Comment on Anon notices what they've taken from us
pivot_root@lemmy.world 9 months agoThough it should be kept in mind there’s thousands of patents that were never actually applied, and this one was filled back in 2009.
This is genuinely a good thing, then. If you patent something and “accidentally” never use it, it prevents other companies from using it legally. Screw over advertisers and save the consumers from their terrible ideas by hoarding patents and working with a patent troll firm :)
unrelatedkeg@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
Not really. Patests expire and then they can just read the specs in your idea. No reverse-engineering effort required.
pivot_root@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It takes 20 years for patents to expire, and you can’t commercially use the patented method until then. If I “invent” and patent 50 different methods to track viewer attention during video advertisements, that’s 50 fewer ways that some company would be able to achieve it.
It would be impossible to cover every possible method to achieve the same thing, but the risk of violating a patent held by a highly litigious patent troll might be a good enough deterrent to stop the whole idea from making it to market for a couple decades.
unrelatedkeg@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
Yes, but after 20 years you’re not at square one, others have free reign to use and abuse your expired patent. Sure, you can tacticize patents in a way where you make a starting patent, then before it’s about to expire “expand” it with a new one in a way which invalidates use of the previous, but I don’t know if that “loophole” is patched and if not, how it looks in real life.
pivot_root@lemmy.world 9 months ago
That is an entirely valid concern, and I see where you’re coming from with that. It would be short-sighted to introduce something revolutionary, only to open the floodgates for everyone else to start implementing it two decades later.
I was thinking of using patents more along the lines of “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.” Rather than trying to come up with a novel way to track user attention and stop it from coming to market, the hypothetical patent troll would create and patent hundreds of different smaller, novel processes that may or may not be needed as part of a larger system for tracking user attention. The overall goal being to make it likely enough for one or more of those patents to be violated that a company would consider it too risky to go anywhere near the idea of commercializing attention tracking software/hardware.