How Joel Spolsky Shot Down a Microsoft Patent In 15 Minutes 175
Thornburg contributes news of a story spotted on Techmeme, writing: "[Joel Spolsky of] Joel On Software has a story about how he found and submitted prior art for a Microsoft patent listed on Ask Patents in 15 minutes. The patent was rejected based largely on the document he submitted." Spolsky gives a very readable introduction to the patent system, and software patents in particular; I especially like this part: "Software patent applications are of uniformly poor quality. They are remarkably easy to find prior art for. Ask Patents can be used to block them with very little work. And this kind of individual destruction of one software patent application at a time might start to make a dent in the mountain of bad patents getting granted. ... How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt."
Not new (Score:3, Informative)
This outfit [articleonepartners.com] (previously covered on /. though I didn't find the link as quickly as I'd wanted it) does something similar, though with a different money model.
(Full disclosure: No connection to either, though I had email contact with article one at one time.)
Re:Mutually Assured Destruction (Score:5, Informative)
Works nicely for them all.
Not any more.
"The ‘irrelevance of Microsoft’ illustrated in a single chart
Microsoft’s share of connected device sales peaked at more than 90% in early 2009. Consider that for a moment — more than nine out of every 10 connected devices sold were powered by a Microsoft operating system. Fast forward to the first quarter of 2013 and Microsoft’s share of connected device sales has plummeted to just over 20%."
http://bgr.com/2013/07/22/microsoft-market-share-connected-devices/ [bgr.com]
None of them try very hard (Score:5, Informative)
I still don't understand it, but there was a patent issue a few years back, where the smaller player put up a plea to the community for help invalidating a certain patent that the megalocorp was wielding against it.
Being curious, I did a quick Google Groups search (Splotsky's 15 minutes sounds about right) and submitted the prior art (a then-defunct software package that was announced on a Usenet group which had the same functionality years before).
A few months later, I got a note from council, asking if I had any contacts with that software company and that they were using my submission as the basis as their challenge, which they ultimately won a couple years later.
Anyway, the surprise was how easy it was for me to find that prior art when the company hadn't managed to. The work I do overlaps with what they do, so, yeah, I had some domain expertise, but so did their employees.
FWIW, they never offered me a token copy of their software or anything for my help. I wasn't expecting it (I'd have no use for it anyway - they make complex proprietary configurations of open source software, while I tend to use the simple-blocks model), but it was also surprising to me that there was no follow-up or loop-closing after the fact. So, if you get into this kind of hobby, do it for the knowledge that you're helping defeat a dangerous patent system.
Not a difficult task... (Score:5, Informative)
Have you ever seen a patent application that appears ridiculously broad? (“Good lord, they’re trying to patent CARS!”). Here’s why. The applicant is deliberately overreaching, that is, striving to get the broadest possible patent knowing that the worst thing that can happen is that the patent examiner whittles their claims down to what they were entitled to patent anyway...
An example might help. Imagine a simple application with these three claims:
1. A method of transportation
2. The method of transportation in claim 1, wherein there is an engine connected to wheels
3. The method of transportation in claim 2, wherein the engine runs on water
What he's done is equivalent to finding "a method of transportation," knocking out the ridiculously over-broad claim, which Joel describes as "a long shot lottery ticket". The narrower, dependent claims may still be patentable.
Additionally, this was the first office action in this patent application (not an issued patent, contrary to the /. summary). Would the Examiner have found this piece of prior art or another piece of prior art that knocks out that over-broad claim? Almost certainly, again according to Joel's logic. In fact, the Examiner went on to using 5 other pieces of prior art to address the dependent claims. Any of those could well anticipate the independent claim too.
Is it a good thing to crowdsource prior art searches? Absolutely. But people doing the search can't stop at just a single piece of prior art to knock out the one over-broad long shot lottery ticket claim. In Joel's example claims, finding prior art describing a method of transportation may allow you to run a victory lap and get a Slashdot story, but it does nothing for invalidating the claim to an engine that runs on water, which is really what the patent is about.
Re:Mutually Assured Destruction (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Illegal Patents (Score:5, Informative)
Lots of compressors are much better than ZIP (with regard to compressed file size), and in fact lots are also much better than RAR which the pirate community so often uses. Nobody is using any of the top 10 methodologies.
The best compressor for raw bitmaps is currently PAQ8PX which is benchmarked at 1.0392 bits per byte while WINRAR and WINZIP are benchmarked at 1.5194 b/B and 2.4185 b/B respectively. To be clear what I am saying here, that PAQ8PX offers the same level of improvement over WINRAR than WINRAR offers over WINZIP yet still people mainly use ZIP, rarely RAR, and never PAQ.
If you have ever played with the PAQ family of compressors.. they are dog slow (less than 1 megabyte per second) and use lots of memory (often a gigabyte or more of memory.)