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A comment on Microsoft and Google jointly sue a patent troll who has sued 397 companies. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft and Google jointly sue a patent troll who has s... by singular on Thursday March 03, 2011 @05:49AM (#2283544)
Absolutely.

I think John Carmack put it best:-

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." [1]

[1]:http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack

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Re:Microsoft and Google jointly sue a patent troll who has s... by albertzeyer on Thursday March 03, 2011 @05:58AM (#2283560)
Whereby this again now is not about the idea but the implementation.

But in many cases, this is also right.

See Amazons 1-Click as an example. I haven't really looked up the implementation details they describe in their patent but I guess it mostly follows the straight-forward implementation of this.

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Re:Microsoft and Google jointly sue a patent troll who has s... by fakelvis on Thursday March 03, 2011 @06:47AM (#2283642)
The implementation details of the 1-Click patent are still fairly broad/generic: http://www.google.com/patents?id=O2YXAAAAEBAJ

It's worth noting that while the USPTO granted the patent (and even after multiple reexaminations still granted parts of the patent), the patent was never granted at all in Europe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent

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Re:Microsoft and Google jointly sue a patent troll who has s... by singular on Thursday March 03, 2011 @06:01AM (#2283568)
This applies to ideas too I think - if I have a general 'idea' of how to perform a task, that can be expressed as an algorithm which I then implement in [whatever language]; I could then be unwittingly violating a patent on the idea.
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Re:Microsoft and Google jointly sue a patent troll who has s... by noonespecial on Thursday March 03, 2011 @06:52PM (#2286281)
The problem seems to be that, when it comes to software, implementation, to the patent office, reduces to "with a computer".
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