

Goliath v. David, AAC style - inetsee
http://niederfamily.blogspot.com/2012/03/goliath-v-david-aac-style.html

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zdw
Looking at the app's video, it appears to be a directed soundboard with a tree
structure, parts of speech, and queueing of words:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpafqM1kiNo>

Even if the app got sued out of existence, implementing the same functionality
would be fairly trivial.

I'm assuming that the unique, patentable portions are a lot of "when used in
this way" clauses, and the speech research to come up with the contents of the
soundboards.

The end run around this would be an generic soundboard app with a bunch of
silly noises but with the ability to load other soundboards and rulesets in a
set data format that would implement the functionality.

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sneak
Yes, because personal anecdotes are exactly what was missing from a reasonable
and unbiased re-evaluation of patent rights on a planet-wide scale.

Nothing against you or your daughter (hey, make sure you have the ipa file,
IOS app cracking instructions, a copy of AppSync, and a jailbreakable device
or three - and you're set for YEARS) but this isn't the kind of discourse that
is likely to get anyone's ball rolling in any direction it wasn't already -
touching though it is.

Best of luck to you and your family.

~~~
bad_wolf
You may not like it, but to most people a story with a cute kid in it is worth
a thousand reports produced by a team of legal and technical experts. We here
may not like the appeal to anecdote and emotion, but these things would not be
common logical fallacies if they weren't effective.

So this might be just the story that will stick in people's craw about what
patent reform could mean to them.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
On a related note: One of the least popular things about patents is the
ability to patent something relatively obvious and then sit on that
"invention" for years waiting for someone else to "copy" it. Patent trolls
have taken this to an art form.

As a way to fight patent trolls who produce nothing, it's been suggested that
a requirement be added to attempt to actually CREATE and MARKET the
technology. That you can't just sit on a patent and wait for someone else to
stumble on it by accident; in fact, if someone else DOES stumble on it by
accident, it should be considered de facto evidence that the patent isn't
novel.

How is this related to the article? If you DID have the requirement that a
patent owner actually produce a product, then you could add on the additional
restriction that the patent would only apply in the market that the patented
product is being sold to. If they can but won't sell an iPad version of their
product, and they are notified that someone wants to use their patent that
way, then (after a reasonable grace period) the patent would lose its ability
to prevent competition in that realm.

Remember the Flip video camera? Super cheap video that anyone could use? They
were allegedly working on a new version that would allow you to use the camera
as an ultra-cheap video conference device. They were bought by Cisco for
$590M, and then just before releasing this new product, Cisco shut them down.
The Wikipedia article [1] suggests that maybe the purchase was to acquire
patents, but since the company was still profitable and they made no move to
divest their ownership of Flip, it seems more likely they shut it down rather
than allowing the consumer device to compete with their expensive enterprise
video conferencing devices.

It's when patents are used to PREVENT a product from existing that they should
be null-and-void. That doesn't help "...promote the Progress of Science and
useful Arts." [2] IMO, it's only when a patent is used to grant you a
temporary monopoly on a product to help you recoup your R&D expenses through
sales of the product that it should be valid.

And in the case of an iPad app being able to do the work of a large $9000
piece of hardware -- if they won't produce an app, they should lose patent
protection that can be used against someone who CAN produce an app. Protecting
their market for $9000 hardware devices shouldn't be done at the expense of
"Progress of Science..."; it would be like blacksmiths using a patent
portfolio to prevent cars from being manufactured, holding back progress
rather than promoting it.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_Video>

[2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause>

~~~
SoftwareMaven
There are a lot of "shoulds" in this comment. I'm no fan of the patent
protection racket we have going, but what you lay out would be infinitely
worse. All those "shoulds" are decisions that would be made by beurocrats with
little real understanding (who really knows whether the $9000 device can
really be substituted with an iPad and app?).

Patent reform is tough. The obvious one (no pun intended) is that patents
really should be non-obvious. Beyond that, I vacillate between killing them
and severely neutering them. I think they could have some value if they
protected inventions that were two or more steps ahead of the current
technology. Being able to patent the place _everybody_ would put their next
foot is inane.

~~~
notatoad
i think the simplest and easiest solution to patent reform would be to just
scale back the term. 20 years is garbage, i'd say that patents should be
granted for a maximum of four years. their purpose is to give innovators a
chance to use their invention to build a business, and if you can't build a
business in four years you aren't going to. in a fast moving industry like
software, the term should be more like 6mo - 1yr.

also, it'd be great to kill licensing of patents. it would turn patents from
an IP marketplace to a use-it-or-lose-it incentive for inventors.

