
Victory Lap for Ask Patents - jaydles
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2013/07/22.html
======
jasonkester
Pure Awesome. Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to _existing_
software patents. There are plenty (~40k/year according to the article) of
bad, obvious nonsense patents already out there. It'd be nice if there were a
simple process to appeal and invalidate them with similar demonstrations of
prior art and obviousness.

I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some Wikipedia-level-OCD focused on
this site to stop the roughly 100% of bad applications for new software
patents dead in their tracks. Imagine a 2014 where zero new software patents
were issued.

EDIT: Incidentally, patentlyobvious.com is just a parked domain at the moment.
It seems like the obvious choice for a place to host a site like this.

~~~
silvestrov
One thing missing in the patent system is that the patent seeker should pay a
"fee" of $1000 if it is patentlyobvious that prior art exists.

That would enable "Amazon Mechanical Turk"-style killing of most patents with
prior art.

~~~
larrys
Would hurt the proverbial small inventor more than it would hurt others.
Almost like a regressive tax.

~~~
mrgoldenbrown
I think the problem is that the proverbial small inventor is extremely rare,
and if they are indeed small enough for us to take pity on them, then a patent
isn't enough to protect them anyway.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I don't think the proverbial small inventor is so rare, but that as you say, a
patent is practically useless for them.

------
zmmmmm
There was an extremely depressing AMA on reddit a while ago where a patent
examiner explained that what all of us consider "prior art" will be completely
ignored by a patent examiner:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ww982/iama_patent_e...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ww982/iama_patent_examiner_i_want_to_answer_questions/)

The bar for prior art is very high - it has to be _published_ in a recognized
medium. Most specifically, unless it has a date that the patent officer can
verify and cite (and a self stated date on a web site is not "verifiable"), it
can't be considered because it is not possible say for sure it came earlier
than the patent filing. So - some random thing on the internet - not
published. Even an actual real product made and sold by a company - not
published. Even standard industry practise, established for years, if not
written up and "published" somewhere, may not qualify as prior art. In one
comment he says:

"You may be right, that is how everyone does it. But if there is no documented
prior art for us to search, we are out of luck rejecting it."

This explains why so many things that software developers routinely do end up
in patents. Some of them are just _so_ obvious that publishing it in a formal
way is redundant. Yet that is the same bar that the USPTO is applying for
rejecting patents. So the patent system itself is enriching the pool of
obvious patents that get through.

Anyone using this Ask Patents site really needs to sit through a mini-tutorial
explaining these things before they start, or they will waste more time than
they save.

~~~
mr_luc
Wait.

What about the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine?[0]

And how can making a physical product not count -- surely any physical product
sold in the United States has some kind of qualifying documentation associated
with it which counts as publishing, even a manual?

[0] [http://archive.org/web/web.php](http://archive.org/web/web.php)

~~~
axman6
The wayback bachine is used routinely, at least in Australia, to show that a
web document was publicly available before the priority date of an
application. One problem is that if the document happens to be from the domain
of the applicant (more common than you'd think, some applicants are dumb like
that), they can have it removed by archive.org. This is why examiners will
make copies of the page from a date before the priority date when using
documents accessed through the wayback machine.

------
rayiner
> “Sometimes you have a picture that you want to scale to different
> resolutions. When this happens, you might want to have multiple versions of
> the image available at different resolutions, so you can pick the one that’s
> closest and scale that.”

This is basically mip-mapping, and was described in a 1983 paper:
[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=801126](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=801126).

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

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

~~~
ajiang
The patent trolls are already on it, patenting crowd-sourcing as a method of
patent defense. This will inevitably result in the shut down of Ask Patents in
a stunning fit of irony.

~~~
adambard
If only some sort of prior art could be found...

------
creamyhorror
Good lord, it's actually working! Full steam ahead, boys!

If only we'd done this a decade or two ago. How about some reevaluation of
granted patents?

edit: The original title, _" Joel Spolsky, patent killer"_, was better :/

------
skore
> Since patent examiners rely so much on keyword searches, when you submit
> your application, if you can change some of the keywords in your patent to
> be different than the words used everywhere else, you might get your patent
> through even when there’s blatant prior art, because by using weird, made-up
> words for things, you've made that prior art harder to find.

Wouldn't it also make sense to build up, maybe at the same time, a sort of
"counter-thesaurus"?

As in: If you find prior art where the thesaurus method has been used to
obscure terms in the patent, enter those as an example into a database. When
another patent is looked up, individual terms that show up in the database
have a "there are alternative terms for this" marker applied to them.

This might also make it a lot easier to make automatic search for prior art
feasible again.

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

------
shabble
Does anyone know whether participating in a public forum like this could used
in future proceedings against the user or their employer as evidence of
'willful infringement'?

I vaguely recall something about large corporations discouraging engineers
from reading potentially relevant patents due to the possibility of greater
damages if they were later proved infringing, since demonstrating that they
_didn 't_ take any inspiration or details from the patent is quite difficult.

Not wanting to spread FUD or anything, but it strikes me as a potential
exploit for patent trolls to discourage participation if it's a significant
risk.

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

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

I am impressed by Spolsky's positive attitude to do something about the
problem, I bid ask patents continued good fortune!

------
DannyBee
So, this _sounds_ great and all, but I don't see any proof that it was ask
patents that caused the examiner to find this, rather than the examiner's
standard search?

In fact, the search history, on PAIR (look for 4-11-2013 SRFW Search
information including classification, databases and other search related
notes) does not say ask patents was used, nor does the search strategy
(document code SRNT).

It could be the USPTO has not gotten around to noting this yet, but the only
entry I see that could be related is the NPL entry, which of course, has no
image available (god i love PAIR), and does not say it came from outside the
search.

Don't get me wrong, I think askpatents is great, but i'm skeptical considering
how examiners actually work.

~~~
jaydles
The USPTO explicitly asked us to set up this site to help get the public
involved in getting prior art to the examiners. (Press
release:[http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2012/12-60.jsp.](http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2012/12-60.jsp.))
So, while it's entirely possible that the examiner might have eventually found
this without us, which is far from certain, it seems reasonable to assume that
they saw it on the site. Which means that even if you assume they _would_ have
found it without help - again, questionable, given the number of weak patents
out there - at a minimum, we probably saved them a lot of time, which frees up
more resources to look for prior art on the next crappy patent. And that
reduces the odds that the clock runs out without them finding any, which leads
to a lousy issuance.

~~~
DannyBee
I'm aware the USPTO asked you to set up ask patents. The USPTO has a number of
pilot programs, and i'm involved in some.

My only question is whether AskPatents was how it got to the USPTO.

I don't see why it's reasonable to assume that they saw it on the site
considering most examiners still don't do that sort of thing. Most of them
search the USPTO approved databases, internally, and go about their way. This
is in fact, what the search strategy/et al says happened. Given that, i think
the burden falls on you to show some likelihood here.

For example, do you have anything to say that any significant percentage of
examiners (IE > 10%) use askpatents on a regular basis? I would be pleasantly
shocked if you did.

The rest is not the argument i am making, the only argument I am making is:
"Do you have _any_ evidence that your site is the reason the USPTO found
this?"

From what I can tell, your answer is "no".

If you do, great!

No offense meant, of course, my problem is if you declare victory when you
were not actually involved, this will actually make things worse - people will
think they are helping solve the issue, yet, if the PTO actually _isn 't_
using your data heavily, they aren't.

Again, don't get me wrong, i think askpatents is a great idea, and i'd hope
and love to find out it's actually being used heavily by the PTO. I can't find
any stats on that, and given the history of prior pilot programs/etc, i'm very
skeptical.

~~~
jaydles
No offense taken, and thanks for the overall support!

As to:

> "Do you have any evidence that your site is the reason the USPTO found
> this?"

Well, the office has told us directly that examiners are reviewing the site.
So, when they then reject an application, based primarily on art posted on the
site, that was asked for and posted there just prior to the actual review, it
makes me highly optimistic that it's not all a coincidence, although I suppose
that's theoretically possible.

~~~
nileshtrivedi
You could have just said, "no" and it would have been okay. We would have
understood. We're on the same side after all. :)

------
maximilianburke
I like the concept of Ask Patents but at the same time I wonder if it is
possible that participation on Ask Patents could be leveraged by malicious
litigants to seek treble damages.

For example, if the company I work for is being sued by a troll for
infringement, could the troll see that employees have been participating on
Ask Patents and therefore a reasonable assumption could be made that they're
reading/reviewing/participating in discussions on patents, and therefore they
knowingly are infringing? Would this something that either I or my employer
should be worried about?

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

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

------
Stratoscope
This is an awesome project. I've signed up and will see what I can do to help
shoot down patents!

There is one true and important point in the article that isn't supported by
the example given:

> This patent was, typically, obfuscated, and it used terms like “pixel
> density” for something that every other programmer in the world would call
> “resolution,” either accidentally (because Microsoft’s lawyers were not
> programmers), or, more likely, because the obfuscation makes it that much
> harder to search.

The patent uses "pixel density" to refer to the physical size of the pixels on
a display. This is a fairly common term, with over five million results in a
Google search. I've used the same phrase myself for over 10 years with the
same meaning.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_density](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_density)

"Pixels per centimeter (ppcm), Pixels per inch (PPI) or pixel density is a
measurement of the resolution of devices in various contexts: typically
computer displays, image scanners, and digital camera image sensors."

Of course here we can see where the terms get a bit confusing: "...pixel
density is a measurement of the resolution..."

But display resolution these days usually refers to the _number_ of pixels,
not their physical size:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution)

"The display resolution of a digital television, computer monitor or display
device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be
displayed."

Advertisements and spec sheets almost always use "resolution" this way, for
example the MacBook Pro specs on Apple's site:

"Supported resolutions: 1440 by 900 (native), 1280 by 800, 1152 by 720, ..."

Forgive me if this seems like nitpicking, and I completely agree with Joel's
point here: patents often do use unusual terminology to obfuscate what they're
talking about.

This just isn't a case of that. The patent is using the correct term, and it
even does a very good job of explaining what it means:

> A particular characteristic of display components that may affect
> presentations rendered thereupon is the pixel density of the display
> component, such as a pixels-per-centimeter measurement. It may be
> appreciated that such characteristics may be independent of the size of the
> display component (e.g., two display components of the same size may present
> different pixel densities; conversely, two display components of different
> sizes may present the same pixel density) and/or the pixel dimensions of the
> display component (e.g., two display components displaying a presentation
> with a particular pixel dimensions may do so with different physical sizes).

~~~
Stratoscope
Following up on one comment I made:

> There is one true and important point in the article that isn't supported by
> the example given

I can't actually vouch for the "true and important" part. I must confess I put
that in there to try to be nicer about what I was saying. :-) And it certainly
seemed plausible enough that patents would be deliberately written in
obfuscated language, I just can't say it's true or untrue from my own
knowledge. I know pixels better than patents.

There's a great comment here that sheds some light on this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6085888](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6085888)

In particular, there are reasons for some of the language that seems
obfuscated. Read the comment for details and a lot of insight into patents.

Another interesting comment, with a link to a patent examiner's AMA:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087057](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087057)

(Of course there are interesting comments all up and down this thread!)

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

How do I do so?

~~~
spolsky
Ask yourself, then answer your own question.

~~~
cruise02
I think he means he wants to submit prior art directly to the patent examiner.
Is there a way to be sure they'll see it?

~~~
spolsky
Oh. Yes. You can always submit it directly to the USPTO. See
[http://meta.patents.stackexchange.com/questions/105/i-want-t...](http://meta.patents.stackexchange.com/questions/105/i-want-
to-make-a-difference-how-can-i-submit-prior-art-to-the-patent-office) for
details

------
ISL
Trouble is, what killed the patent was prior disclosure from the researchers.

The same thing has happened to friends of mine; an undergraduate's summer
research presentation may have betrayed patentable inventions. An effect of
the 1-year prior art rule is to force researchers to keep mum about what
they're doing and to generate greater numbers of incremental patents.

If you're interested in the free flow of information, using a researcher's own
publications to kill patents may not help the cause.

Prior art from other work in the past? Bring it on!

~~~
seldo
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "prior disclosure" here. They filed
a patent application: those are _supposed_ to be public. The prior art Joel
used was the documentation of the Win32 API from 5 years previously (and I'm
pretty sure we've been using variable-resolution apps since earlier than 2008,
and not just in Windows -- this was just an example). Could you clarify what
the problem is?

~~~
willyt
App icons in OS X are interpolated between about 4 different sized images. I
remember reading about this in the developer docs back in about 2002. I'd be
surprised if Apple don't have pretty much the same patent on this already but
registered 10 years earlier :-)

~~~
dmdeller
Mac OS has done this since much earlier. The classic Mac OS needed at least
two different representations of the same icon, one for the desktop (32x32)
and one for the application switcher (16x16). The application switcher,
initially called MultiFinder, was introduced in 1987[1]. If memory serves, the
various sizes of an icon were stored together in the ICNS resource of the app
binary's resource fork. There was a developer tool provided by Apple called
ResEdit which allowed you to view or change the icons of any application, in a
nice GUI editor (of course).

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multifinder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multifinder)

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

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
At 40,000 software patents per year, it would require 110 posted patents per
day to actually stop them, or a significant fraction of that to make a serious
dent.

One a day would be less than a 1% reduction in software patents. We need to
shut them ALL down.

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

------
chrisb808
> _How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a
> Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or
> four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their
> competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies
> would grind to a halt._

I'm kind of surprised this isn't happening already.

------
jacques_chester
In another patent thread some time ago I identified what I think is the core
problem with software patents, which is abstractability. I used the example of
a tractor being generalised into transportation, so I was nodding along with
Joel's example.

This is because that's how software development often proceeds. We start with
the concrete problem, then notice a pattern that encompasses a class of
concrete problems, then a pattern that describes a group of classes of
problems and so on. Building abstractions is literally what we do as a
profession.

Now, as Joel points out, the rational strategy is to take the highest-level,
most abstract version of your invention to the patent office to see what will
get passed in. So patent applications are written like matrioshka dolls, with
a super general case on the outside, and progressively more concrete
descriptions as you go deeper. Somewhere near the bottom is the original thing
that started the ball rolling.

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

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

~~~
tempestn
That is an excellent idea. (To clarify, you're saying a company would need to
have _both_ a high number and a high ratio rejected to be penalized.)

More generally, it seems logical to have the size of the penalty increase at a
quadratic or even exponential rate, based on the number of rejected patents
within a certain trailing time period[1], and scaled by the
rejected/submissions ratio. So every rejection would carry a penalty, but the
more that were rejected (both in total and as a percentage), the larger the
penalty would be, at an increasing rate.

It might also be an idea to do this with individual claims as well as, or even
instead of, entire patents, to also deal with the overly broad claims problem.

[1] Or even for all time, but with a weighting factor based on recency.
Wouldn't want to get overly complex though.

------
joshuak
This is great! I don't truly believe that no software patent should ever be
granted, but we should definitely weed out the bullshit ones.

I would think mipmapping would be the core prior art, and that's from 1983.
But I suppose anything over a year older then the application is good enough.

Also note there is another technique for patent manipulation which is to
provide a provisional patent application (to start the clock) which can't be
granted, then continually refine and the application as time goes by. In a
worse case scenario you could taller a general patent into a specific patent
based on someone else work, and have a patent already in place that will
predate the new invention.

------
throwawaykf
somewhat active on Ask Patents. In fact, I've submitted an answer that is
pretty sure to kill at least one Google patent application, and possibly
another from Uniloc.

A few comments on this article:

1) This is a very unusual case; most answers (and almost all questions) from
"lay engineers" completely misunderstand the scope of the patent, since they
don't even know what claims are. And even if they do, they are very lax at
interpreting claims. And even then, most posters frequently misunderstand the
terms used (case in point, Spolsky's very post!
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6084884](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6084884)).
All this leads them to post irrelevant prior art.

That does not mean there are no useful answers at all; there are, but they
mostly come from people who are somewhat versed in patent law (such as agents,
lawyers and examiners). Some re-wording of claims, such as what Micah Seigel
does in his posts, helps, but for the proportion of useful answers to go up,
we need more education about how patents work for this to be useful. It's
really not that hard; heck I did it!

2) It's wayyy too soon for a victory lap because that was only the first non-
final rejection, for which a response has already been filed. Statistically,
this application will undergo 2.5 more rejections [1] and (based on my
guestimate) at least one Request for Continued Examination (RCE) before being
abandoned or (more likely considering the applicant) issued with much narrower
claims.

3) Patents are worded so not (primarily) to be obfuscating, but rather because
of legal, technical and some silly historical reasons. For instance, pronouns
are very rarely used because _any_ indefiniteness can be cause for
invalidation. Obfuscation will not help much, because you are not trying to
get it past lay engineers, but patent examiners, who have a technical
background and are (usually) adept at reading patentese. Complaining about how
hard it is to read patents is like a Blub programmer complaining about Lisp.
You simply need to learn the language to appreciate what you are reading.

4) Most "software" patents (which can't even be cleanly categorized as such)
are not crappy, at least with respect to all other patents. There are studies
presenting this view [2, 3], but it's also based on my experience having read
hundreds of patents. Almost none are revolutionary, but just as few are really
as bad as the media portrays. The PTO has gotten pretty good at finding prior
art (interestingly around the same time Google came around), and the really
broad patents are dying out.

The "crappy software patents" view is common mostly because tech media
routinely publishes uninformed (or disinformed? [4]) rhetoric, mostly because
they garner some easy rageviews, and audiences accept it without critical
thought. I do think the bar for non-obviousness should be different, but
solving that is a difficult, almost-philosophical problem.

5) In response to various comments on this thread regarding pay-for-prior art
schemes, initiatives such as Article One Partners already exist.

I am not a patent lawyer or an agent, but I believe in the patent system, as I
have actually worked for the mythical small-guy firm that was ripped off by
the big guys and almost died, but eventually prevailed with patents. You don't
hear these stories much because typically the small guys don't have the PR
budget for it [4]. (And also because many of those with patents turn to
trolls, who like to keep a low profile.)

I have only recently become personally invested in the patent system, but I
want all inventions, including mine, to be truly novel and worthwhile. And I
want people to get off their butts and do something rather than complain about
patents on HN. This is why I support Ask Patents.

[1]
[http://www.uspto.gov/dashboards/patents/main.dashxml](http://www.uspto.gov/dashboards/patents/main.dashxml)
[2]
[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=650921](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=650921)
[3]
[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=970083](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=970083)
[4]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
dctoedt
Re (2): In 1924, legendary federal judge Learned Hand [0] remarked that "the
antlike persistency _[sic]_ of _[patent]_ solicitors has overcome, and I
suppose will continue to overcome, the patience of examiners, and there is
apparently always but one outcome."

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_Hand](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_Hand)

[1] Lyon v. Boh, 1 F.2d 48, 50 (S.D.N.Y.1924), _copy available at_
[http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9696597566965196...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9696597566965196877).

~~~
throwawaykf
Agreed. It is an unfair match. It is, statistically, almost a tautology: The
set of examiners is necessarily limited by government funding constraints, but
the number of patent attorneys and agents they contend with on a daily basis
is only limited by the market, which is _huge_. The examiners will eventually
be overwhelmed.

I think this is one reason that most examiners (at least IME) have their
default mindset to "Reject! Reject! Reject!" Also, this is why something like
Ask Patents is invaluable to even the odds.

I don't agree with the quantitative approach, but I can't help think that
technology can help. Google has already (in my opinion) helped the PTO greatly
narrow claims the past decade; similar technology can help even more.

I have some background in NLP. And I know it's surprisingly effective when it
comes to domains with specific jargon (cf. Watson and medical language). I've
lurked long enough to know some here (such as VanL) have already experimented
in this area. Personally, I have toyed with the idea of constructing parse
trees out of multiple technical texts and claims, "normalizing" them using
ontologies, and trying to find matches (i.e. prior art) using various tree-
matching algorithms. I have a feeling it would be very effective. (Maybe
Google already does this!)

But that does not address the problem of identifying patents that are
quantitatively invalid but qualitatively valuable. To me, that is the more
important long-term problem.

~~~
kazagistar
Increase the filing fee, to pay for better examiners directly? Patents that
cost a few thousand dollars?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
This weighs against individuals too heavily. The UK for a time had a zero
filing fee but they've gone back to a small fee again (to avoid getting so
much chaff).

It's the renewal fees where you should be charging highly IMO; hyperbolic
year-on-year increases would be an interesting option to model.

~~~
xmodem
I know this sort of thing is unpopular in the United States, but how about a
pay-according-to-your-means model? So individual inventors working for
themselves could file quite cheaply, but a publicly held corporation with a
>$1b market cap pays a much bigger fee for the same thing.

~~~
bstpierre
Or perhaps even a pay-based-on-number-of-filings model. First application is
$500, with a doubling for each filing, up to a max of $10k. (Or whatever
multiplier and ceiling you want to have.) For small filers, the legal fees
will dwarf the USPTO fees; for large filers with dedicated legal assets, the
USPTO fees are still fairly minor but might start to be large enough to deter
some of the frivolous filings.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
How much does it cost to set up a shell corp, $50?

> _For small filers, the legal fees will dwarf the USPTO fees_ //

You _can_ self file; though it's not generally advisable. $10k isn't even a
blip for someone like HP who (at least in the past) markets themselves on the
number of patents they have.

------
pjdorrell
Be aware that there is a backlog of "secret" patent applications in the US,
where the patent application can be kept secret until such time as it is
granted, at which point the easy invalidation described by Joel is not
allowed.

For example the Twitter patent was granted, even though there is prior art
(mine), and even though I submitted my prior art as soon as I found out about
the patent. But I got a reply along the lines of "too late, the patent has
been granted". It turned out that the application was kept secret until it was
granted, thus guaranteeing protection from any prior art not already known to
the patent office employee assigned to that patent.

The "new" US patent laws require an application to be made public after 18
months, but there could be thousands upon thousands of older patent
applications benefiting from the secret option.

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

~~~
FurrBall
Absolutely. We should not have to waste time proving a patent is bad.

The root of the problem, the patent system itself need to be abolished.

------
neilk
It would be great if others could attach bounties to certain patents. Of
course then the patent examiner would have to pick "winners", answers that
helped the most.

Also, like Quora, does the StackExchange system allow one to register one's
fields of expertise, to have questions suggested to you? (I'm not a big
participant on SE but I know it may be hiding that feature from me, because it
slowly reveals features based on karma).

Anyway I'm sure this has been thought of before, just curious if it's on the
todo list.

~~~
cruise02
You can post bounties on Stack Exchange if you have enough reputation to cover
it. Whoever posts the bounty (not necessarily the patent examiner) gets to
pick who wins the bounty. If they don't, it can be automatically awarded to
the highest-scoring answer during the bounty period (one week). More details:
[http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/16065/how-does-
the-b...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/16065/how-does-the-bounty-
system-work)

------
jackschultz
> How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican
> Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four
> engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’
> applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind
> to a halt.

Wouldn't the result of this be that the company who finds out that they have
the earliest implementation of the code in question be able to get the patent
for it?

~~~
mattip
The first publisher of an invention has a year to file a patent on it. Because
of the length of time taken to get to a filing, by the time this prior-art
shootout takes place more than a year will have gone by and the prior art will
actually disallow anyone from patenting the invention, including the original
inventor.

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

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

------
kazagistar
If the patent office cannot do this work themselves, they should offload to
the private sector: small bounties for prior work, paid out of a fraction of
the filing fee. It costs a few hundred dollars to submit a patent... thus,
they could easily afford to give out a hundred or so for each comprehensive
dismantling.

TLDR: Give people financial incentive to destroy patents, and they will be ALL
over it.

------
netcan
This is really, really cool.

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

------
dgesang
Two quick thoughts:

1\. Swap the burden of proof: couldn't much of these issues with software(!)
patents be avoided just by forcing the "inventors" to check for prior arts
themselves and prove (somehow) that they actually did do that?

2\. Make them pay: What about a (huge) fine when the patent does not get
approved eventually or when prior art was found during the approval process?

------
mooreds
From my friend who is a patent examiner:

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

------
flaktrak
Nice win but I have to say the bit that really got me excited was this

"My dream is that when big companies hear about how friggin’ easy it is to
block a patent application, they’ll use Ask Patents to start messing with
their competitors. How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google
got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents?"

How great would that be?

------
snowwrestler
> An example might help. Imagine a simple application with these three claims:

> 1\. A method of transportation

> 2\. The method of transportation in claim 1, wherein there is an engine
> connected to wheels

> 3\. The method of transportation in claim 2, wherein the engine runs on
> water

> Notice that claim 2 mentions claim 1, and narrows it... in other words, it
> claims a strict subset of things from claim 1.

> Now, suppose you invented the water-powered car. When you submit your
> patent, you might submit it this way even knowing that there’s prior art for
> “methods of transportation” and you can’t really claim all of them as your
> invention. The theory is that (a) hey, you might get lucky! and (b) even if
> you don’t get lucky and the first claim is rejected, the narrower claims
> will still stand.

I'm pretty sure this is not accurate. To my knowledge, the claims of a patent
are considered only as a whole, not individually, so there should be no fear
that this is somehow trying to patent "methods of transportation" broadly.

To make a broad patent claim, you can't have any narrowing claims on the same
patent. Put another way, the maximum scope of claim by a particular patent is
defined by the narrowest claim in the list.

Lawyers--correct me if I'm wrong.

~~~
nissimk
Not a lawyer, but I'm pretty certain that you're wrong. There are 2 types of
claims, dependent and independent. dependent are those that refer to a
previous claim and expand on it, (2 and 3 above). Claim 1 above is
independent. The dependent claims are taken together with those they
reference, but the independent claims if accepted are taken independently.

Here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claim_(patent)#Basic_types_and_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claim_\(patent\)#Basic_types_and_categories)

~~~
snowwrestler
Thanks

------
linuxhansl
This! What the author describes is exactly what happens.

Our lawyers even admit that. The company I work for gets sued for a bogus
patent every week(!), so we were all ask to file patent applications. I
didn't, but I got involved in some applications as co-inventor anyway.

This isn't - and not been for a long time - about inventions.

------
ThomPete
If you want to get an insight into that world I can really recommend when
Patents attack Part Two.

[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/496/w...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/496/when-patents-attack-part-two)

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

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

------
maqr
> The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software
> industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly
> is, perhaps, two.

Any idea to which two he might be referring?

~~~
spolsky
I sort of like
[http://www.google.com/patents/US4464650](http://www.google.com/patents/US4464650)
(Ziv/Lempel compression), which doesn't seem obvious to me

~~~
Tyr42
Can't patent algorithms though, so, can't be that.

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

~~~
r00fus
Any flat increase would just make it less likely that the big guys will have
competition in their "most patents filed" competition.

Also, given we just switch from first-invented to first-filed, it is
particularly onerous for those garage-based small inventors as a big corp can
easily justify the cost.

What might make more sense is to _tax_ intellectual property. We tax physical
property with much less value than a "successful" software patent (ahem,
Eolas?), why not tax the non-physical property as well? If you make it
progressive based on the number of patents owned/controlled, it will also
limit the usability of maintaining warchests of patents for controlling
markets.

~~~
darkarmani
Perfect. Tax them heavier as they age. That way the people trying to create
usable products are barely hurt, but by the last few years it costs a lot to
hold on to. And you can release your patent to the public domain to release
it. That's more likely to hit trolls than innovators.

------
milkmiruku
Like [http://www.peertopatent.org/](http://www.peertopatent.org/) but with the
momentum of the SE platform/network. Good stuff.

------
wiseleo
Check out the caption I got for this article from USPTO ;)
[http://prntscr.com/1h0c3u](http://prntscr.com/1h0c3u)

It says "Resolution"

------
seeingfurther
Isn't this the job of the patent examiner?

~~~
klausjensen
Yes. And how does that seem to be working out?

------
jingo
The original title on this was:

Spolsky, Patent Killer

