How Joel Spolsky Shot Down a Microsoft Patent In 15 Minutes

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."

Read the article.

[stewsters]

Here is some more prior art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap [wikipedia.org]

Re:Mutually Assured Destruction

[jeffmeden]

The big boys build weaponry to keep each other in check, and to eliminate all the smaller boys.

Works nicely for them all.

Don't know why they'd rock the boat.

This, thread over. It "would be cool" as Joel points out, if the patent gorillas did their own policing via Ask Patents but it will never happen, they are in a profitable standoff now, why would they ever want to trade it for an unprofitable one?

Come up with a way to force peer review with proper incentives (maybe for every one you submit you must read and sign off on three more, and the more you shoot down the higher on the list yours goes for priority granting if it passes) and you might have a system that starts to work in a quasi-normal way.

Re:Mutually Assured Destruction

[farrellj]

So let's change the rules...create a Kickstarter campaign to fund a patent-bounty system. If funded, the fund pays out $10 per-patent that is squashed. Suddenly, it becomes a game for people to compete with each other to kill off patents. Even if a person can only do one an hour, that is better pay than minimum wage in many US States, or around the world. And once a year, they can throw a conference, and give out awards to the top "sharp-shooters" who kill off the most patents!

Turn killing bad patents into a game where you can make money, and we can have the patent-trolls slain in short order!

Re:None of them try very hard

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I am very sure some engineer out there wanted to say thank you and legal stepped in and squashed it saying, "no no no, that guy might sue us for money! If we acknowledge we got some benefit from them, they might ask for huge sums of money. It is better to be thought as selfish jerks than to expose the company for huge claims!"

Re:Mutually Assured Destruction

[Anonymous Coward]

If funded, the fund pays out $10 per-patent that is squashed. Suddenly, it becomes a game for people to compete with each other to kill off patents. Even if a person can only do one an hour, that is better pay than minimum wage in many US States, or around the world.

You say that as if someone educated enough to understand a patent AND locate/document suitable prior art could/would work for $10/hr... We have student loans to pay off!

Oops or Shill?

[s.petry]

Are you just shilling? A quick 10 second Wiki search [wikipedia.org] shows that MS now owns less than 40% of the server market share, down from 80% in their prime. Desktops, it depends on who's stats you believe. Most rate Windows in the high 70% range%, but there is a rating of over 90. Since I see how many people are using MAC now days, I tend to disbelieve the 90%. I won't even get into the amount of PCs as a whole declining so causing MS to lose tons of market share to IOS and Android.