
John Carmack on Patents - azharcs
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151312&cid=12701745
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anewaccountname
Carmack isn't just being hypothetical here; he independently came up with
"Carmack's Reverse" for rendering shadows and it turned out Creative already
had a patent on it; they ended up using it to force Doom 3 to support some
crufty proprietary 3d sound system.

~~~
GrandMasterBirt
Look at the current patent trends. The first company to paten an idea that
having people interact via avatars interact in an online world managed by a
server was not the first company to come up with the idea. However they are
now suing every MMORPG on the market because any game in which users chat with
eachother using avatars violate the patent.

Apple is doing such things as well patenting things like "a 3d desktop" they
don't have to do much just describe a rough idea of one.

OOOOOO and my favorite is the company who is suing Apple, MS, Palm, Google due
to their exclusive patent on operating systems. I am sure they invented OSes
it just a few years ago.

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noonespecial
_Yes, it is a legal tool that may help you against your competitors, but I'll
have no part of it. Its basically mugging someone._

Love it. Legal does not mean moral. Or right. Putting on a suit and using a
paper weapon doesn't make it any more respectable than hiding in an alley and
using a steel one.

I'm looking forward to Mr. Carmack's position paper.

~~~
statictype
Well, that post is about 3 and half years old. So don't hold your breath
waiting for his position paper :).

~~~
noonespecial
Yeah saw that. Went searching hopefully. Disappointment. Busy guy I guess. In
the end though, I'd rather he be making cool stuff than messing around with
patent nonsense, whatever side he's on.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
Not non-sense,m actually. Quite the opposite. This is comapany and industry-
ruining stuff. To continue on oblivious to the law and the effect that
industry leaders like Carmack can have on the law is nonsense.

~~~
arockwell
Do you think John Carmack's time is better spent writing 3d engines or
lobbying congress?

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dice
Hidden third option: building space rockets and driving Ferraris.

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arockwell
Touche.

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erik
I recall reading something from Carmack along the lines of "I find it
horrrifying that I can't use my own ideas if someone else had the same idea
first." It was a very succinct and insightful quote on a problem with patents,
but now I can't find a source for the quote. Does anyone know what I'm
reffering to?

~~~
jwilliams
Ok - So - What's the alternative?

There are some inventions that take vast amounts of investment, yet are easy
to copy.

~~~
statictype
I think the problem is in the details. It's far too easy to get a patent. And
on trivial 'inventions'.

Paul Graham has literally got two patents for the exact same thing. 'Somebody
hit submit twice' indeed.

Patents should be examined by people knowledgeable in the field and have a
strict process for being granted.

And there should be a much higher activation energy required for taking
someone to court for violating a patent.

~~~
elecengin
A quick shout-out to the US Patent Examiners - these individuals have
technical degrees just like us, and do their best to weed out the crap patents
they can. In fact, they are judged (for better or worse) by the number of
patents they successfully reject.

They are also now some very overworked individuals. They have only hours to
review patents in a diverse set of topics. There is only so much research they
can do - a patent written by a master claims writer, no matter how frivolous,
is very difficult to reject outright.

If you want to improve patents in the US, you can start by asking your
congressperson to increase funding to the USPTO.

~~~
weavejester
Or ban software patents altogether. That would probably be cheaper.

~~~
jeeringmole
In the meantime, strike small blows here and there against bad patents by
helping examine them:

"Help the USPTO find the information relevant to assessing the claims of
pending patent applications. Become a community reviewer and improve the
quality of patents."

<http://www.peertopatent.org/>

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incomethax
Hmmm... Interesting... Seems like a prisoner's dilemma situation to me. If I
was to patent, it would be to my benefit, but it would also hurt the 'other '
I was playing the game with (supposing he didn't patent).

I suppose Carmack's position paper would advertise to the world that he is in
favor of no patents, thus in this 'multi-round' game he is providing others
with the ability to collude with him to keep patents out of his field.

~~~
anewaccountname
When a product is covered by more than one patent, the patent-holders end up
in a tragedy of the commons problem. The commons is the person with the
product. He has money he can pay. Each patent holder has a veto over the
product and wants to extract as much as they can. One hold-out can ruin it for
everyone and every single stake holder often ends up worse off as a result.

~~~
elecengin
The cases you are referring to - where there are blocking patents - generally
are resolved with mutual licensing agreements. Of course, there are many
exceptions, especially when there are patent trolls involved.

In these cases, though, I really wonder the comparative cost of innovation
versus licensing battles. Software is still an amazingly open field - given
that licensing battles can run into the millions, if that money was invested
in R&D could an alternative (superior) method be found?

One of the methods that patents were supposed to encourage innovation was by
providing reasons to innovate. If you are forced to explore new options and
develop your own IP that might be patentable, is that such an awful thing?

~~~
Retric
Software patents often leave zero room for innovation. Let's say you patent
pushing email to a hand held device AND pulling email from a hand held device
what are the options? Showing a screen shot of another device that's not hand
held? It's still either push or pull. etc.

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kmavm
I work at a commercial software company, for which I've filed and been granted
some patents. I do so even though the pittance my company provides as a
"patent bonus" doesn't begin to compensate for the paperwork, writing,
iterating with a lawyer, etc. involved in the process.

In principle, it's possible one of my patents will either defend my employer
from litigation, or be a poker chip in some licensing deal in the future, but
honestly the odds of that are small. My selfish reason for writing patents is
that they provide a way of publicly recording my technical contributions. An
alternative venue is academic publications, but that's inherently a crapshoot.
Granted patents have your name on them, are freely available unlike a lot of
CS journals, and usually provide better technical detail about the problem and
solution than a typical 5-page academic CS paper.

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lliiffee
In what sense are academic publications more a crapshoot than patents? I hope
you don't mean that because they might be _rejected_! That would completely
convince me of Carmack's correctness.

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scw
Until we can remove the leverage that intellectual property holders currently
have, they will fight ruthlessly to retain 'their' property.

Compare the economically optimum copyright length
([http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/07/research-
optimal-...](http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/07/research-optimal-
copyright-term-is-14-years.ars)) with the actual changes in length within the
US (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Copyright_term.svg>). This increase in
terms coupled with the ease of patent filing surely is purely marginal
decision making.

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dzorz
Uh, effect -> affect.

~~~
GeoJawDguJin
The truly elite (or at least, those who think of themselves as such) know that
"effect," when used as a verb, is (sort of) a synonym for "cause."

~~~
sokoloff
It's clear from reading Carmack's sentence that he means affect
(alter/disturb, in this case negatively so), not the verb form of effect/to
cause. (Not that that justifies a grammar flame on HN, but it was at least an
accurate flame.)

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TweedHeads
Patents should be valid for one year only, to give a head start to whom had
the idea and invested developing it.

That willl give them enough time to build a brand (iPhone, Viagra) then it is
all open season and everybody can copy and improve on that idea to get an
edge, investing their own resources (Zune, Cialis) whether they fail or not is
up to the market.

You can't blame people for you being a great researcher and a poor marketer.

People will reward who can be both.

