throwawaykf05

This story is oft-repeated here but this paper provides convincing historical industrial evidence that it's a myth: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2355673

Let's. Microsoft is the biggest spender on R&D amongst software companies and they sponsor a lot of research without clear immediate benefits. This is in stark contrast to all the other big companies who largely only sponsor projects driven by product requirements. They regularly publish research papers in the best conferences and journals. MSR is the last bastion of well-funded, blue sky industrial R&D and the closest (though still a far cry) approximation we have to the precedent set by Bell Labs and Xerox Parc.

I don't begrudge them a few patents in exchange for that.

Or, asserting their legal right to protect their investment in R&D that latecomers like Linux and Android simply ripped off. Just a matter of perspective, really. Is just that given open source is the dominant religion around these parts, that perspective is in the minority.

Of course it does. The claims define what a patent covers. Noting that the vast majority (95%+?) of patents go unused, it's reasonable to assume that they have some correlation with market usage. What other hypothesis would you posit for the over abundance of value-less patents? Mine is that most ideas have no market value terrible, hence most patents don't either.

In fact, the MP3 patents are directly responsible for spurring the development of Ogg Vorbis, which is arguably superior in some ways (see other comments). From Wikipedia:

Vorbis is a continuation of audio compression development started in 1993 by Chris Montgomery.[8][9] Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format.[10][11]

This is interesting because "innovation through forced workarounds" has long been one of the ways patents are said to be beneficial. Ogg is a prime example.

In what way is it "doing harm" to the patent system?

Well here's a study showing that the user of the term "troll" had become widely used by media without any evidence to support their negative views. This has led to judges forbidding the use of that term at trials as it is unfairly prejudicial.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2768939

If it is improper in the court of law, one can reasonably assume it is improper in the court of public opinion as well. The effects of this bias can be seen in the usual comments on patent-related threads here and other forums, where the USPTO is regularly derided by people who don't know the first thing about patents. These people know only what the media tells them, and as the paper shows, media is highly biased. This bias is being spread to a large audience and is also being used to push for reform that may not necessarily be balanced. I'd say, yes, such rhetoric is hurting the patent system.

... grant a more even balance between the financial interests of the rightsholders and the cultural interests of the public at large...

You mean the public that still exchanges terabytes [1] of pirated content every month in the US alone that the rights holders are unable to stop?

1. Sandvine estimates single digit percentage of daily Internet traffic in the US is BitTorrent. That is huge in absolute numbers.

The main reasons Netflix, Spotify and their ilk exist are a) piracy is still not user-friendly enough for everyone, and b) people vastly overestimate the risk of getting caught for piracy. Both of these are largely due to the incessant efforts of copyright holders exerting their legal rights. We are, in the large, homo economicus.

TV and Movie owners already have copyright laws and DMCA laws giving them legal control on who gets their content and how it is used.

And you have property laws giving you legal control over who gets your physical property and how it gets used. You could, for instance, loan your car to your family all you want, or agencies can rent their cars out as they wish. But the moment some stranger makes off with it, the government law enforcement agencies are obliged to help.

The legal distribution of content is a free market -- there is no government price setting agency and no monopoly more than other forms of ownership -- the public only needs to be better educated about what they are paying for.

IIRC, it was some bytes of object code they copied to be interoperable, so that string could just as well have been an array of random numbers as far as being the key to interoperability was concerned.

Most corporations are still focused on just moving over to IaaS with compliance and security first

Yes but my point is AWS has more mindshare and MS has more leverageable pre-existing business inroads with a huge number of these corporations.

and Google has done a great job building a solid foundation for this which should pay dividends in the future

That seems rational, but the countless examples of "worse is better" in life indicate that that outcome is far from guaranteed.

"We can only send you the data as fast as we can get it from Netflix. Please try speedtest.net, speedof.me or testmy.net to check your actual speed."

Is not wanting to peer with somebody for free a violation of net neutrality?

Microsoft put billions into Windows Phone and many (including me) think it's superior to iOS and Android, but what's its market share now? What I mean is, even if it is technically better, will Google Cloud get customers? AWS has a huge head start with significant mindshare, and Microsoft has its pre-existing enterprise customers sewed up. With tech funding drying up, where will Google find its customers?

Says the guy paid by Google. Tell me, when Alsup issued his "name your shills" order, was yours amongst those Google released? I certainly see you (or at least your handle) commenting on various Google-related threads here and on Ars.

Yes, and those semantics are purely functional, lacking any form of expression, which copyright expressly excludes from protection. The only reason binaries are copyright-protected is because they are "derivative works" from the original copyright-protected program code.

Another key point (in my view) is that these APIs are textual whereas BIOS / protocols / binary interfaces are purely functional. Copyright is meant to cover "forms of expression". Text can have "expressive" creativity, but binary interfaces can have only functional creativity, which is expressly the realm of patents.

Of course, the only reason code is copyright-protected is because it's text, and text can have expressivity and code can be creative. But that does not mean code has creative expression. Most code does not express anything, not in the way other artworks do -- most code exists only to solve specific problems and hence is functional. Sure we can use whatever names we want for the methods and variables but you'll notice they all tend to be very descriptive of what they do. Not much creativity in the text of the code itself (at least for "good" code). All the creativity in software is in the technical ideas, approaches, algorithms and abstractions we use to solve those problems, but unfortunately only patents protect that, if at all.

The real problem here is the use of copyright to protect code. It's a legal hack, enacted because there was nothing better around to use. And to make the hack uglier, binaries enjoy copyright protection because they are "derivative works" from copyright-eligible program code. We need something more appropriate, lying between patents and copyright to protect software.

You said:

Sure. But music sharing didn't kill the industry then; there's little reason to believe it'll be the reason for its death now.

To me that translated to: "Sharing some songs between a handful of friends once every few days didn't harm the music industry; hence being able to share hundreds of songs with millions of people in a few seconds will harm it now."

The second statement sure looks like an extrapolation from the first, and given the mind-boggling difference in scale, an invalid one.

As for lack of data, music industry revenues have been decimated since the turn of the industry. Sure, there are several factors involved, but can you really pretend the terabytes of copyrighted music being torrented every month has nothing to do with it?

They put in most of the up-front money to make an artist big (or bigger). Is that not risk?

But music sharing didn't kill the industry then; there's little reason to believe it'll be the reason for its death now.

Not a valid extrapolation. The Internet is billions of times faster and more densely connected than the sneakernet.

Maybe they can afford to because they've figured out other ways to screw the public?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G_spectrum_scam

Are you saying the government does not do "vigorous enforcement of drug laws, long punishments for criminals"? These are topics that are the source of perennial complaints on HN. I think rayiner's point is that outside the HN echo chamber, there is a lot of implicit support for all kinds of empowerment of government and law enforcement agencies to "keep people in line". These same people may possibly even condone surveillance if it helps catch some small fry drug dealers.

I see the same thing when it comes to TSA threads. I know people who actually want the TSA around, and when stories of TSA ineffectiveness come out, their reaction is not "security theatre!", it's "fund them more!"

The point is, the government is literally doing what most of the populace wants it to do. The opinions on HN are in the minority.

Actually the problem these days is that standard-essential patents are considered less valuable because they tend to require FRAND licensing. This is the problem companies like Motorola and Samsung ran into during the smartphone patent wars. They could not ask for injunctions or high royalties for many of their patents as they were standards-essential, and they lost a lot of leverage.

Secondly, standards setting bodies are usually a conglomerate of members from competing companies and hence a huge political bureaucratic mess, so it's not as easy to get something into the standard just for some money.

Not really, it's just compliance with the license that a piece of software is offered with. Things are no less silly in the world of open source. You are bound to honor the license of the open source software that you use. For instance, if your app links to a GPL library, you are bound to offer your code under the GPL too. However if it links to a BSD-licensed library that does the exact same thing, you don't have to.

No, only abstract mathematical algorithms cannot be patented. Compression is a concrete application of mathematical algorithms.

As a consumer of APIs I agree that having drop-in replacements for APIs is the ideal state. However, as a producer of APIs, I also appreciate the efforts required to design a good API. There's some value in that. This translates to any product other than an API, of course, but in general if somebody creates something of value, I believe people who derive value from it should respect the creators' wishes.

This case is not, of course, about APIs. It's because Sun created this enormously valuable Java developer base, and Google totally free-loaded on that to bootstrap Android. The API just happens to be the means, and hence the crux of the lawsuit.

Yes, in my view people should not get to free ride on the labors of others. The ease of copying information belies the efforts required to produce quality information that is valuable, and so people think they have a right to freely copy whatever they can get. But there was a period in recent history when people thought this kind of thing was ok for physical labor, and the world largely agrees that was a bad time. I don't see why things should be any different for mental labor.

The ABI, being essentially an ordering of bytes at specific offsets, has no expressive capability. Tons of creativity, sure, but of the functional kind, the stuff copyright explicitly exempts.

Note that if only ABI compatibility was required, Google could very well have defined their own API. For instance, they could have defined an API called "openFile()" that compiles down to the exact byte code as "new java.io.File()". But they were not after binary interoperability, they were after the Java developer base Sun had spent billions building.

That is what Chicken Little would like you to believe, but you always have the option of devising your own API, call it prefixWithChars. If your implementation really is that much better, people will go through the effort of migrating their software.

The sky is not falling.

IANAL, but my take: Are you re-implementing anybody else's API without their permission? If not, this has absolutely no bearing on you. Hopefully a real lawyer can shed more light.