
I Hope Yahoo Crushes Facebook  - azazo
http://blogmaverick.com/2012/03/13/i-hope-yahoo-crushes-facebook-in-its-patent-suit/
======
mindstab
Why are people so upset with Yahoo? Apple is still incredibly popular with the
tech crowd, I bet many of these blogs and comments were written with their
hardware and software, and they are currently suing just about every phone
manufacturer over patents?

Aside from the fact it's not a web thing, how is this different? Or is that
difference somehow enough for people to choke down their bile and keep using
apple products?

I originally was going to post something about banding together and boycotting
Yahoo but then remember the HUGE apple fan group that lives here.

Apple is worse than Yahoo IMHO (considering this is like Yahoos first suit)
and yet no one cares. So why do people care about this?

~~~
shingen
It's based on the crowd's judgement of merit and who is filing the lawsuit and
why.

That is to say, Yahoo is viewed as non-innovative, and their action is viewed
to be the result of a new CEO intent on aggressively finding pennies through
any means including just by lawsuit. Meanwhile, most of Yahoo's team is
apparently against this action.

So, it's the context. If you drop the context and equate Apple to Yahoo, then
it's easier to arrive at: why is everybody upset when a company files a patent
lawsuit.

I bet the same people upset about Yahoo also find Apple's lawsuits to be
distasteful. Apple is viewed as a very innovative company, so they're given
slack when it comes to suing over issues related to innovation.

~~~
kumarm
The reality is Apple filed lawsuit on company that actually invented Mobile
Phone (Motorola) about a silly design patent.

Facebook didn't invent anything.

In reality Apple should be the real bad guy in whole patent issue.

~~~
ashishgandhi
Are you trying to say the iPhone changed nothing? It wasn't an innovation and
innovation stopped the day Motorola invented the "Mobile Phone"?

Sure, the iPhone is a mobile phone but it's no way any more similar to what
Motorola invented than how similar Motorola's mobile phone is to the original
landline phone.

~~~
fpgeek
But, for various legal and practical reasons, Apple isn't suing over the
things that made the iPhone and the iPad innovative.

Instead, they're suing over ticky-tack nonsense that other people did before
like:

\- "slide-to-unlock" (Neonode N1m)

\- clicking to call phone numbers they detect in text messages and email (Palm
Treo among many, many examples - especially if you look at analogous desktop
functionality like recognizing URLs in email that makes the concept obvious)

\- tablets that are black rectangles with rounded corners (Knight-Ridder
concept tablet from 1994, the movie version of 2001, ...)

Perhaps if more people were aware of exactly what Apple was actually suing
over they'd be less supportive.

~~~
weeny
All that prior art will certainly bubble to the surface during the trial
process. There is a cottage industry around finding it - kind of like bounty
hunting. See articleonepartners.com, a service that lets researchers be
rewarded for invalidating litigious patents.

------
doktrin
While I can't claim to speak with authority on this matter, a far more likely
outcome would seem to be :

    
    
      1. Yahoo sues Facebook  
      2. Facebook settles for some large-though-not-crippling amount of cash  
      3. The public forgets and moves on, since no-one's actual day-to-day user experience is affected (and we collectively do lack a bit of an attention span)  
      4 [epilogue]. Companies are further incentivized to leverage patents in the pursuit of financial gain
    

Of course, MC knows this, which is what I'm sure prompted this post to begin
with.

------
redsymbol
Here's how I explain the problem to my tech-impaired friends and loved ones:

In 2012, software patents don't cover solutions. Rather, they cover problems.
Anyone creating a solution to that problem must pay licensing fees. This takes
large amounts of money from the people actually solving problems and improving
the world, and gives it to people who don't do anything to advance human
progress. If the law isn't repaired, my fear is that other countries will far
surpass the USA in our lifetime.

~~~
sbov
I also like to put it this way: software companies like to patent the
application of well known tools and processes to be used for a specific
problem domain.

My favorite example is glue. Everyone knows what glue is. However, has anyone
used glue to hold itemX and itemY together? No? Patent!

~~~
weeny
Highly misleading. You should look into some patents and how they work, before
you start spouting psuedo authoritative bullshit.

------
diogenescynic
The quickest surefire way to patent reform is by threatening Facebook users
that they may have to go back to using Yahoo services. People will be
revolting in the streets.

~~~
starfox
Exactly his point here. my.yahoo.com was innovative for its time, and patents
are supposed to last 20 years, right? So according to the legal system in
place, the public should use my.yahoo.com till around 2020.

I agree, what could really be any other purpose for patents? Is a judge going
to say, 10 years into a patent, "well, our process thought this was novel 10
years ago, but it doesn't seem so novel to me now"?

The problem is that this 20-year term makes no sense in software, if the
public wants to use the latest and greatest thing.

~~~
ahlatimer
No, because non-obviousness is judged according to the time in which the thing
was invented. Was it non-obvious in 2000? If it was, its patent remains
intact, even if it seem obvious now.

And I'll point out that novelty and non-obviousness are two different things
in the context of patents. The majority of software patents seem to fail the
latter the majority of the time. Novelty is more of a wash.

------
Jach
> Change is needed. However, its not going to come from our government.

Nor will it come from putting yet another sacrificial lamb on the pyre.

> If Yahoo were to be awarded 50 Billion Dollars from Facebook, I think
> consumers may take notice. And don’t think that 50B should be an
> impossibility.

I don't think consumers would bat an eye. So long as facebook.com remains
online, they won't care. If it goes offline, they'll migrate to Twitter, or
back to MySpace, or Google. There is enough competition to Facebook right now
that if they vanished overnight people wouldn't clamor for their return for
very long.

> This is what patents are for, right ? To protect companies with original IP
> from smarter, faster, aggressive companies who catch the imagination of
> consumers and advertisers. What else could patents be for ?

At this point I suspect the author is just trolling. Nice job. It doesn't take
much research to learn that patents were meant to encourage inventors to share
the details of their inventions to Society, so that Society could benefit in X
years instead of waiting X+delta years for the chance something gets
reinvented and shared freely.

~~~
BrandonMTurner
You are grossly underestimating the amount people would care if Facebook went
offline. The world would freak out. People have memories of their lives tied
up in the service with the combination of photos, friends, and messages. The
pent up data generated over the years is truly meaningful.

~~~
Jach
Oh there would definitely be mourning of the lost data because people don't
keep backups, but I really don't think it would last that long and I don't
think the mourning would lead anywhere. When people don't even care that their
loved ones die enough to donate to anti-death institutes, it's hard to imagine
any major effects would happen if all their data disappeared.

~~~
Arelius
> When people don't even care that their loved ones die enough to donate to
> anti-death institutes

Err, what? Elaboration required.

~~~
chrisrhoden
Trolling, nothing to see here. Move along.

~~~
sciurus
I think he's being sincere.

From <http://www.thejach.com/about#sum>

"Can you sum up your core views in a short package so I don't completely
misrepresent you when reporting second-hand?

My real view is simple. I'm a transhumanist Singularitarian in the Good sense,
or the Yudkowsky sense if you prefer. Anything that gets in the way of a
positive Singularity is bad. [snip] Even though I'm an Anarchist you'll see me
supporting national health care because there's a decent chance we'll get
really long life this century and the less people who die the better."

------
nh
The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly. - Abe
Lincoln

------
moocow01
In software these days I feel like patents are analogous to chefs patenting
cooking techniques and then running into the middle of another chef's dinner
service and saying he can't use cream in his mashed potatoes because of the
'creamy mashed potatoes' patent #78.1 Maybe a decade or 2 ago there was more
science involved in software but these days, it seems to fall more under the
realm of craft - patents need not apply.

~~~
bostonpete
Well, recipes are patentable, so I'm not sure this example proves your point
as much as you would like...

------
yuvadam
_It’s the law of big numbers. When there are enough of anything issued, some
good will be done._

Can we stop using the law of big numbers as an excuse for everything in the
world? </pedantic>

------
mcherm
It's a win-win situation! The public hears lots of news stories about how
stupid Yahoo's patents are, Facebook gets seriously motivated to use their
warchest of money to help lobby for patent reform, and at worst, Facebook
loses some cash (I'm NOT feeling sorry for them).

If I thought that Yahoo might come out of this with a new source of cash I'd
be worried about the perverse incentives to misuse patents... but I don't see
ANY way this works out for Yahoo.

~~~
mrich
The thing is, even if Facebook used all of their cash for lobbying against
software patents, there are many more entrenched companies on the other side
of the fence that have spent billions already on patents and will defend their
investment and "competitive advantage". That's what Google realized and they
bought Motorola.

~~~
vibrunazo
Which is why I fear that Yahoo winning over Facebook wouldn't start a lobbying
war against patents. But instead, Facebook would simply become one more in the
list of patent supporters.

I think that it would be better if Yahoo loses remarkably. Such as that it
becomes reference for future judges to take better caution with software
patent lawsuits. Which would slowly "reform" the system, instead of a fast
revolution with new legislation. One can hope.

------
csallen
As Abraham Lincoln said, "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce
it strictly."

------
kd5bjo
The current patent system is broken. That does not imply that the right thing
is to have no patent system; are we sure that the problem is with the idea
instead of the implementation?

Can we talk about what an ideal system would look like instead of saying that
what we have now is broken and therefore nothing can work? Isn't debugging
broken systems what we're supposed to be good at here?

I've tried to come up with a reasonable patch for the current system:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3698637>

I'm sure that there are problems with it, but at least it's a starting point.

------
dr_
I'm no fan of patent lawsuits, but Apple had lawsuits ongoing with Microsoft
when Jobs arrived and agreed to settle them in exchange for Microsoft making a
sizeable investment in Apple. The rest is history, and no one seems to look
back upon that in distaste.

The difference? Tech news cycles, including blogs and online papers, now
report news 24/7 just like CNN/Fox, etc, and are pretty relentless.

Personally I don't understand why any of those patents were issued in the
first place, and perhaps a start for reform would be to get people who have
some experience working in the industry into the patent office.

------
tspiteri
I can't make sense of the post; with the same reasoning, we should hope for
the murder of a well-known celebrity so that we get better murder legislation.

~~~
efsavage
I won't assess "better", but high profile trials do drive changes in
legislation. From changes to kidnapping after the Lindbergh baby until the
present day with "Caylee's Law", people need to have a stake (even a vicarious
one) to really care about changing the law.

I think Cuban is right here, if you take away people's Facebook, they're going
to want to know why, and they're going to be pissed when they find out.

------
carlesfe
I've read this line of reasoning many times, and it's like saying "Hitler
needed to kill 6 million jews to that people would realize he's a bad guy".

No, the correct action would be to fix the system, not to cause a catastrophe
so that "regular people" realize anything. Those who need to know already
know.

I guess the author already knows that and uses this reasoning to prove a valid
point, but I'm firmly against it, it's a fallacy.

Sorry for the Godwin.

------
darksaga
I really feel like this is a ploy to get a chunk of Facebook, just like they
did to Google (<http://cnet.co/w7IaUn>). $50B? That equates to "X" amount of
shares, which Y! would snap up in an instant.

For a company flailing in the water right now, this seems like a perfect play
to get a good financial shot in the arm.

------
andrewhillman
I do not think Yahoo winning billions will make the public realize what is at
stake. Those not in tech, don't really think deeply about our dated patent
system. This will just result in more lawsuits just before companies IPO.
Yahoo "crushing" FB won't change much, but we can hope it will.

------
duairc
First of all, fuck patents. I'm in complete agreement about that (except for
the bit where the author says that maybe they might be okay sometimes). I've
long felt this way.

However, in the last year or two, I've become much more interested in more
thorough change to the system in its entirety, for its own sake, not just
because intellectual property law is stupid.

(Although you can use essentially capitalist economic logic to defeat the
concept of intellectual property (meaning that capitalism and "free culture"
(or whatever you want to call it) are not necessarily incompatible with each
other), I don't think it will be possible (or desirable) to reform
intellectual property law without also dismantling the state and (actually
existing) capitalism. Or at the very least, the institution of wage labour,
whereby nobody (at least by default) has access to food and shelter (the
necessities of survival), because those things cost money, and people don't
automatically have money, so just to be allowed to survive, they have to sell
their labour. A living wage for everyone would make redundant the (invalid,
anyway) argument that intellectual property rights are necessary so that
creative people can earn a living, because "a living" won't mean "money"
anymore.

(As an aside: I think intellectual property is a (failed) attempt by
capitalism to deal with externalities, which it is unable to do in its
unrestrained form. However, there are so many externalities, and if you were
to try to fully take them all into account, you would probably end up with a
fully managed economy, which seems to be the antithesis of what most
capitalists want.))

So basically I'm coming at this from an anarchist perspective, and when I look
at this stuff now I'm seeing things that I didn't see before I became an
anarchist.

> Change is needed. However, its not going to come from our government. The
> lobbyists have taken over. One of the symptoms of the illness patents have
> caused the technology industry is the explosion of lobbyists pushing the
> agenda of big patent portfolio holders. They are not going to let our
> lawmakers give an inch.

It's not at all uncommon to read things like this, in fact it seems entirely
uncontroversial. Governments seem to have lost all legitimacy a long time ago
(did they ever have it?). People don't even seem particularly upset or angry
about this, it seems just to be a fact of life.

> Rather than originating in Congress, its going to take a consumer uprising
> to cause change. What better way to create a consumer uprising than to
> financially cripple and possibly put out of business the largest social
> network on the planet ?

So then this is what really baffles me. "Consumer" and "uprising" in the same
sentence. Why is the most imaginative form of resistance that anybody who
opposes intellectual property rights can come up with always just a boycott of
the relevant corporations? Ask anybody in the radical environmental movement
how much personal consumer choices have helped slow climate change or
transition our culture to a sustainable way of living. They've done fuck all.
Why does nobody ever say that we need to organise a strike, or riot in the
streets, or ever do anything more radical and direct than alter our personal
consumer choices? I'm not necessarily saying that a riot is the best way to
change patent law, I'm just pointing out how there seems to be this underlying
idea that "internet" activism/politics is completely separate from "real"
activism/politics and that the idea of connecting the two doesn't seem to
occur to most people (in either world).

~~~
Peaker
If everyone earns a living wage by default, the consequence might be too many
people living off the work of others. It may not be sustainable.

Maybe in practice, it will, but it's bound to generate animosity by those who
do sell their labor.

------
signalsignal
Is it possible to create a business which can profit off of patent trolls?
Like a patent troll bait company? I've read somewhere there is a lawyer who
profits off spam using the small claim courts system, so maybe something along
those lines is possible...

------
drucken
I do hope he is speaking entirely about software patents rather than all
patents in general.

There may be issues with non-software patents but under any system their
problems are trivial in scope and solution space compared to software patents.

~~~
rdl
Even most modern "real" (non-software) patents don't seem to be useful for
actually teaching people how to implement technologies, which was one of the
major purposes of requiring the disclosure.

~~~
zanny
I'd argue the 20 year long patent law in place now is way too long for a
publicly granted monopoly of production.

~~~
rdl
The possible exception being in regulated industries like pharma where it's
entirely possible for a drug to take 15 years to develop and test. I think
healthcare and pharma probably need to be treated differently, but even there,
patents don't seem to be making the world a better place, at least not in the
way they were originally intended.

~~~
zanny
If you used a patent at launch system, where you could only copyright / patent
something going to market, you could avoid the corner case.

It is a good practice in general. You can only patent that that you can
actively push to market in a reasonable time frame (even if it is in small
quantities). Under a policy like that, drugs couldn't be issued patents until
after they pass the FDA, but the FDA could internally have rules against
letting someone else copy a design and pass it through faster.

I guess that would make copyright law easier at the expense of bureaucracy.

------
junto
It is interesting to note that a large number of us on HN who make a
livelyhood from building software, are fully adverse to software patents.
Patent lawyers on the other hand are quite happy with the status quo.

------
jonmc12
Is he serious about consumers impacting government because they get mad about
their favorite brand getting sued?

Consumers vote with their dollars - a massive change in spending habit would
be required to impact congress. Voting consumers get a say in which
congressman get to be bought off by lobbyists - not sure that helps. I'm not
sure I get how anything would change unless executive branch saw risk of re-
election (like what happened with PIPA/SOPA).

I've also wondered, since corporations are people with 1st amendment rights,
how does a patent not infringe upon freedom of speech? Would love if there was
some basis of judicial review that could effectively influence IP laws.

------
rdl
I suspect this raises the value of the shell of Kodak, too (they have some
imaging patents, although Apple is suing them for other imaging patents,
perhaps defensively).

------
davemel37
"If Ifs and Buts Were Candy And Nuts, We'd All Have a Merry Christmas!" -
Sheldon Cooper

------
zerostar07
Someone should patent the patent creation process.

------
shareme
Lets see if we can get some use out of this thread:

What countries DO NOT SUPPORT SOFTWARE PATENTS?

My probably guess if China..any others?

~~~
notatoad
united states foreign policy supports software patents. a large amount of the
united state's exports is in the form of intellectual property, and the US
government is very aggressive in pushing foreign countries to enact US style
intellectual property legislation.

sure, China and Russia can choose to ignore software patents, but if they do
they're going to get hit with embargoes and tarriffs when they try to trade
with the US.

------
reader5000
*He is being rhetorical

~~~
tnorthcutt
Sarcastic.

~~~
crusso
He's being literal. He hopes that Yahoo wins the patent fight so that
Facebook's lobbyists and the public backlash hit the current patent process
firmly in the groin.

------
rjurney
This is the dumbest 100+ upvote link ever.

