One of the main purposes of patents is (ostensibly) to allow innovators a temporary monopoly to recoup their R&D investment. From that perspective, a UI patent that isn't specific to applications in your niche seems like a bad idea. If I'm not competing directly with Tweetie, how are they harmed by my use of their UI technology? If they're not harmed by my use, why are they being protected?
Because their UI being innovative and one of a kind might well be a corner stone of their product marketing plan. You and I copy it, and they can't market, sell and recoup the expenses as planned. Though in this case I suspect this is one of a "valuation booster / acquisition facilitator" patents rather than anything else.
It combined a known, existing event (scrolling), with a known, existing action (refreshing). It would be akin to be patenting the ability to right click, hold that right click, and then have a different menu appear.
So, what you do is take all know actions, and all known events, and put them on a big table so you can cross reference them. See which ones you like, and there you go!
In fact, that's so ingenious, (a mechanism to develop knew UI concepts), I could probably patent it under our own system!
Have you read Charles Stross' Accelerando? The main character holds the patent for "using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain". I really, really hope it counts as Clarkeian prior art.
The book is here: www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html
Patents are also supposed to be non-trivial. Something that someone else of "ordinary" skill level wouldn't have come up with by himself.
Which brings us to argue subjectivity. Is this example trivial or not? There's no scientific way to point that, each one of us will have different opinion. I personally think this patent is ridiculously trivial, but a judge might disagree, and it's their argument from authority that matters.
The best argument against software patents, imho, is that it's too impractical to clearly define what is and isn't trivial in software without causing more harm than good.
For me, this fails the non-obvious criterion. Even a tiny bit of user testing would show people trying to scroll past the current limit to see if there's anything new. That behavior is so common that the Unix pager less has had the equivalent feature for years and years.
(It's obviously not ironic if he doesn’t call for or wants to use legal protections. Being outraged about something doesn't mean you want to make it illegal. That’s an important difference and I'm not sure why so many people are ignorant of that difference.)
It is worth noting that he repeatedly used words like "stealing" and "theft" while outraged and those words have strong legal connotations. That at least suggests (but, to be clear, does not prove) that he thinks there should be some sort of relevant legal protection.
Stealing and theft is often used to refer to things that are not stealing or theft in the legal sense. This is especially prevalent when talking about ideas and designs. The speakers usually do not want laws to change, they don't want to sue.
You cannot take the use of such words alone as an indication. That just makes no sense. Stealing and theft aren’t legal terms, not first and foremost. They only happen to also refer to legal concepts.
Patents don't exist to protect people's work, per se, they exist to "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." Protecting people's work is a means to that end.
In this case it seems obvious, to me, that this is not promoting innovation at all. Would this technique never have been developed were it not for the fact that it could be patented? Would other people copying the technique in any way dilute its benefit to Twitter?
The UI is the language with which people communicate with the computer. UI patents makes as much sense as a patent on "WTF". Having such a patent is the same antisocial behavior as trying to own the "ceiling cat" meme.
Maybe it is a new UI concept, but should we deny Loren the use of drop-down menus, scroll bars, split-buttons, sliders and all the other UI elements in use today? Patenting this is a morally bankrupt move.
> Do we see no place for patents in true UI innovation?
I don't know. Do you? I personally don't. If your software's differentiating factors are your UI innovations you might feel differently.
If it was appropriated into a competitive application I can understand being upset, but as long as the app the UI innovation is used in isn't competing with your app, who cares? You came up with a good paradigm and people liked it and used it elsewhere. Isn't that enough?
I'm all for patents (bye karma. but keep reading). that's what allow us humans to invent new things and improve our way of life.
now... about patent enforcement today that's another issue.
Main goal of patents WAS to promote innovation. it started in a time when everyone had trade secrets. So if you wanted to fix your fridge yourself, thought luck. it's a trade secret. you could even go to jail if you are found with schematics to fix it.
instead, patents. you publish your trade secret, everyone can read and learn from it. Then if someone want to use it for making money, they pay you a fee to cover your research and move on to invent new things
what happen today? patents crush hobbyists. everyone spend 10x R&D to invent the same thing in a way not covered by some patent. companies avoid useful stuff because they are afraid of being hostage of the patent holder (as is the case here, apple could pay a license fee to twitter, it's not the royalties that are game here).
Today you release something open source that is covered in a patent you never saw (hey, it's so obvious monkeys could came up with the same solution) you go to jail, just the sort of thing patents were supposed to PREVENT!
> I'm all for patents (bye karma. but keep reading). that's what allow us humans to invent new things and improve our way of life.
Yeah. So the guy who implemented the "pull to refresh" totally did it because he wanted a goddamn patent.
On a side note, I pity the non-innovative free loaders who roamed this planet before patents. It's not like they invented or innovated. How could they, we didn't have patents.
I don't believe you can find a way to enforce patents such that our current system isn't the result, but I'm open to being educated. How would you enforce them to keep this from happening?
I agree. It's kind of like saying "I agree with keeping drugs illegal, I just think enforcing the laws has been done in a bad way, and that's why the war on drugs failed".
Maybe it's time to take a step back and realize that the decades or centuries of patent legislation can be proof enough that they are not necessary to promote innovation, and in fact it has stifled it. In any market where patents have been disregarded, and heavy copying was done, innovation has increased (by wanting to stay a step ahead of competition), prices have dropped, and the quality of the products have increased.
The bigger the patent enforcement, and copying restrictions, the bigger the monopolies, higher prices, less quality products. And what is "competition" anyway? When you say a competing product or service for X, aren't you really thinking about a similar product or service; a product that copies a good portion of what X has? Or are you thinking about something that is completely unique and has no relation to X? At that point it's already in an entirely different product category.
On a side-note, is it ironic that this post is from a guy who was recently upset when someone else appropriated his own innovative UI?