I'm afraid that I (and surely many others on Hacker News as well) will not be cheering you on. It's pretty much the definition of something I do not want to be patentable.

I understand it will probably not be possible to convince you to change your mind, so I won't insult you by trying. However, keep in mind that your stance really is diametrically opposed to many groups who do not want software patents.

Doesn't matter. You're trying to take ownership of an obvious idea. Your patent did not inspire anyone at Square, nor did anyone at Square learn how to perform this process by your patent. They don't owe you a cent. It is only by a shitty quirk of the system, which you are taking advantage of, that allows you to try to extort money out of them. You are part of the problem.

question is how do we distinguish between patents that "inspired" and those which did not?

Or does inspiring even matter - anyone can see the "inspiration" on Android from the release of the 1st iPhone (e.g. before and after designs) - yet this fact plus all of Apple's $billions were unable to stop/prevent Android from their clearly inspired copying.

Is it still considered a quirk when it's by design and it's the entire point of the system? If we're only talking about damages for when designs are copied (instead of independently developed), we're basically talking about trade secret misappropriation.

Patents are SUPPOSED to cover the case where someone else invents the same thing in parallel, independently. You might not like it, but that's a legal fact. Clearly, you have a different moral opinion of when someone should be able to enforce their patent rights.

That's great you made a real product. So many who file patents don't end up creating real products. But the problem here is you made a real product that's pretty generic much akind to the patents of "input devices changes display on output device" kind of patents. It's an abuse of the system that many are working to eradicate.

So I don't think you're going to find any support on HN for it. It's great you're not like the typical patent troll since you claim you made a product (of which I have not verified but I give you the benefit of the doubt) but obvious design patents hurt innovation. Hell to some degree all patents hurt innovation but the obvious designs are the most egregious in my opinion.

But they just can't be. Many millions of dollars are spent gaining bad patents and litigating them unfairly. In practice, they're a tool which enables and amplifies the worse parts of human and societal nature, a tool for the abuse of power.

I say we just give them up. There may be fewer published inventions, but not that many fewer really. Some inventors will be motivated to invent for its own sake. Others will profit from being involved in the implementation and commercialization of their own inventions combined with others. Some inventors will get "screwed" when others get rich off their creations. But that happens today anyway. There will likely be disagreements about who really came up with the core of an idea first, or who's idea is really more core to the product, and without patents, those arguments won't cost millions of dollars and stifle creation. Everyone would be better off IMHO.

You have to look at the claims if you want to know what the patent is actually about.

It's absurd to say that I am "actively trying to do harm to innovation." I filed for patents on novel processes to protect myself. That's inherently defensive, not offensive.

Smart people can disagree on this topic. I understand that a lot of people don't think there should be software patents, or patents at all. I don't think it's that simple.

You sued Square, right? Square benefited in no way from your work or from your patent, but now you're either expecting payment from them for no services rendered, or forcing them to waste their resources fighting your shakedown attempt. In what worldview is that not harming innovation?

Not to mention that Square's fundamental innovation, its credit card reader, is premised on intellectual property theft. See http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/lawsuit-questions-s.... So in addition to holding a hundred more patents than my company, Square isn't even being honest about who deserves credit for theirs. Yet you argue that they're the pro-innovation good guys, and non-VC backed independent inventors are actively destroying innovation, because they hold patents? I have to disagree.

You were right at the time, but I just flipped through it now (the meat seems to be in attachments 4 and 5 at the bottom of the original link) and it doesn't change my argument.

What service did you render to Square to earn the payment you claim to deserve? Did they get the idea for their product from your patent? Did they learn how to implement their process from patent?

Are you just trying to get a slice of the pie because of some childish "I thought of it first" garbage, and because our broken patent system allows it?

I suspect it's that last one.

> Yet you argue that they're the pro-innovation good guys

I never argued that. I argued that you are trying to extort money out of Square despite providing them with no real service or benefit, and that this does real harm to innovation.

the service rendered was he made public the details of the invention. Whether Square read or did not choose to read the patent is beside the point.

> Did they get the idea for their product from your patent? Did they learn how to implement their process from patent?

You are assuming that Square did not read his patent - which if true suggests that Square inefficiently re-invented the wheel. You know, that whole standing on the shoulders of giants thing.

However, what we find happening lately is the concept of efficient infringement where large corporations have found it more cost effective to infringe and fight with their lawyer muscle than to pay inventors their due rights.

I completely disagree.

1) http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...

2) www.google.ca/patents/US8396808

3) http://pat2pdf.org/patents/pat8396808.pdf

if not publicly disclosed?

If you have any of those, I'd encourage you to file a public comment with USPTO, as I have repeatedly. Otherwise, yeah, in this case I thought of it first, and I filed a patent on it, and I added a number of important limitations, and it was granted.

I think a lot of folks would agree that face-based payment authorization as an option would have come along eventually, just as every other biometric and security device will eventually get applied to everything anyone might want to secure.

I think the people here are challenging the "novel processes" part of your patent. I can't look at it myself currently, but based on the replies, I'm a bit skeptical myself on the "novel" part of it. Unless the replies are misrepresenting what your patent is about. Which is totally possible.

That's not really the fault of lawyers, either.