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cajmorgans t1_j88dj8d wrote

Patenting stuff is so weird if you think about it, it feels so 19th century

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cantfindaname2take t1_j88yd4n wrote

I dunno if a company paid for r&d then they should be entitled to exclusively make money from it for some time. I think the problem is around the what and the when and not the why.

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Cherubin0 t1_j8dbny1 wrote

Or they should not do r&d if they cannot accept others people's human rights to use their brains whatever they like. This is like saying a thief had so much effort he should be allowed to keep the stolen good

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cantfindaname2take t1_j8e4x9q wrote

No, it's not like that at all. IMO that analogy does not make any sense. First, r&d is not just thinking up stuff and then making them. In drug discovery it involves expensive trials. In other fields it may involve a lot of building and scraping things, sometimes from expensive material. Patent should be an incentive to do all that knowing that once that it's done it can monetized in a way that does not allow other companies just to copy and paste without effort. Should they be able to do it for everything and forever? Probably not and that is what I was referring to.

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cajmorgans t1_j8chwh9 wrote

Do you know the ”swipe to write” feature that exists on iPhone and Android, where you can keep your finger down and “draw” the words?

There is some small company suing the big guys atm for this “feature” (imo I think a fraction actually uses it). When I heard it, I lost it as, how can you patent such a thing? I mean yea, it might not be the most simple software to write but it just feels so weird to be able to patent such a (useless) technique

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womenrespecter-69 t1_j8dwqtl wrote

Are you talking about swipe typing? It was a lot faster than peck typing back when phones were small enough to fit in one hand.

AFAIK the company that patented it (Swype) screwed up by making their patent more specific than they needed to and apple/google were able to work around it without licensing it. They eventually got acquired and killed a few years ago.

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cdsmith t1_j8gpcrf wrote

We're off-topic for this forum, but since we're here anyway...

Patents are tricky when it comes to stuff like this. To successfully patent something software related, you must be able to convince the patent office that what you're patenting counts as a "process", and not as an "idea", or "concept" or "principle" or "algorithm", all of which are explicitly not patentable. The nuances of how you draw the lines between these categories are fairly complex, but in general it often comes down to being able to patent engineering details of HOW you do something in the face of a bunch of real-world constraints, but not WHAT you are doing or any broad generalization of the bigger picture.

It's likely that Swype didn't just screw up and write their patent poorly, but rather wrote the only patent their legal team could succeed in getting approved. If it didn't apply to what other companies did later because they used a different "process" (for nuanced lawyer meanings of that word) to accomplish the same goal, that is an intentional feature of the patent system, not a failure by Swype.

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