At least if it doesn't encourage those behind f.lux to continue beneficial activities (promoting the benefit of redshifted screen use) then it should encourage others to develop health focussed apps in the hope of getting paid?
FWIW I use redshift.
Changing a pallete was a solved problem. "Doing something when it's a time" was a solved problem. But if you change a CLUT "becuase it's a time" your software belongs to someone else. It seems like the only innvoation here is observing a need discovered by health researchers, and patenting the existing components of the solution before someone else does.
I'm would find it a bit suprising if someone on HN really thought that changing a CLUT because of the time is so hard that no one could figure out how without the promise of a government granted monopoly on the idea.
I will hasten to add that actually implementing, marketing, and maintaining a real life multi-platform proprietary solution sounds hard, in the sense of being plenty of work, and I think lots of people would gladly pay for that service.
The question we should be asking is: where is the public good in the government intervening to reduce competition in this space by creating a new abstract property right?
All patents are for ideas, in order to acquire a patent you have to give details of how to perform it - how to create a product/device or how to work a system/method to use the idea - but patents are not given for products per se.
I'm not that familiar with pharma patents but the few I've seen were quite abstract, they make claims that cover many different chemicals rather than one "product" (this when attached to that group; this when attached to some other group; etc.).
That said I was specifically responding to the [paraphrasing] "you have to pay them to be healthier if they patent the medically beneficial method/technique/device/drug" - which is true for all companies holding healthcare patents that they don't give free licenses on.
WRT the particular product you do it a disservice - yes changing things at a time were known, yes changing colour palettes were known but there is synergy in the idea of removing blue light elements from a monitor gradually as dusk passes in order to prevent the negative effects of blue light on people and the method of changing a CLUT to achieve this end forms more than just a colocation of known ideas.
One argument in this sort of situation has always been quite powerful to me - if it was so obvious then it would have been done, the need was known, the individual concepts were available. Almost every idea seems obvious post hoc.
Software patents don't have to include code, and generally are not useful to a skilled practitioner in actually creating software. The are written in legalese by persons incentivized to seek as boad a claim as possible, while revealing as little usefully information as possible.
>> if it was so obvious then it would have been done
By this reasoning every new product should be protected by a monopoly. Sometimes how to do something is obvious, but no one wanted to do it before.
The question should be whether treating every new situation as an oportunity for government sponsored property grab is good for society, or just the first guy to file.
A huge number software developers get sued because they wrote software that violated a patent they had never heard of for a "business method" type of task, but "with a computer". There are hundreds of thousands of software patents, so it's not possible to read them all before selling software to make sure one hasn't infringed, assuming one could actually be sure without simply defending a trial. The reason there are so many lawsuites is because it WAS obvious, and lots of people did the same thing without ever hearing of the patent untill they got sued.
I'm guessing that your not a programmer who's read any software patents. I have never met one who has that did not agree that the contents of software patents were obfuscated and worthless for creating a storehouse of usefull knowlegde that benefits society, what is the constituionally mandated purpose of patents in the first place.
