Patents Threaten To Silence A Little Girl, Literally

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120326/08360818246/patents-threaten-to-silence-little-girl-literally.shtml

by chaostheory • 14 years ago

278 75 14 years ago

donw• 14 years ago

Once again, software patents to the rescue. If the patents involved applied only to the hardware, then this would not even be a case.

runako3• 14 years ago

Wouldn't this simply result in a flurry of single-purpose hardware devices that could be patented?

If not, why not?

sologoub• 14 years ago

That might be so, but if those devices face stiff competition from software running on relatively generic platforms, they are either going to have to be that much better or all they will become irrelevant. In either way, consumers will benefit.

bobbles• 14 years ago

"None of their options were suited to her daughter, and they all carried hefty price tags—as in $7,000+ hefty. She began asking around to see if PRC or any of the other big companies were planning on releasing an iPad app, and learned that although many customers were clamoring for one, the companies had no intention of meeting their demands. They didn't want an affordable option out there reducing sales of their expensive systems."

Time for their business model to die

amcintyre• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, they can afford the lobbyists and lawyers necessary to buy life support for their business model.

JoeAltmaier• 14 years ago

That business model won't die without a fight. Not even HN posts will do it. This sounds like a losing battle, unfortunately.

cabalamat2• 14 years ago

> This sounds like a losing battle, unfortunately.

Saarland Pirates would disagree with you.

olalonde2• 14 years ago

Off-topic, but related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion (as much as I hate patents)

notJim• 14 years ago

Very relevant, IMHO. I don't want to hear "think of the children!1!!11" as an argument against patents any more than I do for or against anything else.

chime6• 14 years ago

When people use the "think of the children" argument, they are usually talking about the hypotheticals. "Think of the children" when you let guns or drugs in the neighborhood. "Think of the children" when you legalize prostitution.

In this instance however, it is think of this very specific child. There is no hypothetical child here who might be harmed. There is a real, actual child who will lose her ability to communicate if this app is pulled off and remotely deleted from her iPad.

i_cannot_hack• 14 years ago

[Wikipedia] > It is possible to claim that something is being done "for the children" as support in a logical argument, or as a counterargument. But if used to avoid logical debate, it is a thought-terminating cliché. Doing something "for the children" is not a logical fallacy of itself. For example, it is reasonable to suggest and legislate to "add traffic lights next to schools so that children are safer from cars."

Giving an example in which a certain system is bad for individuals is not automatically a logical fallacy. In the article it is clearly not used as a thought-terminating cliché, but merely a way to (truthfully) show the downsides of patent legislation – and if nothing else convince the patent holders that pressing charges against an app that is so essential for many is not a good idea. They also explain in detail what they think is the problem with the current system.

antidaily• 14 years ago

The word "literally" never gets old, does it? Oh wait...

smber1• 14 years ago

I'm not blind to the notion that patents exist to protect business (both big and small) however, I still can't help but think, when these sorts of things just end up hurting the consumer then something is terribly wrong! I guess the question becomes, "Overall, are patents good or bad for consumers?"

TheEskimo• 14 years ago

That is not at all the question. The point of patents is supposedly to protect inventors and innovators. There is no question that it will (short term at least) hurt consumers; a limited monopoly means a higher price and fewer competing products (if any).

People don't argue that patents are good for consumers because they aren't. People argue about if they're good for inventors and technical progress; if inventors will only innovate and share the results with the monetary benefit provided by a patent.

schiffern• 14 years ago

The point of patents is to encourage the spread of information by discouraging guilds and trade secrecy.

luriel3• 14 years ago

The point of patents is not to protect anyone, but to encourage innovation. It has become quite clear that patents make innovation harder (is impossible to create anything anymore without taking a big risk of infringing someone else's patents, and those with patents only use them to slow their progress by their competition, and to avoid having to compete/innovate until their patent expires).

creamyhorror2• 14 years ago

"People don't argue that patents are good for consumers because they aren't. People argue about if they're good for inventors and technical progress"

And the point of technical progress is to benefit the public (i.e. consumers) in the long run. So it all comes down to that.

The issue is in the implementation and outcomes. As you say, do inventors only innovate+share when provided with the monetary benefit of a patent? It would probably depend on the field, but I suspect innovation would still occur even with shorter patent protections for software design.

luriel3• 14 years ago

Patents are artificial government granted monopolies. Such monopolies are in no way good for consumers.

gaius• 14 years ago

Except in the sense that the thing granted the temporary monopoly on would not otherwise exist.

andrewpi• 14 years ago

Even if "Speak for Yourself" is pulled from the App Store, it should continue to work for this girl, correct?

sosuke2• 14 years ago

Yes it will continue to work for her, but the mother feels strongly that it should be still available for other children in the same position. If it does go into litigation hell perhaps open source is the answer, let parents build it for the device themselves?

chime6• 14 years ago

Technically, Apple can remove an app remotely from all iDevies if they are legally required to do so. Whether they will be required to do that in this case is unknown.

chime6• 14 years ago

This is horrible. I've spent the last 18 months of my life developing an AAC text-to-speech app too ( http://ktype.net ) and have dreaded this exact scenario. I've built the app from ground up, solving each problem my users might face on my own - from my own prediction engine to handling unintentional multi-touch taps ( http://ktype.net/wiki/research:articles:progress_20111105 ) without consulting any external sources. One tiny feature (say, allowing the user to change the size of cursor) could get me in the same position if some company owns a patent on it. It is heart-breaking to know that you are absolutely helpless to defend yourself against behemoths with lawyers.

By the way, the reason TTS AAC apps are so expensive (Speak for Yourself is $299, Proloquo2go is $189) is not just the developers. If you're using someone's TTS library (no good open-source ones exist), they can contractually require you not to sell your app under a specific amount because they want X% of your sales. And then of course the license fees to various patent-holders.

Patent reform isn't just about one-clicks and black-border-around-touchscreen tablets. It's about preventing the stifling of innovation. I built a truly unique feature in KType - guess which of the 2-10 multi-touch taps is intentional (i.e. based on the user's preferences, guess which one is the 'index' finger). As far as I know, no app or system can do this. Without this feature, users with speech and motor disabilities have a very difficult time using a touch-screen. I would love for this feature to be a part of all touch-screens, in the Accessibility configuration. That's why I openly described the algorithm the day I came up with it instead of patenting it. But I could be sued and shutdown because one of the many features of KType was broadly patented by someone two decades ago.

I dread being in an industry where trying to help others for barely any money can get you shuttered. I can make 10x more money making an ad/affiliate-network but I love seeing the look on my users' and their caregivers' faces when they are able to use my app to finally communicate after years of needing others' help. I hope this case ends well for Speak for Yourself but honestly, I'm not too optimistic.

moonchrome2• 14 years ago

>That's why I openly described the algorithm the day I came up with it instead of patenting it.

AFAIK this is what patents were supposed to do, instead of people locking away their inventions they would give incentives for people to share their knowledge so everyone would get the results but the owner would be able to benefit from publishing. Now it's "property", and people start talking mortality and trying to take moral high ground, starving artists and equating it with stealing, or some perverse economics rationalization focusing on profit as objective. Frankly I don't think I ever heard anyone saying that he read a patent to understand/learn something - although some papers were probably published after they got patents, I know two of those, but I would argue that those patents were blatantly obvious anyway, since I started working on the same problem and arrived at the same solution independently - found those papers after solving the problem/colleague pointed me to them - without even being an expert in the field - they did develop their ideas fully but I'm sure if I kept working on it, or someone else did, they would solve it, and both of those have immediate applications/have been developed for a product so the R&D would have to be done for product development, having it patented provided was not required for the investment.

lloeki2• 14 years ago

> AFAIK this is what patents were supposed to do, instead of people locking away their inventions they would give incentives for people to share their knowledge so everyone would get the results but the owner would be able to benefit from publishing

True, but the compensation for sharing their knowledge is an absolute, legally enforceable lockdown for so many years. Everyone benefits only when the patent expires. In the meantime the patent holder controls the market and reaps the benefits, hence it becomes a legal, time-limited monopoly. The only possible countermeasure is to have critical patents yourself and play a game of dissuasion, or throw yourself into Mutually Assured Litigation.

Indeed in that case the only solution would have been to patent the 'guess which of the 2-10 multi-touch taps is intentional' technique in hopes that you could countersue or trade it, hence locking down the area further and preventing progress even more. And that's not even taking moral issues into account.

blhack• 14 years ago

Would you open source your app, and let the patent holders deal with this on a case to case basis?

chime6• 14 years ago

I cannot open-source my app as of right now because of contractual reasons. However, I am in the process of negotiating a significantly lower price and the ability to open up my code. It's mostly CoffeeScript and some ObjC. Here's the compiled JS: http://ktype.net/device/ipad/res/ktype.js for the UI: http://ktype.net/device/ipad/index.html

ars• 14 years ago

> broadly patented by someone two decades ago

That's good - parents only last 20 years, so that means the parent is almost expired.

retube• 14 years ago

Set up in the UK. Software patent laws are far from perfect but none of bullshit you see in the US.

lucian1900• 14 years ago

Very interesting app.

I tried loading the live demo on a desktop browser and got many alerts about missing Cordova APIs. Perhaps you should put your PhoneGap/Cordova calls behind checks, so that the app works as a regular website as well (for the demo, I mean)?

chime6• 14 years ago

Sorry, it is supposed to be silent - shouldn't have any error/warning alerts. I didn't realize upgrading from PhoneGap to Cordova would break so many things. I'll be fixing it tonight.

dubya• 14 years ago

I'm slightly surprised that VoiceServices API is still private on iOS. It must not be too far from the current state of the art, because automated appointment reminders now sound like the Mac TTS.

chime6• 14 years ago

During development, I used the hidden http://blog.steventroughtonsmith.com/2009/07/speech-synthesi... API but that doesn't work anymore. I can't wait till Apple makes it available to us. Then I can give my app away for free if I want.

PaulMcCartney3• 14 years ago

This case is at it's core, a question of property and rights. As heartless as that may sound, property and rights are principles the United States is built upon. They are laws of the land. The same argument can easily be made to cut profit margins on medical devices. To a further extreme you could argue to take money from the wealthy to pay the medical bills of the needy. I believe that this is what this case boils down to.

pingswept2• 14 years ago

Historically, you're correct. But the people who codified patent law certainly didn't anticipate the development of software, in which every program of substantial size necessarily uses multiple different patented techniques.

Do you think this is the way property rights and software ought to work together?

runako3• 14 years ago

> every program of substantial size necessarily uses multiple different patented techniques

Do you think that this is not true of other engineering disciplines? For instance, can an auto maker build a new car without infringing tons of patents? What about robot makers? Airplane manufacturers? Do you believe that nothing that e.g. SpaceX (or your favorite innovation shop) is working on is worthy of patent protection?

> Do you think this is the way property rights and software ought to work together?

This consequence is clearly horrible. However, let's say there was an innovative physical device (with no software) at play instead. Then we'd say that's exactly how property rights work. We'd presumably be happy that in a few years the rest of society would have access to the device without paying the monopoly rates. The point is the monopoly is an incentive that helps an inventor take an idea from concept to useful product. If the idea had value by itself, we could use my idea for a cancer cure and be free of it tomorrow. (Unfortunately, I am missing the useful -- patentable --parts of the cure.)

What specifically is so different about software that would make it unique among engineering pursuits as the only one unworthy of patent protection?

luriel3• 14 years ago

So called "Intellectual Property" is not really property from either a moral or a legal standpoint.

Intellectual property is a form of government granted temporary monopoly, supposedly in the name of encouraging progress and the common good.

It is clear that "Intellectual Property" is counterproductive regarding the goals it had. It is time to abolish it.

PaulMcCartney3• 14 years ago

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Saying the "to promote the common good" is not the phraseology, and that matters from a legal standpoint.

I think more elaboration is needed as to exactly how this patent aims to fulfill its purpose. Then we may have more insight to decipher whether the Patent Clause appropriately defends the holder of the patent in this case.

creamyhorror2• 14 years ago

"To a further extreme you could argue to take money from the wealthy to pay the medical bills of the needy."

That's hardly an extreme - it's what happens in many advanced nations with universal healthcare. Taxes are collected, and part of them go to paying for medical treatment for everyone, rich or poor.

"property and rights are principles the United States is built upon."

That doesn't say anything about how long the temporary monopolies granted for patents and copyrights should last, or whether everything in every context should be patentable (e.g. software and UI design).

Intellectual property rights are important, insofar as they "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". When this goal is no longer being effectively promoted by the current implementation of the patent/copyright systems, then it's time to consider re-engineering them.

PaulMcCartney3• 14 years ago

The last point you mentioned is the next logical step in the discussion I believe. As things stand, it would appear the company holding the patents is in the right, from a legal perspective, and that sucks for the little girl. However, were now at the juncture to call in to question the limits and extents of the Patent Clause created to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." On which side of the fence does this scenario fall on. Not such an easy question to answer. In what way do patents "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" anyways?

drucken• 14 years ago

You are wrong. And for simple reasons:

1. Society defines what is property and who has rights. This can change at any time. That is, there is no absolute notion of "property".

Not too far back humans were property. Some would say the abolition of that notion of property is a principle the United States was built upon.

2. Software is different from other patentable ideas. It completely fails the non-obviousness test. That is, people can easily independently develop or use ideas as part of their own creation since at core it is just mathematics applied to a problem domain. This is similar to the underlying reason why (pure) business processes are not in general patentable outside the U.S.

3. There is no corollary to other social systems, at least not the for derivative health metaphor that you made. You cannot give up something (wealth) that you never "owned" in the first place. Further, anyone can fall sick or be hurt at any time for any reason, regardless of wealth or circumstance. So, there is always a social cost come what may. Whereas, you have to create an idea and choose to follow it.

Innovation is an "option" and therefore easily blocked. This was an objective reason for having a patent system in the first place (whether it has succeeded in that is a different question all together).

You cannot even argue software patents are the most efficient enablers of innovation since some of the most innovative and useful software known to exist either easily predates software patents or were explicitly made available for free (many even while software patentability was available) and never encumbered at any point.

TL;DR. It is only a question property and rights if a society deems it. It does not have to be this way. As easily evidenced by lack of software or business process patents for most of the rest of the world...

noonespecial2• 14 years ago

Patents aren't property, they aren't "self evident rights", and they aren't in any way entitlements. They are temporary monopolies granted by governments based on the idea that monopolies are bad, but they are slightly (and it looks like usually only a very tiny bit even in the best cases) better than the alternatives.

When its clear that patents aren't doing their job, and especially in the case where demonstrable public harm is resulting from them, the government should have the right to perform a simple predetermined "due process" like procedure to simply terminate them. Concerned citizens should be able to bring cases like this to the attention of a special office of the USPTO to make this happen.

slowpoke• 14 years ago

I've said this before here on HN, but you won't fix a system that's a gigantic clusterfuck of bureaucracy by introducing more bureaucracy.

There's but one way to "fix" patents, and that's to get rid of them and never try again. We've seen over the last decades (or, indeed, since their inception) that they do nothing but stifle and harm progress, both actively and passively. Today, in a globalized, digitally connected world, progress is speeding up and will continue to do so, probably by magnitudes. The patent system is utterly unsustainable in such a world, and we need to abolish it before it causes even more irreversible harm to humanity.

noonespecial2• 14 years ago

Of course it is and we should, but way too many big money interests have way too much stake in the system to just shut it off. Ron Paul has more chance of abolishing the IRS.

Lets just start with the "Be a dick, lose your patent" act. Baby steps.

netcan• 14 years ago

Here is the problem in this & many other debates, especially online:

"that they do nothing but stifle and harm progress"

Maybe, on balance, they do more harm than good. But they don't only do harm. For one thing, they're embedded into the way a lot of things are done (some of them important) and you can't know in advance how changing it will affect stuff. They also do what they're supposed to do (incentivize innovation) at least some of the time.

VMG• 14 years ago

All kinds of patents? Software patents?

Who will fund expensive medical research for new drugs if the company next door can just clone your work with minimal expenses?

You have to address the free rider problem here.

moomin• 14 years ago

I wonder if you could go for a surreal argument and go for first amendment rights...

rbarooah• 14 years ago

I'm not sure that's surreal. Interfering with this child's ability to develop communication is genuinely going to impair her ability to function as a citizen. That's why this case is interesting - it shows that patents have adverse effects beyond deciding who gets to profit from an invention.

eridius• 14 years ago

At the moment, it looks like she just plans on turning off all connectivity on the iPad so that it will no longer sync and the app will remain even if it is removed from the iTunes store.

Huh? Removing an app from the store doesn't remove it from devices that have it installed. There's no reason to disable connectivity. If you sync the device with iTunes (instead of just backing up to iCloud) then you can keep the app forever.

ekianjo• 14 years ago

Analogy in the video games world. If someone had patented 2d scrollers in the 1980s, we would still be waiting for 3d games in 2012. This 20 years monopoly is hilarious. Patents were invented by kings to reward their friends with monopolistic market positions. They have never been designed to promote innovation. Open sourcing is a way better method to achieve that.

dutchbrit• 14 years ago

What happens if they just release this app under a European company. Problem solved right (like all other software patents)?

tgflynn• 14 years ago

I'd really like to see the main stream press pick up this story. It could help non-technical people understand the problems with patents (especially software patents) and how they adversely affect the lives of real people, and possibly help generate some political momentum for real change in this area.

jack-r-abbit• 14 years ago

I'm sure my opinion is going to be very unpopular and result in some down votes. That is sad... but it doesn't really matter to me.

While a very heart stomping tale, it doesn't change the facts. The article even says the lawsuit and patent look solid. Even the mother says she doesn't care about the legality of the app. People are so quick to jump on the sympathy wagon and rail against the big bad corporation for profiting from all their work. But how many of those people would hold the same view if THEY were the ones who's hard work (protected with a patent) was being used without permission? It really scares me when I see people thinking they are entitled to something for free just because they need it and it costs too much. I think $12 for a movie ticket is way too much but that doesn't make it any less illegal to download a bootleg of it. Do I do it? sure I do. But if I got caught I'd take my lumps like every other "criminal". Sure that isn't going to get the sympathy that this girl will get, but at the end of the day it is the same argument (without the emotional appeal). The ends do not always justify the means. A man who robs a bank to feed his kids is just as much the criminal as the man who robs a bank to buy crack.

Patents Threaten To Silence A Little Girl, Literally

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