The only difference between Lodsys and large software/hardware companies like Microsoft and Oracle is the size of their litigation targets.<p>I'm beyond convinced that the entire software patent systems needs to be abolished.
The act of writing software can be summarized as generating ideas and writing down these ideas in a language computers can understand and execute. Software programmers are in the business of writing ideas all day. This combined with the fact that the bar for ideas being patentable is very low means that programmers probably generate and write down multiple patentable ideas per day. From the get go they are inevitably setting up a huge patent minefield.<p>I don’t know if anyone has ever calculated the average density of patentable ideas in code, but if you consider, for example, that performing an online transaction with the last entered customer data (the infamous 1-Click patent) is patentable, I would very roughly estimate that there is a patentable idea every 20 to 50 lines of code.
As an example, the Linux kernel (just the very core of Linux) contains more that 10 millions lines of code. If you consider a complete Linux distribution (by adding the graphical user interface and a bunch of utilities) you get at least ten times that amount, that is more than 100 millions lines of code. Using the rough estimate above, we can calculate that there are more than 2 millions patentable ideas in a consumer operating system. That is an incredible amount of complexity. In fact, it is a testament to human ingenuity that we can (sometimes) get all this code to work together.<p>Now code is not used side by side like an infantry of little computer processes working in parallel to make computers or phones go. It is rather organised and packaged in a huge network of building blocks, a pyramid of hundreds of thousands of libraries, APIs or functions heavily inter-dependent on each other. What’s more, the building blocks are usually not all written by the same people or organisations and their consistent and stable behavior is critical for enabling compatibility (remember, often between millions of parts made by thousands of developers).<p>This hierarchical and networked architecture is inevitable and the best way to organise complex information, however the stability it requires at the bottom of the pyramid means that some building blocks cannot be changed once the pyramid is built. Someone claiming ownership of the shape of a bottom block after the pyramid is built, someone having the power to force a bottom block to be removed and replaced with a different shaped one, no matter how simple and obvious this bloc is, does not have power over just this block but over the whole structure above it and all the components that depend on it. This means patent holders have a disproportionately large amount of power when they target such a bloc. They know that changing it would require tearing down, redesigning and replacing often thousands of dependent projects and probably break compatibility for millions of users of these projects. It is usually simply not an option.
This annoys me because it is scaring off people from developing for smart phones. This patent is so vague that even if I did know every patent ever made then I would not even associate it with what patent he is claiming he has violated.<p>Bring back Lulzsec for a day, get them to hack their systems and delete all their patents.<p>I wouldn't be surprised if they had a patent for people communicating over the internet and we are all about to be sued.
How is something this vague "directed to systems and methods for providers of products and/or services to interact with users of those products and services to gather information from those users and transmit that information to the provider" patentable?!
I was in DC yesterday, walking by the patent office and saw this quote from Lincoln over the door: "The Patent Office adds the flame of interest to the light of creativity"<p>I wonder what Lincoln would think of Lodsys.
The things what Lodsys is doing right now is actually very good. There are more copy-cat trolls coming to the market based on the same idea "buy some patents and let sue many private proprietors and ask them $1000 to drop suite".<p>Eventually, it will be obvious even to our representatives in Washington that something is broken and they will be forced to fix it.<p>As they say, our representatives will try doing the right thing but only after they try all the wrong things first.
It seems Lodsys was able to successfully patent the hyperlink, U.S. patent system has some serious problems.
Patent trolling is not the only problem, the patent office granting patents, where the is no merit, is another big problem.
My question is, if you just provide an external "Buy Me" or "More Apps" link to the App Store you would have no idea who or how many people actually use that link, and of those who use the link you would have no idea what they did once they got to the store. They could buy someone else's app, they could browse some more, they could leave a comment.<p>So how does that qualify as a "survey" in Lodsys's eyes?
I have a feeling that Lodsys will continue to iterate on this theme until they get shut down. Given they have signed a licensing agreement, I'm not sure what Apple can do, but they should take as active as a role as they can from here on out. It certainly raises doubts in my mind as to what kind of "buy this app" link I can put, if anything, in any apps for myself or my clients.
I was planning on developing a few paid apps to test the market over the next few months, but this combined with the other mobile patent lawsuits has made me seriously reconsider it.<p>It's a pity the app store servers reside in the US. Otherwise i wouldn't have to worry about these things!
This isn't new news if you've been following this business since the start: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2552563" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2552563</a>