Hello HN Community,
I am a dogged Hacker News browser, a startup founder, and a contributing editorialist at a small Chicago-based tech news blog, Tech.li. I've noticed, over the past two to three months, that intellectual property matters (particularly software patents) are a "trending topic", if you will, on HN.
If I were more adroit with code, I'd us the HN Search API to get all the instances of the words "patent" "software patent" "patent troll" and "intellectual property", and come up with a nice graph showing, as of late, a precipitous increase in these words' occurrence on HN. I invite someone to undertake this little project. (I can do all of the data, I just need the data.)
But, I'm not here to suggest an interesting data visualization project.
I come to the community asking a couple of very simple questions.
First, what precipitated all of this attention to software patents, and intellectual property in general? Granted, I've been living under a rock for the past few months (startups tend to do that, even for people on the "business side"). It could be that I missed the big event which prompted this debate.
My second question has two parts: Why is the US government so recalcitrant when it comes to changing an obviously broken intellectual property system, especially as it relates to science and technology? And, other than writing vitriolic blog posts and inveighing against the USPTO and so-called "patent trolls", is there anything else we–innovators, technologists, hackers, artists, and what have you–can do to change things?
A third question goes out to those in the HN community who hold patents, whether hardware, software, or (as is often the case) vaporware. Why did you patent your thing? Was it on the suggestion of a lawyer, your investors? Did you file a patent application without any advice, just because you wanted to? I'm curious.
Anyways, just a few questions. It'll be interesting to see how the discussion unfolds.
Best,
Jason
On a meta level, the patent issue is so interesting because it creates such internal contradictions for the libertarians who comprise a significant fraction of vocal HN'ers. On the one hand, patents as the something belonging to the creative individual to dispose of as they see fit certainly resonates with the general philosophy of many people inclined toward libertarianism. However, the mechanism for granting patents is solely in the purvue of the government and must therefore be assumed to be part of a flawed process which harms business according to standard dogma.
In many ways the current drama unfolds according to one of the subtexts of HN - Silicon Valley v the Rest of the World. It's those plucky Silicon Valley startups like Google and Apple [sarcasm] who are suffering at the foreign hands of Nortel and Microsoft, e.g. nobody talks about Intel's and HP's patent portfolios.