- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Google owes $338.7 mln in Chromecast patent case, US jury says::Alphabet’s Google violated a software developer’s patent rights with its remote-streaming technology and must pay $338.7 million in damages, a federal jury in Waco, Texas decided on Friday.
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Software patents shouldn’t exist. You can’t patent the idea of doing something.
You weren’t supposed to be able to protect the mere idea of something. Software copyright I fully support but patents are revolting. At least the expire after a while whereas copyright lasts way too long.
It makes a bit of sense for physical inventions where the process is the most important part. Whereas for software the actual code is really that process (and covered by copyright), rather than just the idea.
But it’s trivial to write a slightly different implementation of something.
I think one really has to consider what the effect on innovation will be - you don’t want too many protections as that will stifle innovation as it prevents people from building upon the prior ideas, but equally you don’t want no protection at all as that will discourage innovation as R&D takes money, so if you can’t recoup the investment the money simply won’t get invested into R&D and the innovation won’t happen.
Especially with software it’s rather clear that you don’t need copyright or patents for innovation, make everything open source and public domain.
Yeah, I think with software due to the low barrier to entry etc. it makes sense for it to be further towards the less protections end of the spectrum.
But still, if you’d paid a load of PhDs to come up with some really clever algorithm (think of like how Shazam had it’s music recognition algorithm long, long before modern ML) and then someone could just steal it well, it’d harm innovation and ultimately the tech industry and investment would go elsewhere and those clever PhD grads just wouldn’t find employment.
It’s a balance that depends on the properties of each industry, but I don’t think that no protections whatsoever is ever a good answer.
Why would people do anything without clear financial gain. Written on lemmy. Or just think of science, imagine fundamental science not being public domain, that would suck.
Yeah, but some things cost a lot of money to develop. The higher the cost of the R&D, the less likely it is to occur without some patent system. Although I agree that in programming specifically the Open Source model seems to work quite well - look at the Apache Foundation.
You could have a model where all research was done by a public body or something like the Apache Foundation, but this reduces innovation as it means there is less opportunity for some people to try something that may not be considered likely to be successful, as publicly funded research tends to focus on the safest path. For an example, look at how public nuclear fusion research is continuing on the traditional toroidal tokamak model with ITER compared with the more experimental designs being tested by private companies such as Helion, Focus Fusion, Tokamak Energy (they are using a high aspect-ratio 'spherical tokamak).
Most open source software also relies on copyright. The GPL doesn’t work without it.
Obviously you would need a complete overhaul of the system.
That’s why I’m not in favor of completely abolishing copyright. It should protect for a much shorter time, like 10 years, though. For example, companies would be free to use a ten years old Linux version (3.10 would be the newest affected version) and do whatever they want with it, but for newer ones the GPL protections would still apply.
Fucking hate patent trolls.
You mean those who met with Google and then Google stole their technology? Feels shill man.
Not to defend the gigacorp who either didn’t look for or didn’t care to pay for tech that someone already created and they ended up using in a product, parralel development happens and it could be an oversite, but non-practicing entities are leeches of the highest order.
Will have to read in on the nature of the case more to see what was used and who got paid here, but groups that just sit around on a bunch of shakey over-broad patents with no intent to actualy implement them in any meaningful way need to have them stripped. All they do is hold up developments in the hope of getting a payout with no benefit to society.
For a bit more technical readout on the nature of the case, this does sound pretty fishy as a claim. The party getting damages has no product and the patents are all kind of hand-wavey ‘make one device tell a server to give a command to another device’ in nature. Of course the case was handled in TX too which has a penchant for being patent maximalists.
said in its 2021 lawsuit that founder David Strober invented technology in 2010 to “move” videos from a small device like a smartphone to a larger device like a television.
What the fuck? lmao. How is this able to be patented?
Texas courts are the favorite venue for most patent claims. Mostly because they suck at technology and give it up for a plaintiff.
