As someone who has been developing software for 30 years, I have seen many patents that claim techniques and ideas that existed in my code for years before. Most of that code is proprietary so it is not visible to the public or the patent examiners. One can’t really develope any non trivial software today without tripping over many patents. As long as those patents are used defensively, I am fine with that – it is what developers may need to do to protect themselves.

Used any other way this is an extortion scheme, software colonialism and a social cancer – software patents must die along with the software and law companies that use them aggressively (this death wish was just ruled legal in a recent court case).

@devin algorithm, code and layout must also not be patentable – the moment one agrees to their patentability, one gets the awful system we have today. One where Amazon’s single click purchase patent seems reasonable.

…and I haven’t even started talking about the gross mismatch between the parent term and the current rate of innovation. Patents on software will show down the nations that have them while the rest of the world will march forward ever faster.

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Basically, you can’t patent sorting apples, but you can patent a robot that sorts apples.

Some of these patents were from before companies like Google even existed, and besides, Google used to give credit to the company when they launched.

Prior Art my ass.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/paul-allen-is-no-patent-troll/2360

TexIP is correct. You are misreading the patents. I’ll be blunt: All of the criticism here is based on a lack of understanding of how patents work. It’s not just that the text quoted was “boilerplate” that is used simply as window dressing. It’s that you are not focusing on the claims which are really the only thing that counts. If you don’t read and understand the claims then you have no idea what the patent is really about and your harangues are without substance.

Let’s take the 507 patent as a good example. For all of it’s big ideas the patent is very narrow in fact. How narrow? It’s specifically limited to using vector representations of video frames and comparing such frames using a normalized dot product of the vectors. That requirement is in every claim.

Now that’s interesting but not world dominating or destructive of innovation generally. Indeed even in video analysis there’s plenty of ways to compare video frames not using vectors and not using dot products. Just ask any engineer who does video coding (eg AVC or H.263 etc.).

Are there bad patents? Absolutely. Are there problems in the patent system? Absolutely. But it’s entirely wrong to say that Allen profited from a patent free world and now is screwing the rest of us. Mircosoft only got serious about patents after they paid IBM tens of millions for a license to IBMs patents in the early 1990s. Indeed in Allen’s case in particular he’s invested hundreds of millions in startups for many years bringing many products and technologies to market and in the process has had to deal with more patent system induced costs than Ms. Tammy Faye will experience or could even imagine.

That now for the first time I believe he chooses to enforce his own patents does not merit a wall of shame. IMHO.

And btw you can patent “algorithms”. We do it every day.

Well, that’s certainly fair enough – I’m not a patent litigator myself, after all. But even the claims are overreaching. The claims on the “Browser” patent amount to “comparing two pieces of data to see if they’re related, and then displaying one.” I don’t know about you, but that seems pretty broad even in 1999.

If they were patenting a means of comparing two video frames, or a means of determining whether two articles are related, okay sure, via con dios. But they appear to be patenting the idea of comparing two video frames or articles and finding similarities.

Well, Allen did sink, like, a 100 million bucks into that company.

Also, I encourage you to read through the patents for these “vague and general ideas” and see if you can implement one of them yourself. Try the 6,263,507 patent, for starters. If you are unable to, either the examiner was slacking and the patent is invalid… or, more likely, you are not as skilled as a “person of ordinary skill” (someone slightly smarter than a code monkey), and really shouldn’t be calling things above your understanding “vague and general ideas”.

Ideas may be easy to understand, but implementation can be complex, and implementation is what the patent claims protects. If the defendants have implemented the same idea differently, they have nothing to fear from that patent.

Idle Thought: will this lawsuit or its defense in anyway call for a paternity suit on Al Gore? *hint* father of the internet and all that?

Would that invalidate the posit?

Idly curious: is that belief based on anything? Which one is the “said” patent?

A few quick points:

1) We don’t know whether or not there’s prior art that could invalidate one or more of Allen’s patents.

2) It at least appears that some of his patent claims are so broad that they’re unlikely to be sustained in court.

3) In my opinion, this is a “Hail Mary” attempt to try to get some value out of a company that Allen invested $100 million and got no usable products, and a desperation move to compensate for years of bad investments.