I've always found the culture around software patents incredibly toxic. Very rarely are patents used as means to fund future work (which is their entire intention) and far more often they are used as an extortion tactic (even by non-trolls).
Does anyone know what exactly Stallman means by 'functional part'?
I would have assumed it to mean something like one feature, or perhaps one procedure, but that does not quite add up with his examples having two to three times as many 'functional parts' as they have lines of code.
If you read the paragraph that referenced it, it appears he's referring to constructs like 'if' statements and 'while' loops. In particular, he was contrasting the difference between mechanical engineering and software engineering:
> If I wanted to put an ‘If’ statement in a ‘While’ statement, I don't have to worry about whether the ‘If’ statement will oscillate at a certain frequency and rub against the ‘While’ statement and eventually they will fracture. I don't have to worry whether it will oscillate at a certain higher frequency and induce a signal in the value of some other variable. [...]
More important than innovation is often execution. Protecting shallow innovation at the cost of hampering maybe less innovative but well executed small businesses is not serving the common good.
> The Supreme Court has suggested that claims “purport[ing]
to improve the functioning of the computer itself,” or “improv[ing] an existing technological process”
might not succumb to the abstract idea exception.
I can see two rules that would help immensely with trolls:
1. There should be an absolute maximum on the litigation that can be brought against any organization for any reason in a given time period (say, a year), and that total cost should not be able to exceed some tiny fraction of its total operating costs for that period (parent companies included, to avoid hiding actual illegal activities in subsidiaries). In other words, it should be impossible for someone to kill a startup “in the crib” simply by creating overwhelming lawsuits that are too expensive in time and money to deal with.
2. There should be a very substantial penalty for failing to convict after accusing a someone of a patent violation; something like 10x the legal costs of the party that was accused, and a moratorium on any similar accusations against any party for some period (like 6 months). In other words, slow these trolls down and hit them hard when they fail, and they might not try to make a shady business out of it.
The first rule is too easily exploitable. Defensively engage in litigation between a pair of complicit entities that consumes the entire litigation budget, and then go around screwing everyone you can over while going "nah nah nah, you can't sue me"
Of course with absolute legislation like this you're going to end up with someone abusing the rules. Already been sued too many times this year (as any large company is)? Congratulations, you're now immune to lawsuits.
The intended purpose of patents is to _support_ innovation. People spending time and money on inventing should be able to reap financial benefits of such research rather than seeing their hard research work just being copied over by someone else.
Thereby there should be an absolute maximum on the litigation brought by someone using patents based on the R&D spend they had for the said patent(s). Let's say that the litigation can at most be 10x of the said investment.
Since determining how much of the R&D expenses were directed towards the said patents could be tough, the maximum litigation for all patents could be set to 10x the money a company has spent on R&D in say the two years preceding the filing of concerned patents. This means that if a company sues X for $120 million after having spend $20 million for the given period, they can now sue someone else for at most $80 million for any other patent(s) over the same period. Further details can be worked out.
Why not just make all patents illegal? Then just let companies mitigate the risks of IP infringement through the purchase of insurance. The insurer could offer various policies some that compensate for all losses due to infringment and/or also going after perpetrators, etc. This seems like a more optimal solution to me than the current lot of legislation and trolling, I think it would maximize rate of innovation while also allowing companies to invest and have safeguards against IP theft.
This is meta, but I it would be awesome they'd add a slight margin to the text on mobile, it's very difficult to read if the text starts on the border of the page.
There are three important and recent US Federal Court decisions relating to software patents. Alice [1] and Bilski [2] strongly limit business method patents as falling under the abstract idea exception [4]. Enfish [3] goes the other way and protects software patent claims relating to the functioning of computers themselves.
Did you not read the article? Alice is the name of a company, and also the abbreviated name of a court case (Alice v. CLS Bank) in which Alice, the company, was the plaintiff.
To be fair, the linked page does not adequately explain what Alice is. To me it was clear that it was some important court case and they just want to call it "Alice". But I can understand why it might be hard to understand for some.
You can't be serious. The very first words of the article are:
"In Alice v. CLS Bank, the Supreme Court ruled that ..."
That makes it clear that "Alice v. CLS Bank" is a court case, and Alice was the name of one of the litigants. That phrase is linked to another article, whose first sentence is:
"In a long-awaited decision, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank today."
Anyone older than six who can't figure this out on their own should be ashamed of themselves.
I would think that "Alice" used by itself refers to the litigant of that name. The fact that it's used as a shorthand for the case itself is very much not obvious.
It is common practice to abbreviate the name of a case. For example, "Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka" is almost invariably referred to as "Brown vs Board of Education" or sometimes even just "Brown v. Board". "Dred Scott v. Sanford" is invariable referred to simply as "Dred Scott". "Obergefell vs Hodges" is usually referred to simply as "Obergefell." This is particularly true when the context makes the shorter reference unambiguous.
Some of us (where "us"="me") come to the HN comments first, because they load very quickly and can help us decide whether to read the article at all. Especially since many of the headlines are pretty opaque due to reuse of ordinary words in computing contexts.
You are of course free to approach HN any way you want. But if you choose not to read the article and end up asking a stupid question as a result you should not be surprised when you get called out for asking a stupid question. The signal to noise ratio here is extraordinarily high in no small measure because people are expected to do their homework.
You may not realize it, but I'm doing you and lucb1e a favor by telling you this. Many people will just quietly write you off as a hopeless dweeb if you expose your laziness in this way. Some people go their whole lives wondering why no one takes them seriously because no one ever gave them a dope slap.
> You may not realize it, but I'm doing you and lucb1e a favor by telling you this.
I read the article before commenting, but a simple first name doesn't tell me anything so I asked. I find the way you wrote that condescending so let me do you a favor by telling you, have a care what assumptions you make.
I believe I did? But you have to follow the rules regardless of how badly someone else broke them or whether they started it.
I know how annoying that is. But it always feels like the other person started it and did worse, so if we don't approach the problem this way, it's a downward spiral for the lot of us.
In this case, the other person said "Many people will just quietly write you off as a hopeless dweeb if you expose your laziness in this way."
Is that not a personal attack because it's hidden behind one layer of indirection?
>if we don't approach the problem this way, it's a downward spiral
I get that it's not easy moderating a site like this when there's only two of you to do the job, but once you've shown up in the thread, is it that much more work to call out everyone involved instead of just picking the last nasty comment?
You might be surprised at how much more work it is. We can't come close to reading everything, even in a context where we're already moderating, for the same reason cops don't catch everyone who's speeding.
If you notice a bad post going unmoderated, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. Users can help by flagging those, or by emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
No, it isn't. That "layer of indirection" changes it from a personal attack to a statement of fact. It's a lesson that I had to learn the hard way, and I said it because I wish someone had said it to me back in the day. If someone had, it would have saved me a lot of pain.
But now I understand why no one did. I will certainly never make the mistake of trying to offer this advice on HN again.
>That "layer of indirection" changes it from a personal attack to a statement of fact.
So if instead of calling you an ass, 'mixmastamyk has said to you "many people would think you're acting like an ass for commenting like this" -- would that also be something you wish people had said you back in the day? Or are you so convinced of the value of your "advice" that you wouldn't care what many people would think?
EDIT:
>I wish someone had said it to me back in the day. If someone had, it would have saved me a lot of pain.
I am genuinely sorry that people treated you so badly for asking questions.
>I certainly would not consider it a personal attack.
Fair enough. I suppose there's a certain type of person you've never had to interact with; but can you imagine the existence of such a person who, when they said "many people will just write you off as a hopeless dweeb", what they actually meant was "many people including myself..." or "all the people whose opinion matters..."?
In other words, the sort of person who, when they want to make a personal attack, hide behind the kind of language that lets them claim they're just stating a fact about what other people think?
After our little back-and-forth, I don't believe that you are that kind of person; and maybe its a problem with me that I'm too ready to connect insulting language with ill intent; I just find it easier all around to frame things in a way that avoids any misapprehensions (for example, by pointing out "stupid" questions by saying "HN users don't appreciate questions that could be easily answered by reading the article and using Google")
You're right. Asking if you could imagine such a person could be construed as implying that I'm only reacting to imaginary offenses like some sort of snowflake (after all, the word "imagine" was right there in my comment!)
So I'll be more clear; assholes that hide behind weaselly language are not imaginary; maybe I attach too much importance on not being mistaken for an asshole, and if that makes me a snowflake then so be it.
> maybe I attach too much importance on not being mistaken for an asshole
No, that's not your problem. (Though it's actually much more important to not actually be an asshole than to not be mistaken for one. People will make mistaken assessments of you throughout your life. If you let that bother you, you will never get anything done.)
Your problem is that you don't seem to understand what makes HN a cool place to hang out: there are really smart, successful people here who will give you incredibly high quality insights and answers to questions that you won't find anywhere else, and they'll do it for free. But the flip side of the bargain is that you not waste these people's time by asking stupid questions, i.e. questions whose answers are plainly stated in the linked article, or can be easily found with a simple Google search or on Wikipedia. If too many people break that rule, the cool kids will go away because they have better things to do with their time than read a site full of stupid questions. So if you ask a stupid question you will sometimes be called on the carpet for it, and sometimes the person calling you out will do it inartfully. There are a lot of aspies here.
But it is very important to understand that on HN the stupid question is the greater sin because those are what will drive the cool kids away more than the inartful calling out. (One of the things that makes the cool kids cool is that they actually appreciate it when someone calls them out because they learn something when that happens.) You can argue that lucb1e's question was not stupid, and if you win that argument, you can expect me to apologize. But if you focus on my use of the phrase "stupid dweeb" while tacitly conceding that lucb1e did ask a stupid question then you are missing the point: the stupid question does a lot more harm than the inartful calling-out, so we let the latter slide more than the former.
>you don't seem to understand what makes HN a cool place to hang out ... the stupid question does a lot more harm than the inartful calling-out
I guess I have a different perspective on HN than you do; because I've never noticed the "cool kids" wasting their time by griping about stupid questions (presumably they just scroll past them), and I've never seen anyone I consider one of the "cool kids" give warning that they were going to leave HN because of stupid questions.
EDITED to add: And I do know smart, successful, insightful people who don't post on HN precisely because of the kind of behaviors that you want to "let slide".
I'm not griping about the stupid questions. The occasional stupid question is forgivable. Everyone asks stupid questions sometimes. But the proper response to being called out for asking a stupid question is, "Wow, you're right, that was a stupid question, sorry about that." Not, "Hey, that wasn't very nice!"
HN is a site dedicated, ultimately, to high-tech entrepreneurship. In the startup world, if you don't do your homework, or worse, if you get offended when someone calls you out for not doing your homework, even if they do it undiplomatically, even if they level actual personal attacks at you, you will lose, and your competition will happily dance on your grave.
I read the page. Somehow I didn't make the connection that Alice must be a company name (it could have been a person's name, though a first name is weird indeed). Still doesn't give me any context though.
Good question -- the article talks about the case, but doesn't say much about the company. A cursory look at their website makes it appear that Alice Corp. is probably a non-practicing entity (aka patent troll) in the financial services space. Does anyone know if they actually have a business aside from licensing their patent portfolio?
There's a link, but you're right it's way too subtle. Anyway:
> Alice Corp.'s patent claimed a form of escrowing that was well known. Called an “intermediated settlement,” it allowed a third party to act as an intermediary by creating “shadow accounts” for parties, and only allowing transactions to go through if the “shadow account” showed the party had enough money. Oh—and it was done with a computer.
> Alice Corp.'s patent claimed a form of escrowing that was well known.
Somebody told me that it was not really well known when the patent was filed. Apparently keeping shadow accounts was not really feasible without computers and networks, so such methods did not exist previously. I'm not sure how accurate that is, though. I'm not knowledgeable about that domain.
And even if they were being used "correctly", software development is still poorer as an industry because of them. As they say, Stallman was right all along. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/software-patents.en.html