Don't hate the player, hate the game.
We need real, substantive patent reform in this country.
B) This is not the game. As Fred Wilson explains, web company patents have been thought of as defensive. If this triggers a wave of patent lawsuit bullshit, then everybody will end up poorer. Except the lawyers, of course.
Just remember though that right now the pharmaceutical companies are massively outspending the technology sector as far as lobbying Congress. (A Senator is a wonderful thing --- everyone should own one!)
As a Google employee I can contribute to Google NetPAC. I'm not sure what opportunities exist towards donations to organizations that directly lobby Congress. The EFF is an advocacy organization, which is a good start, but they are not a lobbying organization per se.
It's a horrible system and it's not a productive way to use money as far as society is concerned, but unfortunately, it's the way the game is structured, and if you don't play the game, you'll get run over by those who do....
Take this absurd Facebook patent as an example
>System and method for dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network (US2008040673).
While the situation is different, as Facebook aren't suing anyone (yet), we can imagine if the roles were reversed, the story might be a little different. Why else would they file for patents if their intent wasn't to defend "their ideas."
If we're calling out Yahoo's patents as junk, we should be doing the same for facebook and the rest, otherwise we're turning a bad system of "who dunnit first" into an even worse one, a popularity contest.
As the original article said, most SV web companies claim to file patents as a defensive measure - so if they get sued by someone else, they can hit back. Suing first is extremely bad form.
> If we're calling out Yahoo's patents as junk, we should be doing the same for facebook and the rest
I don't see anyone saying that Facebook's patents are fine and Yahoo!'s are junk - Yahoo! are being criticised because they're attempting to enforce their junk patents. If Facebook attempted to force theirs they would get exactly the same flack for it.
Facebook has a lot to lose if it is perceived that Yahoo can hurt them, now that they are going public. Which is exactly why Yahoo is doing that, and why they did exactly the same thing when google went public.
Then you are demanding that the board neglect its fiduciary responsibilities and go to jail.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3698637
I'm sure that it has a lot of problems, but we need to start having the discussion of how to fix the system, instead of just whether or not it needs fixing.
Long story short, kill patents, kill copyright, keep trademark.
Yes, current patent law is broken, but that doesn't mean that Y! have to use it. If this was a defensive move against a patent claim from Facebook, I'd have some sympathy. But as far as I can tell, it isn't. So I don't.
And you can be sure that companies once they have lots of patents will lobby mercilessly to keep the current "game" in place. Who wants to stop playing when they feel they are winning?
Apart from some sudden massive outbreak of sanity, there is no way out.
This player will most likely also lobby aggressively to thwart any attempts at reforming the patent system since it is one of its few remaining sources of revenue.
It may take all out war, and an overwhelming of the legal v startup ecosystem, before sense returns. Akin to the opinion piece in the NYTimes "Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System" over the weekend.
1) A pharma company spends $1B on R&D to develop a drug and get FDA approval. If someone could knock off the resulting compound at 10 cents per pill, we wouldn't have the drug.
2) Software companies, where there are hundreds of potential patents to file or infringe on, and there is tons of iterative evolution.
Seriously, where is the moral imperative that says "Thou Shalt Not Patent Troll"?
In case you missed it, it's the players who make the game and keep it running - a self-sustaining spiral of endless bullshit.
If you want to oppose software patents - and you should - then be consistent about it. Either forego them entirely, or require via contract that they be used only defensively. The latter is the approach taken by my employer, BTW, who also spends more money than anyone else fighting software patents. As schizophrenic as that strategy might seem, I believe it's the right one for the crazy world we live in.
Maybe YOUR stone-age, backward-ass VC thinks that startups should generate patents, but don't tar Fred Wilson with that brush.
I also suspect that startups capable of the sophistication StackExchange brings to the selection of a VC are a distinct minority.
This bad logic is what you are applying here.
More to the point, these patents are objectively BS. Go look at the claims. There is not a single, novel claim among the whole lot, and you could probably pay a college kid an hour's wage to find prior art on every single one of them.
Software patents are problematic, but only because of the general features of the patent process and the fiduciary responsibilities of boards of directors to their shareholders.
It doesn't matter at all whether Fred's firm does this. Union Square Ventures isn't suing Facebook either, that's another behavior they're not engaging in. They're also not actually coding software.
What matters is that Fred wrote a seething post about the patent system without mentioning how many if not most bogus patents get created in the first place - at the urging of the other guys on his side of the table.
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2006/04/patently_absurd.html
If you're letting them spend your money on filing patents without any kind of binding commitment to use them only in defense, and there's plenty of evidence at USPTO that your portfolio companies are still doing just that, then you're not clearly any different than any other VC in that regard.
This madness will not stop until there's more retaliatory capability than first-strike, and that won't happen as long as there's money pouring into the acquisition of first-strike weapons. Those who fund the stockpiling are culpable, no matter what they say as they're doing it.
http://www.usv.com/2010/02/software-patents-are-the-problem-...
Of course it is not clear if he lives up to that stance in all cases (http://www.usv.com/investments/) , but I read CPlatypus' statement more as pointing out the structural problem.
"None of them represent unique and new ideas at the time of the filing. I supect they all can be thrown out over prior art if Facebook takes the time and effort to do that."
I do think that pre- IPO this is a pretty dirty play. You might have a point if you can show a case where Fred Wilson or VC's sues other companies right before an IPO on bogus patents...I am not aware of any such instance.
Is it a bit dirty to do this immediately pre-IPO? Yeah, I think so, even absent other concerns. But Fred's comments go far beyond these specific patents at this specific time. He talks about a very general "unspoken line" that web companies shouldn't cross. It's the general statement I object to, not the specific one.
BTW, you're taking a lot of heat in this thread that you don't deserve. I work at a VC funded startup (with USV as an investor no less) and I basically agree with you.
To answer your question, of course IANAL but the way to do this is to assign the patents to an external entity such as http://www.patentcommons.org/ or http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/, where that entity has a charter allowing only defensive use - and preferably with other entities involved to enforce that charter. A public statement like http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html doesn't hurt either, though it's not legally binding. Now, PC or OIN might not be the exact right vehicle for you, for other reasons, but that's the basic approach.
Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, which is a strong proponent of this approach and supporter of these organizations. Until software patents go away - and Red Hat is supporting that effort too - this is the only way to play the game that is both safe and (IMO) moral.
That's the strangest part. I never found Yahoo useful for anything (except Douglas Crockford, but he could have been employed anywhere).
I mainly use it to correct strangeness in sites' RSS offerings. For example, BBC iPlayer offers feeds for channels but not per show (?!), and Penny Arcade doesn't offer a feed for just the comic without the news posts.
Also, nba.yahoo.com has a better layout than nba.com itself for following stats and even following the games live (a really well-done java applet).
Finally, I've been playing around with switching search engines from Google to something else, and I found for most tech stuff, Yahoo! actually has more relevant search results than Bing or DDG.
> None of them represent unique and new ideas at the time of the filing. I supect they all can be thrown out over prior art if Facebook takes the time and effort to do that.
Also, even the article that he links to just quotes the damn abstracts of the patents, as if that has anything to do with what they cover.
Honestly people, I know you like to rail against software patents and the patent system in general... but educate yourselves first, or you just come off looking ignorant to anyone who knows the first thing about patents.
No one needs to be "educated" in the intricate and fascinating political and economic power dynamics of the Third Reich to have a valid opinion about Hitler. All they need to know is that Hitler killed the Jews and was evil.
Similarly, no one posting here needs to know anything about the technical details of patentology, a subject in which I suspect you're quite expert, to know that the patent system is evil and needs to be eradicated from the earth - like Hitler.
Does that make you a bad person? Fact is, a lot of good people worked for Hitler. But at a certain point, they all had to reevaluate their career choices. I can only hope you'll do the same.
> The best lack all conviction, while the worst
> Are full of passionate intensity.
http://www.google.com/patents/US7406501?printsec=claims&...
The abstract doesn't define the patent. The claims are what defines the patent, in combination with the notes in the patent file which can often limit the claims even further.
Yahoo is claiming a specific method of seamlessly converting an instant message communication into an email one, not the general concept. Claim 1 narrows the claims from that general case immediately.
Notwithstanding the foreseeability of patent warfare, I remain despondent toward "unwritten rules" in American law. Yes, they exist; it's no surprise that defendants in criminal cases who assert their 6th Amendment rights to a speedy trial that they subsequently lose will suffer a heightened penalty. The seminal case on this subject, Bordenkircher v. Hayes, specifically endorses threats of stiffer sentences to entice criminal defendants to waive their right to trial and plead guilty to a lesser offense. One can model this as a game of imperfect information, with society reaping the rewards.
So the author's reliance on this de facto "rule not to litigate" is flawed. The real problem arises when companies exclude others from practicing a technology in which that company's property interest is a mere subterfuge. Rarely do companies practice the technologies for which they've secured patent protection, and that brings me to my last Thomas Jefferson quote:
A man has a right to use a saw, an axe,
a plane, separately; may he not combine
their uses on the same piece of wood?
He has a right to use his knife to cut
his meat, a fork to hold it; may a
patentee take from him the right to
combine their use on the same subject?
Such a law, instead of enlarging our
conveniences, as was intended, would
most fearfully abridge them, and crowd
us by monopolies out of the use of the
things we have.
So in my view, the solution isn't at the corporate level; it's at the national level. As such, patent reform should be a national issue addressed by politicians. Patent term length [c|sh]ould be proportional to the research expenses actually incurred. Alternatively, we might want want a "patent abandonment doctrine" that moves to public domain those patents whose rights haven't been enforced (almost like in trademark law). Even still, we might want to wholly abandon the right to transfer or sell patents (and for that matter, all intellectual property) entirely. I haven't researched the ramifications of these potential solutions, so they're offered merely as points for discussion.
And also historically ignorant. Yahoo did the same thing to Google when they went public in 2004. Somehow the world didn't end.
Overture, a completely different company, sued Google in 2002, two years before their IPO.
Yahoo purchased Overture in 2003. After this, Google settled.
Google's IPO wasn't until 2004.
I absolutely agree. if you're the CEO of a publicly traded company, it is your fiduciary duty to extract value from the company's assets.
Exhibit #1: Sun Microsystems
if Sun had the cojones to sue Google (re: Java/Android) they'd still be in business today.
Yahoo! could be aiming to be acquired by Facebook or Google.
Assuming the patents involved are tenable, this looks rather like a viable reverse-acquisition strategy.
Thanks. Now that I understand your reasoning, I have no problem with the title. FWIW, I wish I could delete my comment, but unfortunately that's no longer possible.
So: suggestions for a social photo archive service which is reliable enough to be the "master copy" of my pictures, and preferably has Flickr import ability?
Unfortunately, I don't believe they have the ability to automatically import your Flickr photos.
They are not stagnant, improving all the time. Not as big as flickr, but big enough and reliable.
I used both imgur pro and flickr but now I only use flickr because I am too lazy to switch.
But for a different reason: It allows a "catch all" email, so I register on every site as <sitedomain.com>@vekslers.org and have my account act as a catch all sink. This allows me to both filter out spamming sources and trace back who leaked my email address to 3rd party sources. This approach is a pivot on the name+tag@domain.com email tagging which most js form validations devs are unaware of it being a legal email syntax and thus do not allow.
This relives me of the need to worry to post my email address, which is news.ycombinator.com_3698017@vekslers.org out in the open (true emails are very much welcome).
From Apple device?
Why would it be ok for Yahoo and other big companies to use patents "only" to threaten small shops and keep the status quo?
Let them fight between eachother, let Yahoo sue Facebook sue Gooogle sue Microsoft sue Apple sue HTC sue Samsung sue Sony sue Oracle sue ... let everyone sue everyone else. Let the total war on patents begin. Let the big players burn a ton of money on pointless legal battles. And then, and only then, they might push for a patent reform which will level playing field for all players, including new ones.
Further, whether patent system needs "reform in this country" is relevant to the fact that one part believes other part infringe. If Yahoo!, Facebook or anyone else feels someone infringe and ended up saying "oh they system is broken lets wait until its fixed", then they may as well wait another 75 years.
I say good things can come up from this, especially if Yahoo! loses. Facebook is claiming that what they are being sued over was "nothing new" at that time. Cool! Have them win. Next time someone build highly successful social website with human connections done based on request/approve/reject, and Facebook will try to shut them down based on infringe of one of their hundreds of patents, you can say: "oh, none of this was new at the time of Facebook: MySpace, Fridndster, etc. Here, I am using Facebook own rules - they win, I need to win too".
Tech companies do not make their living by exploiting their patents directly (as e.g. pharma companies do). They make living from advertising to their userbase. They do patent some things they use to keep and monetize that usebase, but there is no direct relation.
So: Of course they should not sue "by default". It just isn't a winning strategy for them.
Okay then.
The program is that is a ridiculously crude measure. Like measuring programmer output by lines of code, this idea that measuring innovation at such a micro level even makes sense, needs to die.
Is not that crazy to assume this may actually be a last-resort strategy to sell Yahoo once and for all. Most agree Yang dropped the ball when he refused MSFT's offer.
I had hopes the new CEO would try to turn Yahoo around. I don't believe in shitty display advertising long-term, but it could be viable for another 5 years. At least, I had confidence he could fire enough Directors and VPs to make Yahoo at least as innovative as eBay (also not a particular paragon in Silicon Valley), and I was hoping Yahoo's boardmembers would start actually acting in the interests of shareholders.
I guess I was wrong.
http://www.m-cam.com/patently-obvious/intellectual-property-...
If everyone really just uses patents for the threat of a possible lawsuit, is it still worth having them, even if you hope to never use one?
"They are dead to me. Dead and gone. I hate them now"
to:
"Yahoo Crosses The Line"
Curious about the reason this was done.
And where was Fred when MS started its shit?
Oh effing come one now, lets have a honest conversation Fred instead of some lame miss-direction..
Patents are a game that's a lot like Poker.
I couldn't blame any startup for accumulating a patent portfolio because that's something of economic value -- it could help an acquisition because a larger company would like to put together a broad portfolio.
So long as you can get value out of it that way, it's all roses. Once you get to a lawsuit, it's ugly, largely because the result is unpredictable -- if people settle out of court you get the desired result, but if your opponent can fight you to the end, you're very likely to end up with invalidated patents. That, of course, is why companies like this broad portfolios -- if there are ten patents involved, it's much more likely something will stick.
Wait... Is he still talking about the facebook lawsuit?
The article links to the description of the patents http://paidcontent.org/article/419-meet-the-10-patents-yahoo... and tries to summarize each one in "plain English."
> Control for enabling a user to preview display of selected > content based on another user’s authorization level (Filed > 2005, Issued 2009) > In plain English: Share an item only with selected friends
This is actually about a preview of what a given user (friend) would see.
The reason software patents suck so hard is because for every 10,000 totally bogus patents there's one that when you read it makes you think, wow, that really is an invention.
Probably the reason for this post in fact.