

Ask HN: Tech journalist asks, What prompted this fuss over patents? - jasondrowley

Hello HN Community,<p>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.<p>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.)<p>But, I'm not here to suggest an interesting data visualization project.<p>I come to the community asking a couple of very simple questions.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>Anyways, just a few questions. It'll be interesting to see how the discussion unfolds.<p>Best,
Jason
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brudgers
Software patents have been a topic of interest on HN for as long as I've been
reading it. The recent surge of interest started with Oracle suing Google over
Davlik but really took off when Lodsys went after Jesus phone developers.
Microsoft's pursuit of license fees from Android hardware manufacturer's threw
fuel on the fire by proving that only the evil patent their work. Google
getting outbid on the Nortel suite and their subsequent claims that implied
they only pursued the portfolio for the benefit of OSS kept it alive.

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.

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aristus
These are not simple questions. If you are a journalist, follow the money. I
personally suspect that the offensive use of patents, both by "trolls" such as
Lodsys and large players such as Microsoft, has stepped on enough toes to
cause certain vested interests to start a broad-spectrum fight against other
vested interests. One usual result of those kinds of fights is manipulation of
the public sphere, also known as "press relations".

<http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

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marklabedz
I'll take on your first question. In large part for me, the implications of
software patents are becoming an increasingly clear obstacle to individual
developers. We're not talking patents for incredibly complex processes and
lawsuits aimed at specific, large companies. Instead, we're facing lawsuits
over (arguably) trivial/common features of an app. These can have a very
direct negative impact to the individuals that frequent HN.

