It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape and hands control of our culture over to those with the financial mean to claim to own it.
The day we wrest back that control will be a good day.
The problem here isn't that patents exist, intellectual property protection is critical to investment and research. The issue here is two fold:
1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cover. Tech patents, however, are so broad and require so little actual material science that the "protect the investment" part doesn't add up.
2. Patent offices couldn't keep up with the rapid rate of technical advancement and may have granted overly-broad patents for what we would now consider rather general topics. The only effective way to invalidate these patents is expensive and lengthy court proceedings — which is fair, if you think about it, you wouldn't want your rights taken away without a defence. But when weaponised, it can count-intuitively stifle the innovation it was trying to protect.
What we need is a better criteria and definition of IP which better suits modern industry.
> 1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cover. Tech patents, however, are so broad and require so little actual material science that the "protect the investment" part doesn't add up.
Citation needed. I know of many patents that are side discoveries of R&D that was done anyway. It's a myth that others could easily undercut a company doing the research, the inertia of expertise of employees, processes etc. is typically much better at holding of the competition. None of the successful technology companies made their business by patenting. The example of pharma is often brought up, but it's actually a very good counter-example, when pharma companies first developed, it was the Swiss and German companies which dominated and there was very little (Germany) or no (Switzerland) patent protection for pharmaceuticals.
Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering.
In exchange you got a plastic puzzle piece to put on your desk. There's nothing more embarrassing to me than seeing a large number of those puzzle pieces in someone's care. You stood in the way of progress in service of Jeff Bezos? Awful.
Yet, California forbids the non-competes, because it promotes competition and at least somewhat eases capital lock-ins (i.e. two dudes in a garage can start competing with "big ones"). I don't really see much difference with patents here.
Remember early Facebook infra looked very similar to Google, they had to get creative to make new names for internal projects clones of Google ones.
I agree with the gist of your comment, but a fundamental issue with patents is that your investment in research can be destroyed if someone else independently did overlapping research and filed first.
The last 600 years is a rounding error in the history of humans. Imagine if the different methods of lighting a fire were patented. Those humans also burned witches and imprisoned people for criticizing the church.
We would have a better world if our goal was progress for all over profit for a few.
Compare that to something like AWS and the equation is basically flipped. Figuring out what to do is not that difficult compared to actually doing it, Amazon could probably open source all of their cloud offerings tomorrow and outside a handful of very capable actors, implementing another AWS would be next to impossible.
Lots of things in tech are flipped on their head like that, you can describe the idea and functions of Uber at a high level on a back of a napkin, but good luck actually implementing and doing so successfully.
That's why personally I think patents should be abolished in the tech space, they just don't help anyone except the owners of the patent but they don't help in the way people actually intended it to. Here it's not like Cove lost out on being a huge cloud player because Amazon stole the idea behind S3 and DynamoDB, they just "own" the idea and are trying to extract money from Amazon.
The legal definition of novelty and obviousness is nonsensical. The duration is far too long. The USPTO does a terrible job of screening for quality. The court enforcement is little more than a high-stakes game of chance.
Some argue that this will effectively kill R&D, because the second you've created something - others would start reverse engineering, and copy the product. In some areas, like pharma, R&D is notoriously expensive, and the pharma companies have only that many years to recoup all that cost, before their patent runs out.
Would it lead to more money spent on making reverse engineering difficult? Both the products, and the manufacturing process.
Patents are a two-way street where society gets something in exchange for granting a limited-duration monopoly.
Reverse engineering is not needed - it's time-consuming, expensive and error-prone.
The large incumbents would simply poach away key people and have that R&D in a month!
As much as some people hate to admit it, intellectual property laws have their place. Are they perfect? Not in my opinion! But, things would be worse without enforced intellectual property laws.
Some argue that nothing gets done if somebody doesn't get capital gains for it. This is of course empirically flat out false.
(unless authors are supposed to make almost 100% of their incomes from touring and live shows, as the overwhelming sentiment on hn is towards musicians)
I'd argue the opposite. It has been one of the primary driving forces behind human progress for the past 300-400 years. The world today would be a much bleaker and more miserable place if IP rights never became a thing.
Imagine writing or any type of content creation without copyright. Even after the printing press was invented it was basically impossible to make a living only from writing without being independently wealthy, having some rich patron or a daytime job. Publishing any new content was risky and generally unprofitable, it would either flop or if it didn't other publishers would start printing it without giving you a dime.
Without IP rights innovating only makes sense if you're large corporation and have a moat or you're funded by someone else (state/universities/etc.). For any small to medium business it would mean that you would incur all of the costs and couldn't compete with others which would steal your tech as soon as it becomes public.
Of course there is a point where it might start stifling innovation and we might be already past it but that's a bit like calling for air travel to be banned because of the whole Boeing debacle etc.
We see innovation in open source every day from small startups, from various sized communities, and from hobbyists.
That said, the startup selling IP model works somewhat in the pharma sector, but that's patents, and you mentioned books, where the whole IP regulation game got abso-fucking-lutely captured by the industry (with their ridiculous 100+ years of copyright).
Modern engineers of varying sorts can reverse engineer basically any process and underpaid employees who know the secrets can be easily poached. Therefore, the entire concept of patents existing for the sake of disclosure falls flat on its face.
The point of a patent is that a company can share something without it being immediately used by their competition, who didn't have to do the RnD, and now obviously can undercut them.
The problem is that the patent system is largely gamed and exists to a significant extent to drag your opponents and random companies into multi million dollar lawsuits over the most flimsy excuse of a research result.
I'm would not argue that patents are the cause of this rapid pace of innovation, but the data does not come anywhere close to supporting your claim.
This is a strong claim, without any evidence to support it.
In fact, a look at the historical record, as others have pointed out, very much shows an extremely strong correlation between intellectual property rights and technological development. Sure, this is merely correlation, but that's certainly better than a strong claim without any evidence.
I'm curious though, if intellectual property was no longer a thing, which industries would need to be completely restructured. Some rather important ones, I would say. Journalism, in my mind, being at the top of the list. Not that it would be impossible, but the implications would very much be profound. I'm not sure what such a world would look like, but the transition would likely be rather difficult. Maybe it would work out better in the end? Who knows!?
https://annas-archive.org/search?q=against+intellectual+mono...
If IP was more important then the lawsuit probably would've gathered more than half a percent of Amazon's revenue for something that was '"essential" to the ability of Amazon's cloud-computing arm to "store and retrieve massive amounts of data."'
IP doesn't feel great but it feels a lot better than having every bit of research be a trade secret.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7103640B1/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7233978B2/en
I really hope Kove loses, I don't know too much about networking, but a few header fields don't really seem patentworthy to me.
I have no idea if there was prior art or how close the procedure they describe was to known storage algorithms in 2000 when the application was made, so I'm not saying this is a valid patent, but it doesn't seem like a completely frivolous patent to me at first glance.
Of course, if indeed AWS came to a very similar implementation themselves, as the jury found, then that further suggests that the idea is not that novel.
The next of claims seemed to begin to regurgitate the previous ones with some indiscerbable minute difference.
None of this sounds novel. I read another of their patents where they invented a directory backed DNS service and web browser connections. This company sounds like one massive troll.
If this covered separate store networks, then maybe that’s somewhat unique, but that’s not a far leap for me.
Even if there was nothing closer to this than DNS I don't think this patent should be valid.
That wouldn't matter if AWS came to the very similar implementation on their own, after the Plaintiff's patent was issued (and became public information). Patent, unlike copyright, does not allow for independent invention/creation. If you come to, on your own, something already covered in a patent during its term, then you infringe.
https://ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/7...
I'm not a patent lawyer, just a programmer, but reading just the abstract, this seems to be covering a DNS system that can be configured via an API, which I guess does cover S3, but also, like, almost every other domain-related thing?
The rest is just this principle as pure software or as a hardware appliance with pre-installed software, and with a GUI to control the object mappings. But the central idea seems to be the OO aspect.
Edit: also, this doesn't seem to be the right patent. Another poster cites three different patents, one with a similar number to this one (the correct patent is 7,814,170, the one you cite is 7,814,180).
> as follows: (a) On Count 1 of plaintiff’s complaint, finding infringement by defendant of U.S. Patent No. 7,814,180; (b) On Count 2 of plaintiff’s complaint, finding infringement by defendant of U.S. Patent No. 7,233,978; (c) On Count 3 of plaintiff’s complaint, finding infringement by defendant of U.S. Patent No. 7,103,640.
-Verdict ( https://tmsnrt.rs/49wWwvB )
The patent I listed was Count 1.
However, other online sources ( https://casetext.com/case/kove-io-inc-v-amazon-web-servs-3 ) list patent 7814170 instead of 180, so the verdict form may have gotten it wrong?
But we realized if we feed the troll massive amounts of money then they can come back and pay more legal fees and create a need for our worthless court!
Also the life of the startup entrepreneur is just too easy these days. They need to feel more stress that at any moment some rando from Florida can come in crush what they've been working on the last 7 years.
software patents in general are a bad idea imho, go trade secret and never let the ideas enter the public domain.
otoh
society benefits a lot from good ideas entering the public domain, and the patent system is fairly effective at stopping everyone keeping their secret sauce a secret.
Since the US has them, and this decision seems fairly clear cut (or Amazon and google would have got them thrown out as invalid already) about all I can say is congratulations to Kove.
For example, I agree it would be very interesting and arguably valuable to have a public document describing how Amazon built S3. Unfortunately, these patents don’t describe what AWS did. They describe how some random “inventor” thought a system like that could be built (more realistically, of course, that rando likely never dreamed of any valuable application like S3).
At this point in my career for example everything I do is basically tweaking or adapting patterns I've seen in other systems to the ones I'm working on.
If you rely on trade secrets, then you can't sell your software without protecting it using a dongle or whatever; your "customer" might in fact be your competitor. It's not that hard to figure out how a piece of software works, and to write your own code that works the same way.
It's not hard to figure out how some novel machine works either; but how to fabricate it is often a tougher challenge. It's easy enough to explain how a transistor works; fabricating reliable transistors at scale is another question.
IOW the Dewey Decimal system, but with a computer.
At the end of the day, patents and copyright didn't lead to me being rewarded for innovating. I wish there was a better way.
Sometimes I wish AI could read everyone's claims and report who should be rewarded for what and by how much.
https://www.xm.com/research/markets/allNews/reuters/amazon-o...
if you do not want somebody copying your idea, cutting the price and cornering the market, then you simply should not put it out in the world at all.
behind every patent litigation is the threat of violence pure and simple. violence is the building fabric of everything in the west.
the same european colonial attitudes from 15th century that everything can be divided, labelled and sold backed by violence.
skin colours, ideologies, copyright, patents are all cut from the same ilk!
so much of American concepts are echos of its European colonialism.
INNOVATION!
This is a corrupt administration, that like the European Patent Office, finance itself over the amount of patents it grants.
The problem with patents, you can file lawsuits over past infringement as long as the patent was valid when the infringement occurred.
