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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 10 2012 @ 09:09 PM EDT |
I've been waiting for years for someone to show me a patent
- in any field at all, actually - that actually deserves a
twenty-year monopoly.
By "deserves" I mean:
a) absent the patent system, the invention would not
have become known to industry (either through not being
invented in the first place, or through remaining a closely
held secret, or through being neglected in academia) before
the expiration of the patent
b) the value to society of gaining this knowledge early
exceeds the cost to society of the monopoly rents gained by
the patent holder.
Please show how your example swiping patent meets this
standard.
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| Authored by: tknarr on Sunday, June 10 2012 @ 09:15 PM EDT |
Mainly we didn't see it because we weren't looking for it. Early Palm
devices... I owned a Handspring Visor, and you rarely used the on-screen
keyboard because the device just didn't lend itself to handling lots of text.
You jotted short bits of text using Graffiti or Jot, and that was about it. And
since you had to use a stylus anyway, misalignment problems weren't very common
when tapping on the on-screen keyboard. It was only after fully-touch-screen
phones started to show up that we began to have a need to do large amounts of
text input on the touch-screen itself (as opposed to a separate physical
keyboard) using relatively large and inaccurate fingers (as opposed to a small
and easy-to-accurately-position stylus). That was the point where people
started looking at how to improve input on a touch-screen keyboard. It
shouldn't surprise anyone that nobody finds a solution to a problem that doesn't
exist yet, or that isn't major enough to motivate people to solve it.
The
mere fact that nobody's looked for the solution, though, does not mean
the solution's non-obvious. No matter how obvious it is, somebody's always got
to be the first person to think of it. The question is whether the solution's
sufficiently non-obvious that it wasn't thought of quickly. I think the fact
that it took me, someone who doesn't work on mobile devices, a matter of seconds
to recall Graffiti and less than a minute to map out how to apply what's
described in the Unistroke patent to whole-word input speaks volumes about the
matter. KSR v. Teleflex pretty much puts nails in the coffin here: a
straightforward application of an existing technology to do exactly what it's
intended to do but in a new field is not novel and non-obvious. Now, if I
hadn't been able to connect the dots and come up with Swype's solution
within literally a minute of beginning to think about the problem, then I'd
concede your point. But this is what software developers do for a living. It's
no more black magic than polymerization reactions are to a professional chemist.
And the standard for patents is "person having ordinary skill in the
art". I may consider a lot of chemistry to be black magic, but I'm not a
chemist and I'm not the standard for what's obvious and what's not in chemistry.
The same holds for software. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: ftcsm on Sunday, June 10 2012 @ 10:16 PM EDT |
The problem was not the math or the code to support it, was
multitouch not being available to Palm Graffiti. The
Hardware could not be used like Swype just because
multitouch could not be done.
If you move from one position to other and keep mapping that
on a touch screen, it either requires multitouch or at the
most basic requirement a high resolution - high speed
"mouse-like" support. The technology at that time simply
could make Swype not work. So, get a "comparing shapes to a
predetermined database" and apply it to a keyboard is not
what I, as a citizen, would like to grant a 20-year
exclusive rights.
And that's the problem: what the society has to gain from
giving a monopoly to an individual in detriment to all
society in this case? I can't think about a good reason. A
patent system cannot be explained by the economic approach
but has to be based on the premise that a granted monopoly
has to be a fair exchange for some technology that would
require MORE than the monopoly time granted to be developed
independently. Or else it's not worth the sacrifice. And
it's not a software field only problem, it's a general
patent system problem. In my humble opinion, anything short
of an economically feasible cold fusion power (preferably
without dangerous rejects) is not worth the price paid by
society. To be fair, a solar panel that can reach 90%
efficiency using simple materials should be granted a patent
too, cause the achievement would be so great that it would
be worth the sacrifice. In this cases, the technology can
advance faster because the technologies published would
refresh the ideas of others or start a new technological
revolution. But a monopoly grant for "1-click" on a web page
is really, really off the map on patentability.
I really can't agree with the sacrifices made by everyone to
support the patent system we have today, even when my
country (Brasil) does not support (yet) software patents.
You mentioned telephone. There were competing products being
demonstrated at the time. How can only one receive a
monopoly grant? It's celarly obvious or not novel. Our
countries try hard to control indutry or market monopolies
but then easily handle monopolies to anyone asking just
because of fee and a piece of paper saying they have a
method of choosing an item from a menu? Really? Please
explain me how this is not the degeneration of the system.
The whole system is being abused. If something on a patent
can be infringed without being even known (and with 200K
patents a year, no one can know all of them), how can it
pass the non-obviousness test? I'm not anti-patent. Some
inventions can really be proud of being called an Invention.
I think the penicillin revolutionized the world so much that
it deserved a patent. The sacrifice of granting the monopoly
was greatly repaid with better health and less lives lost to
infections. If not for trading the monopoly grant for the
publishing of the invention, there would cost too many lives
and probably would have been more than 17-20 years before
someone else could come with something with similar results.
Maybe it could be done in a month, sure, but the potential
benefit was so great.
As for software patents, I really could not find a single
one worth the paper they where written to. If there is a
field riddled with useless patents, it's software. I do
program since 9 years old, which means some 31 years. To be
fair, the last 8 to 5 years I did almost no programs at all.
I've used programming languages like Assembly, Cobol, Basic,
Pascal, PHP, C, C++, Java (very little) but I still can read
a program easily. I've programmed a lot, earned money
programming since 16 years old. This is to explain that I,
somewhat experienced like I am, could not clearly
distinguish what was written on any of the software related
patents discussed on Groklaw. Or they where so broad as to
cover anything from selecting something over some options,
which would cover any menu, combo box, list of programs (or
almost anything that can be programmed), or they where so
non-sense that if the person who wrote it ever took a class
at an university, that person deserves to lose the diploma.
If I were a teacher that presented a class on programming
and one of my students came with the 1-click patent, I would
be so ashamed.
Mr Risch, today Sir Isaac Newton, with a system like ours,
could patent easily the use of gravity "with a computer",
whatever that means. This system can't be fixed. Like a
cancer, the risk of spreading the tumor cells to the rest of
the body is too much so you remove the tumor. Software
patents and any other purely abstract kind of patents are a
cancer. You cannot cure it by expecting the cancer cells to
behave normally again, you cut them off the body as fast as
possible so you don't die from them. That's my cure to the
system: if you have a doubt it's abstract, than it's
abstract. A fusion power generator cannot be confused to be
an abstract idea, can it? A method to curing rubber at half
the time with half the heat may be worth the patent, cause
it generates a rubber product at the end. What a Swype
patent would generate as a result? A product? Not by a mile.
Flavio
PS: Really thank you putting your ideas out for discussion
and for hearing from us. If I expressed myself too harshly,
please pardon me. English is not my primary language and I
can easily make a mess of some expressions.
---
------
Faith moves mountains but I still prefer dynamite[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: ailuromancy on Monday, June 11 2012 @ 12:52 AM EDT |
Until today, I was completely ignorant about
this text entry patent, or
anything like it.
I have been using KDE (a window manager now called
Trinity)
for years. One of the features (called
"Input Actions") is that you can
associate mouse
gestures or key combinations with thing like
activating a
program's menu entry, or typing a word.
The first thing I thought when I
saw that is:
"I can pick a Japanese a letter for each action I use
often, draw
the letter, and have the computer do what
I mean." (The input actions feature
is too course
to recognise the differences between many similar
Japanese
letters, and taking my hand off the keyboard,
reaching all the way to the
mouse, then re-aligning my
right hand back on the home row takes far longer
than
using a keyboard short cut)
I suspect that using Japanese letters
is not a
the first thing most westerners would have thought of.
Rest assured
that everyone who can read Japanese,
Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs thought of
gesture
to word conversion shortly after they saw a touch screen.
I bet after
using a touch screen keyboard for a few days,
westerners quickly wondered "Why
doesn't my word
processor's spelling corrector fix typos caused
by this
irritating touch screen."
When a typist tries to type too fast, the most
common
error is keys typed by different hands can be pressed in
the wrong
order. Decades ago, there was software that
corrected such common typos so
people could type faster.
T9 text entry is based on converting gestures that
resemble whole words into words.
Get used it it. This is an idea whose
time had come,
and many millions of people thought it up independently
because
you can be absolutely certain that until today,
only a few people had read this
patent.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 11 2012 @ 04:21 AM EDT |
Re: "if it were obvious, why didn't we see the solution sooner".
(a) you confuse patenting with inventing. Probably, many people saw the
answer sooner. Why wasn't it implemented sooner? - see Moore's law.
(b) no sane programmer would patent such an obvious thing.
(c) this is precisely the kind of patent which is extremely damaging, if it
eventually ends up in the hands of a troll, because it claims a monopoly
over something simple and basic; hence anyone with any ethical sense
would not take the risk of patenting it.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 11 2012 @ 01:25 PM EDT |
| It is possible that ideas/methods in Swype is just not that appealing. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: JonCB on Tuesday, June 12 2012 @ 09:48 AM EDT |
In 1987 Mark Weisser invented the iPad, including the iCloud
with pretty much all the integration gadgets.
OK his prototype didn't have multi-touch (you couldn't do that
on an a4 sized device at the time). But he documented things
you would need to do to make it work, how people could use it
and more importantly WHY people would use it.
The tragedy is he died in 1999, long before his future started
to move towards the reality.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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