove it, I think the answer is yes. Even without patents, first-comer advantages and free market incentives still apply. If not for swype, then it’s very likely that someone else would have. A business still needs to put products & features on the market in order to sell them and make money.
Even without legal monopolies, isn’t a software business still going to be better off implementing features to sell to customers than not implementing them at all? New features are the reason why customers buy software upgrades. If a software vender were to stop adding features, their reoccurring sales revenue would plummet to zero.
In short, patents are motivating software developers to do what they already need to do anyways to stay in business. So why have them at all? It’s easy to point to the high costs of the patent system, but hard to point out tangible social benefits it provides for software. IMHO this means that we should get rid of it.
Edited 2014-07-05 05:13 UTC
In the U.S., there is no patent type called a “method patent”. 90% of patents are utility patents. The ideas are the claims.
Claim 6 of the patent: The method of claim 1 wherein said entry of at least one letter of a word on a virtual keypad of said touch-screen device is done by swiping a key of said keypad.
That is not the law though. If you own the claim, no matter of how difficult it is to implement a solution has no bearing on the validity of the claim.
Eliminating patents would actually slow development of new technologies because there would be less incentive to come up with new solutions since as soon as you develop something anyone else could use it without reimbursement. How much development would continue without a guarantee that a good solution is worth something?
You seemed to have confused Alfman’s post with mine, but whatever…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_(patent)
It is a commonly used description for utility patents that describe methods or processes, and almost all software patents masquerade as such since they would be completely ineligible for any other form of patent protection since they are fundamentally abstract in nature and have no physical embodiment.
So what is your point? Please go read a law book before commenting further…
Claim 6 is a dependent claim (i.e. it references Claim 1). You cannot be shown to violate that claim unless you ALSO violate Claim 1 – the two claims are interpreted legally as a single claim.
In fact the patent has 51 claims, all of which but one (Claim 1) is a dependent claim (not uncommon at all). Point being that in order to be found infringing on this patent you MUST violate claim 1 – that is the only claim that really matters. Dependent claims serve as fallbacks in the event that prior art is found on the independent claim, i.e. they are defensive measures and really don’t matter in and of themselves.
Now go read claim 1, particularly this part:
“identifying one or more words stored in the database wherein the first letter of the identified word is associated with a key that is at or near the recorded initial contact location, and wherein the last letter of the identified word is associated with a key that is at or near the recorded final contact location”
Now go make a swipe based keyboard that does not work exactly like this. Congratulations, you just completely dodged their patent.
How does this thing protect an idea again???
Edited 2014-07-05 07:00 UTC
True,
But the problem is that there are other patent holders for even more methods of implementing a Swype style keyboard. You have to consider these patents also. I would be very difficult to implement something without infringement that actually works.
https://www.google.com/patents/US8667414?dq=swype+keyboard&hl=en&sa=…
I wasn’t making an argument for making yet another swipe keyboard, I was simply trying to illustrate that patents do NOT protect ideas (abstract or otherwise), they protect inventions, and they are actually rather narrow in scope.
Regardless, your comment is kind of echoing the sentiment of most software developers. How the hell are they supposed to know about all of these patents? It IS very difficult to write software without infringing someone or another’s patents – more often then not without you even trying or even knowing their patent (or their software) exists…
The only way to really cover yourself is to do patent clearances, which cost upwards of $50,000 to have done properly. Doing some googling simply doesn’t even come close to covering it.
The only other option is to just file a patent yourself, hoping the USPTO does their job right – and that costs at least $3000 or so and takes at least 2 years to get done. If all you care about is not infringing someone else’s patent it is nothing but a giant hassle.
Most developers don’t care about this crap – they just want to get on with solving people’s problems. They consider their software the product of their work – they want to be compensated but they don’t have any interest is keeping other people from doing their own thing. Why should I care if you rip off my idea? If you don’t do it better no one will care, and if you do than maybe I need to do some more work… If you do quality work, big corporations don’t want to rip off your ideas, they want you.
The only thing patents do for most developers is discourage them because they all know someone that got burned by some company no one has ever heard of with a shady lawyer waving a patent on a product that never even made it to market…
The threat of lawsuits is extremely detrimental to innovation, much more so than the threat of competition.
Congrats, one of the best posts about the subject I have ever read.
My take on this is the following (which, of course, may very well be skewed): the wizard apprentices many times defend software patents strongly, perhaps dreaming their powerful and innovative brains will open a magical box full of unseeing wonderfulness to reap huge rewards to them, the seasoned developer though, already scorched by the inevitable friction of wizardly activities and down-to-earth experience will ask for reform or abolishment.
There is no way to avoid the step-on-toe on current iteration form for any non-trivial project, the amassment alone of claims is huge enough to guarantee it and with time it only gets worst. And be careful, the smaller ones may very well get caught on copyright nets.
Concepts and ideas are not patentable, only the specific implementation is.
This I believe that this is the patent we are talking about:
https://www.google.com/patents/US20140015753?dq=swype+keyboard&hl=en…
You can read the claims for yourself and see if another implementation violates any of these claims.
Edited 2014-07-05 04:23 UTC
http://www.therem.org/microsoft-and-cannon-cross-patent-license-agr…
http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2010/06/22/nuance-acquires-shapewrite…
Can someone explain the apparent contradiction that if the USA patent system discourages innovation, why silicon valley and other ho-tech hot spots are so common and successful?
bfr99,
What apparent contradiction? It seems like you are using an assumption that the software industry is successful because of the patent system. Do you have any data showing a correlation, or better yet causation?
If they are not successful due to patents the why do software and technology companies file so many? The are successful in part because property rights are enforced in the U.S. That is way companies are always complaining about knockoffs and sing constantly for infringement. They can research and develop shit and get paid for doing it. I appreciate these long emails explaining peoples views, and they are interesting with some valid arguments, but the main issue you want to ask is should people be allowed to develop methods and get paid for doing so with software just like hardware? If the answer is no, I believe that it will hurt innovation by not giving companies incentive to crank out thousands of new patents with good solutions each year. Implementation of the methods has nothing to do with anything. Programmers know that there is more than one way to implement the same method in code, and just because a particular developer needs to implement something for their customer, it does not give them the right to other peoples property. And if you think that patents are the only reasons why companies sure each other, you have another thing coming. I’d you want to reduce the problems with law suits in the US, change the rules so that the loser pays the damages just like in other countries. GE was started with a fake lawsuit against Westinghouse just to bankrupt them with absolutely false claims. The scumbag lawyers rule in the US.
Edited 2014-07-06 15:28 UTC
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Software patents are recent. ‘Silicon Valley’ originated about 30-40 years before software patents became a thing.
Fast forward 10-20 years, and most innovation won’t come from Silicon Valley. It’ll come from India and China – exactly because there are less restrictions. The freedom to create leads to progress; the lack of freedom to create leads to stagnation. History has shown this time and time again. The development of the steam engine fell flat on its ass for the entire duration of Watts’ patents, and the American aeroplane industry suffered greatly under patents wars, to the point that the US government had to step in and force cross-licensing (because WWI). By that time, American planes were utter crap and not fit for combat.
If the current software patent trends continue, Silicon Valley will find itself in a similar situation.
Edited 2014-07-06 15:33 UTC
Dano,
Isn’t the answer obvious? The legal climate *caused* by the patent system makes it necessary to amass a patent portfolio just to defend oneself. Unfortunately this costs developers a great deal of money and time, which is very hard to recoup unless you begin to use the patent portfolio offensively.
It’s logically similar to asserting that mafia rackets are not a scam, because otherwise businesses wouldn’t have opted to paid them for protection. And in an ironic kind of way paying for protection can be in a business’s best interest when the mafia is in control, but it only serves to reinforce the mafia’s power.
Most software developers would rather software patents did not exist, but given how we have no control over the patent system, we’re forced to deal with this reality. And there’s no denying the patent system encourages rampant patent filing.
Copyright still protects their work. They can still “develop shit and get paid for doing it” by licensing their software. I’m sure your thinking that patents are even better because a patent holder would have a legal monopoly and be able to prevent others from using the same algorithms, however you’d be completely overlooking the other half of this picture that I’ve brought up repeatedly and you haven’t responded to.
Also, it seems many pro-patent posters don’t appreciate how much overhead the patent system imposes on developers.
For starters, just to get a patent filed, there’s alot of financial costs:
http://smallbusiness.costhelper.com/patent.html
http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2011/01/28/the-cost-of-obtaining-patent/i…
Now you have to wait a few years to get a patent possibly approved. And then having a patent doesn’t even mean the patent will be up-holdable in court. In order to monetize the patent and recoup it’s own expenses (on top of your original development expenses), you now have to go out and find other developers who may be infringing, and pay lawyers to threaten them into paying royalties and/or ceasing their own products. If it goes to trial, and the defendant has good lawyers, then your patent may become invalid in the process because it turns out your invention was not novel, which is fairly likely given how much software is being developed around the world unbeknownst to you. Even if your patent is valid, you’ll probably end up spending more money on very expensive corporate attorneys than it than it took you or the infringers to develop an implementation. This is where the patent system fails very badly, when all parties are considered, it ends up leaching far more resources from R&D rather than contributing to it.
I am not sure what exactly in your comments I am supposed to be responding to. What you are arguing could be applied to the patent system in general and not just software. Defending copywrites only prevents developers from lifting code not protecting methods. And as for innovation coming out of China and India, you would think countries with many more engineers and programmers would be way ahead of the US on the innovation front, but they are not. Making a claim and defending it is part of the patent process. Protecting your own entity from infringement and making licensing deals with other entities is part of doing business. There are many companies in the US that exist just because of a concept in one particular patent or another that would not exist if larger companies just took their ideas and implemented them for themselves.
Edited 2014-07-06 17:43 UTC
Dano,
I think each industry is different, patents might make sense for some but not others. As a matter of principal, I don’t want to tell professionals from other industries what is best for them, maybe patents make sense for them, maybe they don’t. If the consensus is that patents will cost more than the benefit they bring, then imposing it anyways is just going to harm the industry as a whole.
Software developers are ok with this. Most of the work goes into writing the code, which is copy protected. Contrast this to other industries with lab fees, crash tests, public drug trials, etc, where there’s a very different reason for wanting patent protection.
Be careful what you say here. Those foreign economies are growing faster than the US. US tech companies have been increasingly reliant on foreign outsourcing. Just as nothing is left of US manufacturing, we could easily loose our high-tech industry to the same fate.
http://business.time.com/2014/01/08/chinas-economy-could-be-bigger-…
http://economyincrisis.org/content/outsourcing_computer_technology
They’ll adapt by solving the needs of businesses and people who will pay to have them solved. That’s the beauty of the free market. This may sound harsh, but if they don’t provide something that anyone is willing to pay for, then perhaps they’re not as innovative as they thought they were.
Edited 2014-07-06 19:35 UTC
My last comment on this topic: You can’t have free markets without enforcing property rights. Thanks for your discussion. Also be careful not to speak for all software developers as I am one myself.
Edited 2014-07-06 20:51 UTC
Dano,
Like I said, I’m not against reasonable protection like copyrights. Software patents are not very reasonable because they force us to make money by bringing other developers to court, behaving in many ways as a leech.
I do not deny the patent system creates new business models that are not possible otherwise: patent trolls make 100% of their income with patent lawsuits. Eliminating software patents would be the death of them. IP lawyers obviously stand to loose alot as well. However most developers making most of their income with development contracts & selling copies of software will still be fine.
Of course, but I’m curious, what ratio of your income personally comes from enforcing patents? Mine is zero percent, and I suspect it’s the same for most developers as well.
Edited 2014-07-06 22:02 UTC
Alfman,
Software developers are indeed OK with this, but copyright still doesn’t serve anyone’s interests because it’s the wrong tool. If you don’t mind, I’d like to continue a conversation which we started in another thread but which closed to comments before I could respond.
Copyright represents a bargain: it protects the expression of an idea in exchange for the idea itself being put out there for anyone else to take and run with. Let’s say I invent a new literary genre – Japanese Buddhist steampunk detective fiction to pick a slightly absurd example. I publish the novel, and get copyright (and, thus, commercial exclusivity) for it. In exchange, a whole lot of other stuff – the idea, the genre, the technique, etc. – are put out there for others to use.
This bargain simply doesn’t work with software copyright: because my source code is never published, I don’t actually make my technique available for others to use and learn from. The contribution to public culture is a fundamental part of the justification for copyright, but you don’t really get it in relation to computer software. The result is that the rightsholder gets copyright, and because source is closed and software licenses are extremely restrictive, the rightsholder also gets a type of protection not too dissimilar in its effects from trade secrets. In just about every other industry, people have to choose – they can’t get both trade secrets and some other form of IP. Except in software, where they get a close equivalent of both.
This would be bad enough in any industry, but it is particularly disastrous in computer software because advance in programming is quite deeply cumulative. You said elsewhere that programmers tend to converge on the same solutions to problems, but this is a relatively new phenomenon. Contrast it with early developments in software – for instance text editors. It is striking just how different the solutions to the same problem were back then – vi, emacs, pico and sam were all responding to pretty much the same problem, but they did so in very different ways. The contrast with modern office suites could not be more stark. I would argue that this is because the fundamental engine of progress back then was being able to see how other programmers did things – an engine that modern IP law basically shuts out.
Patents are even worse. Back in 1994, Columbia Law School held a fascinating symposium on computer software and IP law, which should’ve gotten more traction than it actually got. Some of the participants there predicted that if we stuck with software copyright, the result would be that companies would find some way of dragging software into the patent dragnet with very unhappy results. They were of course right. The essential problem is that people on the management side see software as a product – as, in essence, a way of solving a problem and meeting a need; and the thing they want protected is that solution. They can afford the best lawyers – far better ones that the patent office and ordinary joes can – so if copyright doesn’t give them what they want, they will find a way of stretching patent law to fit. As they indeed proceeded to do.
Back then, my thinking was that we needed to have a clear prohibition against patenting any form of microprocessor instruction, and instead create a sui generis software ‘method’ right, which granted a protection for a very limited period to the particular method of solving a particular problem a piece of software embodied. The quid pro quo would be a filing which disclosed the full technical details of the method (as you have to do with patents). The functionality would not be protected – only the method used to achieve that functionality (much as was done with semiconductors). But that boat has sailed. We’re stuck in the worst of all possible worlds (again, as some participants at the Columbia symposium predicted twenty years ago), where computer software – uniquely – gets copyright, patents AND something akin to trade secret protection.
TL;DR: Software copyright is a bad idea; software patents are one of the few things that manage to be worse; we’ve managed to end up with both.
oskeladden,
Well this is very insightful, and you are right it is a sort of difference. While technically an author can apply copyright to BOTH the source code and the binaries, many developers choose not to use copyright for source code at all and simply do not release the source.
Interestingly the topic of source code access came up under the threads of another recent article too.
http://www.osnews.com/thread?591781
In your opinion, would a software developer who creates all his own software have to worry about accidentally infringing?
The sui generis protection of chipsets that you described seemed reasonable because it’s very unlikely for two engineers to develop the exact same board by coincidence. But I ask myself to what extent this property carries over to software especially given the number of software developers is many magnitudes greater than board designers.
I’m concerned with overhead & scalability. The work needed to uphold the patent system grows exponentially with the number of developers contributing work to be cross checked. The patent system is still relatively tiny compared to the number of developers we have, so it would be even worse if participation was compulsory and everyone needed to register. If we could eliminate the laborious and error prone uniqueness constraints, then it might be scalable, but is that useful?
An idea would be to try and “normalize” submissions in such a way that each unique algorithm automatically gets a unique identity. This would help with the uniqueness problem, but then I’d worry that we’d get someone who deliberately iterates through the unclaimed algorithms in rapid succession to claim ownership.
Yea, this seems to be the case. I’m glad we’re discussing alternatives, but like you say, it’s hard to change course at this point.
I agree with much of what you say in your excellent comment, Alfman, but the problems run much deeper than this. The trouble is that engineers and the chap in the street tend to think in terms of inventions, and believe that intellectual property should protect inventions. The fellows in the C-Suite, joined eagerly by politicians and many bureaucrats, in contrast, think in terms of innovation, and believe that IP law should protect innovation – by which they mean anything that creates a better way of doing something and thereby gives the ‘innovator’ a competitive edge. These two world views are fundamentally incommensurable. What we’re seeing not just in relation to the sorry saga of software patents but in a whole range of other areas is the creeping triumph of innovation over invention.
So I only read about half of the comments, so I apologize if anyone has made these same remarks.
First off, the ‘it’s not innovation!’ point. Who’s to say it isn’t? There are several ‘engines’ out there for swiping text. By this, I mean how does it pick a word? Does it support grammar? Does it have a database of words the user tends to use a lot? Can you add new words?
All of these, being implemented by a single guy, and creating a predictive text engine IS innovative! Just because the idea was already there, doesn’t mean he didn’t create a better implementation of it (or worse. Several of the different keyboards I use on my android phone, including Swype, aren’t even as good as the Swype version on my N9. It just seemed to choose words more accurately.)
Second point. Idea != Invention. I’ve had tons of awesome ideas, but have never invested the time and money into making them actual ‘products.’
Let’s say I have this Idea of Patents. That’s right, I have this great Idea! So I’m going to Patent it. I’m going to write a book about how to create patents (so I’ve invented it right?) So that means from now on, anyone who wants to patent their idea.. has to pay me royalties.
Wow, now all I need to do is wait for the money to come rollin’ in!
It would be innovative if it brought a new twist to the table. The algorithm he used to predict the text might be innovative, but hen might just be a re-use of another pattern matching algorithm – without looking it’s hard to say. It’s certainly impressive, but as it takes something that already existed and creates a version that mimics the original* – well, it’s just the same as a knock off Rolex. It might be as good, it might not. It’s not doing anything new or different, and the internals could easily be a lot worse.
* I know some have debated what “original” means, but as he was basing it on the Swype style keyboard, that would be my definition. Prior art is irrelevant unless he researched the prior art and documented the fact.
In other news – Jolla confirmed that a new device is coming next year:
http://www.jollausers.com/2014/06/big-news-for-jolla-owners-fans-ne…