Should Salesforce's Tableau Be Granted a Patent On 'Visualizing Hierarchical Data'? 72
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp says America's Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted a patent to Tableau (Salesforce's visual analytics platform) — for a patent covering "Data Processing For Visualizing Hierarchical Data":
"A provided data model may include a tree specification that declares parent-child relationships between objects in the data model. In response to a query associated with objects in the data model: employing the parent-child relationships to determine a tree that includes parent objects and child objects from the objects based on the parent-child relationships; determining a root object based on the query and the tree; traversing the tree from the root object to visit the child objects in the tree; determining partial results based on characteristics of the visited child objects such that the partial results are stored in an intermediate table; and providing a response to the query that includes values based on the intermediate table and the partial results."
A set of 15 simple drawings is provided to support the legal and tech gobbledygook of the invention claims. A person can have a manager, Tableau explains in Figures 5-6 of its accompanying drawings, and that manager can also manage and be managed by other people. Not only that, Tableau illustrates in Figures 7-10 that computers can be used to count how many people report to a manager. How does this magic work, you ask? Well, you "generate [a] tree" [Fig. 13] and "traverse a tree" [Fig. 15], Tableau explains. But wait, there's more — you can also display the people who report to a manager in multi-level or nested pie charts (aka Sunburst charts), Tableau demonstrates in Fig. 11.
Interestingly, Tableau released a "pre-Beta" Sunburst chart type in late April 2023 but yanked it at the end of June 2023 (others have long-supported Sunburst charts, including Plotly). So, do you think Tableau should be awarded a patent in 2025 on a concept that has roots in circa-1921 Sunburst charts and tree algorithms taught to first-year CS students in circa-1975 Data Structures courses?
A set of 15 simple drawings is provided to support the legal and tech gobbledygook of the invention claims. A person can have a manager, Tableau explains in Figures 5-6 of its accompanying drawings, and that manager can also manage and be managed by other people. Not only that, Tableau illustrates in Figures 7-10 that computers can be used to count how many people report to a manager. How does this magic work, you ask? Well, you "generate [a] tree" [Fig. 13] and "traverse a tree" [Fig. 15], Tableau explains. But wait, there's more — you can also display the people who report to a manager in multi-level or nested pie charts (aka Sunburst charts), Tableau demonstrates in Fig. 11.
Interestingly, Tableau released a "pre-Beta" Sunburst chart type in late April 2023 but yanked it at the end of June 2023 (others have long-supported Sunburst charts, including Plotly). So, do you think Tableau should be awarded a patent in 2025 on a concept that has roots in circa-1921 Sunburst charts and tree algorithms taught to first-year CS students in circa-1975 Data Structures courses?
where's the knife and fork icon ? (Score:3)
or is that just when someone sues over it ?
Re:where's the knife and fork icon ? (Score:0)
No (Score:1)
Re: No (Score:1)
Agreed. +25dB Ãver 1TW.
Re:No (Score:2)
No (Score:5, Insightful)
Our patent system is broken beyond repair, you shouldn't be able to patent anything short of revolutionary. The answer is NO and Tableau is a cancer.
Re: No (Score:2)
Re:No (Score:3)
Although I agree that this chart type shouldn't be patentable, I don't agree with the "revolutionary" yardstick.
This patent should have been disallowed due to prior art. Org charts have been around for decades.
As for "revolutionary," nearly all inventions ever, are incremental, not revolutionary. The humble farm windmill, for example, has a long history of innovation, adding features that do things like turning it sideways in high winds to keep it from being destroyed in storms. We only think of it as mundane because we didn't live in the time period when all those incremental innovations were added.
The light bulb too, was developed through a series of thousands of incremental innovations.
With that said, drug makers have certainly abused the "incremental" patents, patenting changes like making a pill blue instead of some other color. That kind of nonsense ruins the system for everyone.
Re:No (Score:2)
This patent should have been disallowed due to prior art.
The problem with that is two fold:
1) The US Patent Office is regularly underfunded and subject to the whims of politicians looking for savings to give to billionaires directly. Which means the amount of time an inspector at the Patent Office has to review each patent application is ridiculously short, and hardly, if ever, done by someone who knows anything about the state of the industry.
2) Prior Art only really comes into play in practice after the patent is granted and expensive lawyers battle it out in a very particular federal court in the Eastern District of Texas. Where the local community gets oh-so-regular things like an outdoor ice skating ring right in front of said courthouse. Of course there are also those who buy patents for the sole purpose of going after those who practice them without a royalty payment.
Yes, there's corruption in the entire system. Which is why Nintendo can patent event handling in response to a collision box intersecting another collision box. Not just once but twice in succession! (Yes, that's literally the second patent if you boil away all of the legal garbage and focus on what the machine is actually doing. It's just the first patent (Pong: "ball hitting a paddle" essentially) being done multiple times in succession.) And no, there's no incentive to fix it, because everyone from the corrupt community and their ice skating ring, the politicians looking for bribes, the "business men" conducting shakedowns on entire industries, to the business men's relatives who also happen to be judges and lawyers in the same legal area, benefits from it. Well, innovation and the taxpayers suffer, but who cares about them amiright?
As for "revolutionary," nearly all inventions ever, are incremental, not revolutionary.
That's no excuse for the piss poor quality patents that have been coming out of the US Patent Office for decades. To the point that there's multiple memes for it: (X but on a computer, X but on the Internet, etc.) Nothing a computer can do is revolutionary at all, and given how fast the industry changes the term length of patents is far too long when compared to how long the usefulness of the "invention" is. Was anyone still marveling at the 8.3 character FAT filenames at the time of the patent's expiration? No. The entire industry had mostly moved on to newer filesystems, even it's patent owner, only using FAT as a compatibility layer for interop with other systems.
I'd argue that if a computer can do it, it's not patent-able period. Why? The entire point of the patent system is to document and preserve inventions for future generations by preserving and cataloging the instructions on how to make the invention. Software is simply a set of instructions written in a format for a machine to read and carry out. So the "invention" itself is it's documentation, and being sold on the market place will do far more to get those instructions into the hands of the public than any patent ever could hope to. Hell, in an ideal world this would be the end goal. Getting the instructions for how to make an invention into a machine readable format that could then be used to automatically reproduce the invention or improve upon it. Instead, because we don't live in an ideal world, we get restrictive laws banning even examination of these instructions for national security reasons. The instructions lost to time because no-one maintained the hardware that could legally read and or store them.
TL;DR: Software is a different beast. It's not the same as a physical invention, and that's partially the reason why many other countries don't honor software patents to begin with.
Re:No (Score:2)
subject to the whims of politicians looking for savings to give to billionaires directly
These are simply conspiracy theories. If this were really happening, it would be possible to name specific perpetrators.
The USPTO is not funded through tax dollars. Rather, it is funded through fees charged to applicants for trademarks and patents. Influence follows the money, so since neither Congress nor the President have money to give in order to influence its spending, that type of influence is largely eliminated.
While there is certainly plenty of corruption going around in the current administration, there is no evidence I've seen, that the dumb decisions like this one, were anything more than dumb, or de to (as you pointed out) lack of adequate funding.
I'm not arguing that the USPTO does a great job evaluating patents for things like prior art or utility. What I AM arguing, is that patents should not, in principle, be limited to revolutionary ideas.
I do agree software patents should not be a thing. Software is more properly covered by copyright, not patents.
yes (Score:0)
It is a shit idea. Monopolize shit ideas.
link to the patent is missing (Score:2)
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:3)
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:3)
A system designed to render a collapsable tree on a server
My Android menu system does that. So do UIs like Windows Device Manager, if my memory serves me correctly.
on a server and present it to the user's computing device
X11 is prior art.
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:2)
The first independent claim is not really about the UI, but about (ultimately) querying (and getting a response from) a subset of a tree constructed from a relational database based on some attributes of some of the objects at the "child nodes" of that tree. In patent law, if you do not practice ALL of the elements of such a claim, you are NOT infringing.
Notably, one of the steps in this first claim is: "determining ... partial results based on .. characteristics of the ... visited child objects, wherein the ... partial results are aggregated and stored in an intermediate table". So, this is a very particular implementation detail that presumably is used to improve query efficiency. In my reading, that is what they are counting on as the patentable subject matter.
Note that this is really easy to work around: You could store those partial results in any old data structure in memory and NOT be infringing this claim. You could then workaround using SQL to query that data structure, e.g. by making it a hash of queries (or important parts of queries) which would be used to look up these results. Also, the description (which I did not read) will give you more details about how they store it in the table. If their description is not general enough, it would be plausible to work around this even with a temp table, but with a "very different from what they describe" structure. They might try to sue you, but you could take your chances in court.
So, I don't know if this should be patentable, but THIS is what people who are skilled in the art should grapple with to answer this question.
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:3)
The claims are extremely detailed, which is what I would do if I were required to get a patent for work: make it so detailed that their is no prior art, and no one will likely ever do the same configuration again.
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:3)
I'm not going to look at the claims because that's a good way to treble damages (by committing "willful infringement"), but adding details should not be sufficient. The threshold for patentability isn't doing something for the first time, but doing something novel and not taught by prior art. Detailed claims aren't needed for that unless prior art teaches so much as to suggest that the present invention was taught by the prior art.
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:2)
A device that has A and B and C and D and E and F
Add enough letters and the patent is unique. It also becomes easy for other people to avoid violating the patent.
I'm not going to look at the claims because that's a good way to treble damages (by committing "willful infringement"),
You're just being lazy, merely hearing the title is enough, see for explanation: https://www.dority-manning.com... [dority-manning.com]
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:3)
Adding "and F (and ...)" isn't sufficient to escape prior art. There needs to be something more to establish that it wasn't an application that could be deduced by a practitioner with ordinary skill in the art based on knowledge of any prior art.
And speaking of lazy, maybe you want to find some source that (a) mentions merely knowing the title of a patent and/or (b) isn't about summary judgment in favor of a defense on willful infringement.
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:2)
Adding "and F (and ...)" isn't sufficient to escape prior art.
Obviously it was enough for this patent.
And speaking of lazy, maybe you want to find some source that (a) mentions merely knowing the title of a patent and/or (b) isn't about summary judgment in favor of a defense on willful infringement.
You're more at risk of willful infringement than I am. I read the patent, so I know how to avoid infringing the patent. You, on the other hand, put in writing that you refuse to read it, although have some idea of what is in it. If you're doing anything related to "visualizing hierarchical data," then avoiding reading the patent isn't going to help you. Living in Europe might help you.
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:2)
You're more at risk of willful infringement than I am.
This is exactly as true as your earlier claims that "You're just being lazy, merely hearing the title is enough, see for explanation" -- namely, totally false.
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:2)
But not me. I know how to avoid infringing.
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:2)
"I honestly beleave it iz better tew know nothing than two know what ainâ(TM)t so." - Josh Billings (which may have been the genesis of the modern quote that is incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain, "It ainâ(TM)t what you donâ(TM)t know that gets you into trouble. Itâ(TM)s what you know for sure that just ainâ(TM)t so.")
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:2)
It also becomes easy for other people to avoid violating the patent.
The way patents work is that an applications has letters A, B, C, D, E, and F in order to get the patent. Then the patent holder sues anyone who does A, B, C, D, E, or F; in any combination. Then they argue that not all elements need to be present at the same time to constitute patent infringement. And then, if they lose, they suffer no consequences aside from the money they put into the suit. And then they write that off as a business expense.
That this piece of shit was even considered for submission is an indictment of how horribly corrupt the patent system is. The prior art for this goes back to the first time someone needed to jot down how something was organized. Even the worn adage of, "but with a computer!" fails the prior art test for at least decades.
This application should have been immediately shit-canned, and any moron who grants it should be executed by a squad of rusty-spooned chimpanzees.
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:2)
I don't think it's corrupt. It's lazy. Patent examiners are overworked and are probably aware that what they do doesn't really matter. They're prone to rubber stamp things because it's ultimately up to a court anyway.
Is it too late ... (Score:2)
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:2)
Then the patent holder sues anyone who does A, B, C, D, E, or F; in any combination. Then they argue that not all elements need to be present at the same time to constitute patent infringement.
In this case, the patent is very clear that all of those elements do need to be present. They go out of their way in the patent to define the word "and" which is kind of unusual.
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:2)
I'm not sure why you say that. The claims are very broad, as they are in most patents. Patent claims arent "all of these things" they're "any of these things" with some limited (lol) hierarchical relationships as specified.
Usually the way it goes is that the actual person who made the thing gets to explain it to a lawyer and the lawyer draws up claims that vaguely resemble their impression of the thing in the broadest possible terms. Broad terms let you intimidate and maybe actually sue the largest variety of competitors and make your intellectual property and patent portfolio more impressive.
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:3)
On the other hand, I did look at the claims, and, well, it does seem pretty stupid. The independent claims don't actually have much more than what's in the abstract. The file history might be interesting, but not enough for me to bother digging though it.
USPTO has blocked guest access to Patent Center (Score:2)
Was surprised to learn the USPTO started blocking unregistered user access to the Patent Center on 9/11 [uspto.gov] (including file history). To become a 'verified user', the USPTO recommends submitting one's social security number and photo of your driver's license to ID.me, a private company, who will also pull data from your credit report header to complete the required verification process needed before you can request USPTO Patent Center access. The USPTO alternative is a 2+ week snail mail process requiring submission of a notarized paper form request for access to the USPTO Patent Center.
Re: USPTO has blocked guest access to Patent Cente (Score:2)
Re: USPTO has blocked guest access to Patent Cente (Score:2)
That'll keep out those darn foreigners!
Although it's a bit hard to avoid patent infringement for patents you can't know about.
Re:link to the patent is missing (Score:2)
Data Processing For Visualizing Hierarchical Data [google.com] Here you go - hopefully got the access rights correct this time!
Betteridge’s Law of Headlines (Score:2)
Well, when you put it that way... (Score:2)
It's likely Tableau's founders learned this stuff when they were taking their CS intro courses at Stanford [wikipedia.org] in the first place.
Prior art in antiquity (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Antiquity and the Middle Ages – Early Outlines
2. Medieval and Scholastic Outlines (12th–15th centuries)
3. Early Printed Encyclopedias and Tables of Contents
4. Early Modern Systems
5. Library Classification Systems
TL;DR – Earliest Examples
Re: Prior art in antiquity (Score:2)
ShatGPT missed my second year Pascal program that used recursion to traverse a tree of arbitrary depth, circa 1982.
Fair point. (Score:2)
And yes, we did something similar in uni in Pascal in the 1990s.
And yes, I did Shit a fair amount of GPT to get that summary.
But yeah, that company attempting to patent tree views is insane. Especially when they only shipped the feature in beta on 2023 and then pulled the feature.
Re:Fair point. (Score:2)
prior art? I think I drew a tree with a crayon in the first grade!!
Yeah, these guys have to be just bullshitting the system to see what they can get away with.
Hopefully, the system works well enough.
Re:Prior art in antiquity (Score:1)
Prior art in antiquity
The US is first-to-file now, not first-to-invent.
Examples of usage like you show is called "prior art" which has no legal weight for anything.
None of your examples include patent filings, now required to challenge a patent.
The prior patent filing also has to be within 20 years of "now" (the 23rd actually)
So even if your examples actually were patented in the US, your newest example of 1897* would have expired in 1917 and available to patent again anytime after 1994
*(Apologies if I glossed over and missed a more recent year)
No (Score:2)
There is obviously prior art, so it's not patentable. Since we are seeing more and more of these malicious attempts to patent common practices, I would propose that the patent authority can issue penalties for it. Like, let them issue a fine up to 5 percent of the business' turnover of something for really egregious behaviour like this. Make them feel it.
As it is now, there is no reason not to try, which is kinda ridiculous.
Re:No (Score:2)
There is obviously prior art, so it's not patentable.
Too late:
Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted
Patent clerks used to be smart [wordpress.com] and familiar with the state of the art. Not so much anymore, I guess.
Re:No (Score:2)
I'm sure the so-called "DOGE" only helped solve that problem...
https://www.ipla.com/news/doge... [ipla.com]
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No. (Score:2)
Bread Browning Patent a.k.a. Toast (Score:3)
Abstract: This groundbreaking invention tackles the age-old crisis of bread being too soft, too edible, and frankly too boring. By blasting bread with weaponized levels of heat until it cries out in crispy anguish, this system produces what humanity calls "toast." Said toast can then be smeared with salted fats, sticky fruits, or whichever condiment is least expired in one’s fridge. The invention supersedes all prior methods of “leaving bread near fire and hoping for the best.”
Comment removed (Score:0)
Re:Prior art gallery (Score:3)
Re:Prior art gallery (Score:0)
FFS, They are trying to tell their story and how it applies to this.
I've seen this before (Score:3)
It's called an "org chart."
Oh wait this is an org chart "with a computer."
What am I missing here?
Re:I've seen this before (Score:2)
Sounds like SalesForce found for their AI to do (Score:0)
prompt : write me 1 million patent applications and see if one gets through.
They added.., (Score:2)
â¦On a computer
Patent granted.
so, they want to patent ls ? (Score:2)
for real, they want control of the directory! this is b u l l s h i t.
Link to Patent (Score:0)
https://patents.google.com/pat... [google.com]
- 85 patent citations
- 3 top level claims
- This reads almost identical to the concept of dynamic groups in an LDAP, with some visualization sprinkled in
I'm genuinely struggling to determine what is "unique" and "novel" about this particular patent. Others care to chime in?
Rene Descartes has prior art (Score:2)
no patents for software should exist (Score:1)
Just like a million or more of others, who have done the same, I have personally, singlehandedly used the same exact principles and techniques to construct in a dynamic manner, not only visual representations of parent/child relationships as visual trees, but created entire systems that relied on these concepts for both, reporting and control.
I am absolutely capable of displaying my work, results of my work, people using result of my work, my work used in production on daily basis. I built a retail management system back in 2009-2013 and it is in use today as well, where data was described as master product (a representation of what a product is), an actual product instance (sku), incoming product orders and incoming product order items, etc.etc.etc.etc.etc. it is large and complex enough to spend many hours to go over it.
In any case, to be able to see data from all sorts of different perspectives, to analyze it, to understand what must be ordered, what sells, what doesn't, to filter data, to report, to control it for purposes of ordering, changing prices, creating lists of discounts, everything that a retail chain needs to do to be able to survive in a retail chain market.
A master product can be labeled with a record called 'label'. A label can be typified, because we may want to create *dynamic* representations and views. So for example labels can be of type 'supplier' or of type 'brand' or of type 'subbrand', etc.
A filtering system was created that allowed *LEVELS* of filters to be arranged, creating *DYNAMIC* ordering of *NODES* within *TREES* of labels and then master products or product instances (sku) could be selected from the database in a way that corresponded to the tree representation of the labels.
So a tree of labels became a template, with levels of the nodes being grouped by label types and then the products were arranged based on this template and all of a sudden you could use this grouping to understand the flow of products and the flow of money, purchases (incoming orders), sales (receipts), numbers of receipts and of individual products bought or returned or lost or whatever.
On the webpage or in an excel file this data was represented in either table format (very very similar to the figures and pictures attached in this story) or in an actual *TREE* format, where one could drill down as deep as needed.
I kid you not, I would be perfectly happy to participate in any lawsuit against any patent office or a company to prevent any such patent from being issued. ANY FUCKING PROGRAMMER would figure this out if they are mildly awake or even slight less than creative, it is absolute nonsense that we even have to entertain a possibility that this stuff can be patented, this is bullshit. Search trees, sort trees, visual trees, whatever trees, they are obvious simple data constructs and must be left alone without assholes trying to make money on suing people for stuff that is as obvious as the air we all breath (together with these assholes, unfortunately).
Before 2009-2013 I had a variety of projects, where trees were used as well, I built silly things like XML file editors, fucking XML to describe logic that was then converted by a piece of code I built to generate java code from that XML. The XML was a fucking tree, I built an editor so that an insurance company rep could fill in the data within XML nodes to describe logic (don't ask me why, this was 2001-2002 or something).
Before that I had to work with data sets from AT&T that were loaded from mainframes in order to create normal parseable file sets that were sent to rebiller companies, with the records that were at some point represented as tree nodes in levels. That was 1997 I think. Fuck. Before that I wrote tools for myself to study languages, English and French, long ago, where sentences and words in different languages were structured as tree nodes, with multiple crossing tree structures corresponding to different grammar rules.
Fucking hell.
YES (Score:2)
"So, do you think Tableau should be awarded a patent in 2025 on a concept that has roots in circa-1921 Sunburst charts and tree algorithms taught to first-year CS students in circa-1975 Data Structures courses?"
Absolutely, as long as they also accept my patenting the letter "e" and my groundbreaking idea of "making things hotter or colder by using electricity".
Pay me, bitches!!
Link to Full Patent Document (PDF) (Score:2)
Data Processing For Visualizing Hierarchical Data [google.com]
Re: Link to Full Patent Document (PDF) (Score:2)
I can already go to my relational DB of choice, and query across multiple databases, and pretty much anything that exposes data in a ODBC compliant sort of way, and I can already visualize the resulting data sets in a number of different way, including a visual tree or graph view.
Did I miss something while skimming through those 30-odd pages in 5 minutes?
Simple answer: no (Score:2)
This is one of those "practitioner skilled in the art" kind of things. We've had SQL and UML for ages that use and visualize parent-child relationships. Once you know them, this is an obvious application for making queries about the relationships. Given how ubiquitous trees of various kinds are, I doubt their specific implementation is particularly novel.
What the hell? (Score:2)
I did code something pretty much like that 20 or 30 years ago. Simple, yes. Coded on a weekend to experiment with a graph drawing library. But the thing in this patent? Yes, as far as I can see.
Look at Others Saleforce Patents--pure absurdity (Score:2)
Look at the long list of utterly absurd Salesforce patents. It is hard to find a single one that could be even arguably unique. It is mostly just a list of common things any and typically every CRM does. I looked through these long ago and saw--at a glance--what a joke it is. Yes. The patent system is near completely dysfunctional, even after so many reforms. Nobody in government seems to care.
Just understand this: A major part of any business plan is legal. Contracts, leases, or patents are not, in and of themselves, any form of protection. It's about what you can defend or strike back with financially or the realistic threat thereof. Legal documents like these are often just a way to sucker people into deals thinking they are two-sided.
These thing rarely even continue to a judge's ruling. It's about who can intimidate and cost the other more in the process. It's about bleeding your opponent.
Old hat (Score:1)
Back in the Dark Ages of 40-odd years ago, when I studied Computer Science, I can remember that as well as the more widely discussed, and used, Relational Databases, we did also briefly touch on Hierarchical Databases -- which would seem to be very close to what Salesforce is attempting to patent.
I'd suggest that the likelihood of Prior Art not existing for this idea is zero.
Grant Now, Challenge Later (Score:2)
The Patent Office recognizes that it is impossible to have the broad range of in-depth experts needed to review patents. (They don't have people who can even really understand the patents, let alone figure out if the subject was taught by prior art known to everybody in the particular field.)
The policy is to grant any patent that meets a few syntactic requirements. If the patent should not have been granted, then it can be challenged by someone who gives a fuck. It is EXTREMELY difficult and expensive to mount a challenge to a patent. So the incentive is for corporations to patent any/everything they can imagine, grant the patent, and see if there is a more moneyed corporation with incentive to go to war to undo the bad patent after the fact.
The process is explicitly about who is willing to spend more money on a given patent. And it is heavily biased towards the corporation filing the patent initially.
Patent Office: "Fuck everyone. Let free market capitalism sort it out. We can't sort it. Nobody can. And this is all about money, anyway. The monopolies can battle each other. Not our problem. If you're not a powerful monopoly who can financially stand against whatever monopoly has the patent already, well, fuck right off. Nobody can judge this shit, certainly not us."
Re:Grant Now, Challenge Later (Score:2)
Having a Patent Office that can actually review a patent and understand the state of the art was possible early in the history of industrial technology. A new kind of wheelbarrow, a radio, or even an industrial chemical process, could be understood by a group of subject matter experts. But modern technology -- digital and computer technology especially -- is too vast and too hard.
Consequently, after failing at it in the late 1970s thru the mid 1980s, the Patent Office just gave up. I believe they even officially admitted their new position and policy.
USPTO is now just a clerkship that rubber stamps patents if they meet some syntactic requirements. The theory is to let the patent holders (only monopolies can really play this game) battle it out with each other. The public is not directly involved, except in the sense that those corporations may be on the Stock Exchange.
Challenging a patent is an extremely costly and risky proposition, so the challenging corporation has to really give a fuck. Mostly they don't actually get money: they settle by cross-licensing other patents. Because (since anything can be patented), both sides have. massive portfolio, and surely the other guy is also infringing on something, too. Non-mega-monopolies need not apply: the patent game is about granding monopolies, after all. Little Guys can sell out to a big rich monopoly if they want to play the game. It was never about anything other than money, and that means that the Patent realm is necessarily about Big Money.
Re:Grant Now, Challenge Later (Score:2)
The patent office gets paid when someone files for a patent. They get paid when someone gets granted a patent. They get paid when someone does the research to challenge a patent. They get paid when someone challenges a patent. Etc etc. The whole system is set up to incentivize granting as many patents as possible because that produces revenues, and not to do meaningful review first because that costs money.
AI and Patents (Score:2)
What I wonder is how this will work when people start submitting unprecedented amounts of patent applications written from generative "AI". Perhaps the cost of the submission process will still be able to limit the submissions.
The other approach will be to use AI to review the patents. You'll just have to get your application past an LLM for it to be granted. (And we know how well these "AI" programs are able to "reason" about cause and effect, logic, physics, and stuff.)
fuck no (Score:2)
I've been using lists to visualize the hierarchy of files and folders for 3 decades. they can fuck right off.
and don't forget, NeXTstep had the Mac-Style extend the folders to the right to display hierarchies in the late 1980's
Maybe someone should tell IBM about this (Score:2)
DL/1. DB/2
Hell, I *wrote* a database system in the mid-eighties, and if I'd ever converted it from basica (don't ask) to C, Oracle would be 2nd tier.
All hierarchical.
As a patent creator; heck no (Score:1)
I have a couple of hierarchical data system related patents to my name. Should my patents exist? Maybe. I'm not a fan of software and idea patents. However, as the world currently works we kind of had to file. The ideas, code, and algorithms are novel and have been a demonstrable differentiation for our business compared to competitors.
What they are showing here in this patent filing isn't novel or innovative. There are also literally decades of prior art to counter it also.
No (Score:2)