Patent Absurdity/Українська (Ukrainian)
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Субтитри українською, незавершені: (Ukrainian subtitles, unfinished:)
Patent_Absurdity_transcript_v2.0_UA.srt
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Ці люди стали в чергу щоб вислухати аргументи
в судовій справі стосовно патентів на програмне забезпечення
що піднялася у Верховному Суді вперше за останні 30 років.
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- Панове, назовіть себе
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- Так, хм, гм, Берні Більскі. B - I - L - S - K - I
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- Ренд - R - A - N - D, Воршав - W-A-R-S-A-W
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- Розкажіть коротко, що саме ви винайшли?
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- Наш винахід - гарантований рахунок за електроенергію,
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-метод захисту(хеджування) обох сторін від ризиків у транзакції.
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З точки зору споживача процес оплати
рахунку досить громіздкий і містить багато взаємодій -
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фінансових операцій (окрім самого процесу використання енергії)
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між споживачами та тими, що надають енергію.
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ЦІ ЛЮДИ НАДІЮТЬСЯ ОТРИМАТИ ПАТЕНТ НА
БІЗНЕС-МЕТОД ХЕДЖУВАННЯ СПІЛЬНОГО
РИЗИКУ
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Ось це коротко і є нашим винаходом:
метод створення "гарантованих рахунків"
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як і для споживачів, так і для захисту
прибутків електрокомпанії.
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Результат розгляду цієї справи буде дуже важливим
для аналогічних випадків з програмним забезпеченням
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Справа Більського - це фактично заява на отримання патенту
на бізнес-метод чи програмний алгоритм
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- і патентне бюро відхилило її. І тепер він (Більскі) судиться
з патентним бюро, кажучи:
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-"Ви повинні видати мені патент".
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Дана справа - якраз про те, чим може бути процес,
який можна запатентувати.
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Оскільки ж, патенти на програмне забезпечення підпадають під
категорію процесів,
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тому що вони не є машинами чи сумішшю речовин -
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іншими категоріями, які патентуються. Ця справа вирішить,
яким має бути процес, на який можна отримати патент.
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- Можна трохи правосуддя, пане Робертс? Він щойно сказав, та й ви знаєте,
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що вся суть вашого патенту - це люди, що
підіймають телефонні слухавки та телефонують іншим людям.
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- Так, все можна настільки спростити, аж до конкретних дій,
котрі будуть виконуватися, але насправді це трохи більше того.
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Все узагальнюється, як продаж добра, що має змінну ціну
для однієї сторони, другій стороні угоди,
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за іншою фіксованою ціною, з виявленням
можливих ризиків.
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Якщо подивитися на постулат 4 патенту (у патенті містяться постулати, що
описують винахід)
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- там є довга математична формула, що дотепер не
існувала ніде в природі чи літературі,
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саме її вигадали ці дуже винахідливі панове.
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- Колись давно математику неможливо було патентувати,
а тепер може з'явитися хтось, як от Більскі, -
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що прийде та скаже: "Знаєте,
я дуже серйозно попрацював над тим математичним рівнянням -"
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"- а саме тому мені варто отримати тут патент на такий метод
обробки інформації."
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- Ви кажете, що там описане дуже довге виведення.
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Ви вважаєте, що точні обчислення чи хороша математика уже є
приводом для патенту?
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- Так, можуть бути.
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- Основа процесу написання програмного забезпечення -
берете абстрактний широковживаний алгоритм, наприклад,
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якісь засоби зробити що-небуть з якими-небуть даними,
і присвоюєте назви змінним.
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- Для нашого прикладу почнемо з простої матриці, матриці значень.
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- Знайдемо медіану кожної колонки, Мю 1, 2, 3.
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Нехай Y дорівнює X мінус Мю для кожної колонки.
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Тепер, оскільки у нас є ще один фактор, X, можна порахувати
X скалярно помножене на S - проекцію вектора X на даний простір.
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Цей процес називають сингулярним розкладом матриці.
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Ось де прихований трюк - найцікавіша частина. Скажімо,
перший рядок, X1, означає сексуальність.
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А X2 означає "Чи є у вам кішка?"
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А X3 означає.. ну не знаю.. захоплення.
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Тоді, ще ми означимо, що фактор, наприклад фактор
J1 дорівнює відповідям на опитування пані Джейн.
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Let's say J2 equals Joe's responses.
А J2 - відповіді пана Джо.
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Тепер спроектуємо все так само, як і раніше і обчислимо
J1 скалярно помножене на S мінус J2 скалярно помножене на S.
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Це буде геометричною відстанню між цими двома точками,
і цю відстань ми назвемо "сумісністю".
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І ось такими простими кроками ми вивели патент номером
6 735 568.
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Трюк у тому, що під час сингулярного розкладу матриці у нас були
абстрактні цифри.
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Те, що зробили у компанії Е-Гармоні (eHarmony; дослівно - Електронна Гармонія)
зробили, щоб отримати патент - це просто присвоїли назви до змінних.
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Таким чином замість абстрактного X1 маємо сексуальність,
а замість X2 маємо любов до котів.
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Саме так називаючи математичні змінні,
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вони змогли перетворити абстрактну ідею в
"пристрій", що можна запатентувати.
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- What we want to do according to the heads of
our patent institutions, is take mathematics and
- Як кажуть керівники інституцій патентування,
нам слід робити ось що - взяти математику
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slice it up into as many slices as possible, and hand
those slices out. And, say, if you do a
і нарізати її на скибки, якомога більшу кількість, а потім роздати
їх людям. Скажімо, якщо
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ви проводите аналіз методом головних компонент - перемножуєте матриці для сайтів
онлайн-знайомств, ми видамо цю справу компанії Е-Гармоні(eHarmony).
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Якщо щось стосується акціонерного капіталу - нехай цим займаєтья
компанія "Вулиця Приватної Власності". І так далі.
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Ми роздаємо ексклюзивні права використовувати математику,
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закони природи, у всіх контекстах.
Взамін же ми не отримуємо практично нічого.
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- Патенти - це форма державного гранту, в США це
випливає з конституції.
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- Ті, хто її писав, включили туди можливість надавати
ексклюзивні права винахідникам,
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з вірою в те, що це було важливою складовою процесу
винагороди людям, що ввели технологічні
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зміни ни благо суспільству.
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- The rights that they are granted are not the rights
to do the things that they invent, -
Ці права - це не дозвіл виконувати речі, що вони винайшли,
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а не давати іншим це робити.
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- So the idea was you have a machine or a thing,
which is not previously described in any literature, -
- Отож, ідея була, що у винахідника є машина або річ,
яку ще ніде не було описано у літературі,
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-and which no skilled mechanic could figure out
how to make given what is described in literature, -
і такої складності, що у цьому жоден досвідчений механік не зможе
самостійно розібратися (маючи сучасну технічну літературу),
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-саме за це вам видають патент..
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- The basis for determining what is patentable
subject matter has continued to evolve -
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- over the last 200 years of our national existence.
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- In 1953 the Patent Act was modified by Congress,
to add the words "or processes" to the word -
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- "product" in describing what could be patented.
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The Congress which did that was plainly thinking of
processes of industrial manufacture. Processes -
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- that produced something at the other end. Float
glass on molten tin, and it'll become flat, or whatever.
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- And it's unlikely that anybody thought of process
at that time in terms of computer software, -
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-because we didn't have applications on computer
software for many years after that last revision -
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- of the Patent Act.
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- Back in the late 70s the patent law was interpreted
such that you couldn't patent software. It was -
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- considered a mathematical algorithm,
a law of nature.
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The legal world changed. The environment was
quite different starting with some decisions by-
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- the Supreme Court, like Diamond v. Diehr.
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- The patent applicant was coming in with a new
process for curing rubber. The temperature, and-
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- the preciseness of the temperature is essentials
in curing rubber well. And the innovation -
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-that was being patented in this case was an
algorithm to monitor a thermometer -
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- that was basically in the process and determined
when the rubber needs to be released and cooled.
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- And they said "Processes for curing rubber are
patentable, there's nothing new about that, -"
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"- the fact that they use a computer in implementing
it shouldn't change anything."
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- The Supreme Court makes it clear that you can't
patent software, because it's only a set of -
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- instructions, or an algorithm. Abstract laws of nature,
algorithms, are unpatentable in the US itself.
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However, then there was the creation of the
Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit.
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- The problem being solved, in some sense, begins
with the fact that trial court judges always -
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- hate patent cases.
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And the reason they hate patent cases is, for a single
trial judge, a lawyer who has spent his/her life-
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-doing litigation, a patent case in which she/he is going
to be required to find detailed facts about how paint is-
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-made or how computers work or how radio broadcast-
ing operates, is an opportunity just to made into a fool.
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- Congress is attempting to change the system in which
patent cases are litigated.
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But instead of changing who tried patent cases,
Congress left a non-specialist district judge-
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-in charge of the trial. And then created a new court of
appeals called the Federal Circuit,-
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-who's job it was to hear all appeals from patent cases.
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Rapidly, of course, this court filled up with
patent lawyers.
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And the patent lawyers then made the law in the court
of appeals that applied to all those district judges-
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-who were still making non-specialist decisions of
which they were afraid.
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Naturally the Federal Circuit turned out to be a place
which loved patents.
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And it's chief judge, Giles Rich, who lived to be very
very old and died in his late 90s,-
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-was a man who particularly loved patents on
everything.
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The Federal Circuit court under Giles Rich sort of broke
Diamond against Diehr lose from it's original meaning,-
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-and came to the conclusion that software itself
could be patented.
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- The Supreme Court basically left everything to
this court to decide.
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- The PTO actually used to reject patents on software,
like in the early 1990s, and they did not allowed them.
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And the applicants would appeal those
rejections to the Federal Circuit.
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- In the world of machines you show the Patent Office
the machine,-
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-and you've got a Patent Office who's claims were
"I claim this machine."
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In the world of computer software there was no way
of defining what the unit was.
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I don't claim a program, I claim a technique that any
number of programs doing any number of things could-
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-possibly use. The consequence of which is very rapidly
we began to build up as real estate that somebody-
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-owned and could exclude other people from a whole
lot of basic techniques in computer programming.
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- What happened was, starting in the mid-90s, the
number of patents on software started soaring.
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An industry attitude started changing too.
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So you had Microsoft, which originally didn't deal
with software patents very much at all,-
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-I guess they got sued in the early 90s
by Stac and lost a, uh,-
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-significant judgment against them,
they started patenting.
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- They're gonna have their own set of patents.
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So that if a major patent holder threatens them,
they can fire back.
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- Gradually companies like Oracle were forced to set
up patent departments just for defensive reasons.
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They had to patent their stuff so that they had some-
thing to trade with the companies that had patents.
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Mark Webbink:
- And so the arsenal started to develop. By year 2001
Microsoft now holds thousands of software patents.
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Oracle was probably approaching a thousand software
patents. Adobe...
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James Bessen:
- All of them become more and more aggressive.
Patenters and some of the ones who were against-
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-software patents ended up suing other companies,
and so what you had is an explosion of patenting first-
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-and then an explosion of litigation.
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By the late 90s about a quarter of all patents
granted were software patents.
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About a third of all litigation, patent litigation,
involves software patents.
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About 40% of the cost of litigation is
attributable to software patents.
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And those numbers have been going up.
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So Charles Freeny invented a kiosk that goes in retail
stores, and the idea is you'd come in,-
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-you could select the music selection, swipe your
credit card, put in a blank 9 track tape,-
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-and this is is how long ago this patent was, and it
would write that music selection onto the tape-
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-and you could go away with it.
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The patent was drafted in a very vague language so
there were terms like "point of sale location",-
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-and "information manufacturing machine".
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And Freeny eventually sold this patent to somebody
who wanted to interpret those terms very broadly.
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To basically cover e-commerce.
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So here was this very limited invention for this kiosk,
and he wanted to interpret those terms in such a-
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-broad way so that it would cover transactions that
took place over the Internet,-
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-you could make them in your office, in your
bedroom, in your house, anywhere.
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And so it covered virtually all of e-commerce.
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The courts initially didn't agree with that interpretation
but they appealed it, and the appellant court largely-
150
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agreed with them, and they were able to extract some
settlements out of well over a hundred companies.
151
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But the significant thing is, here is this patent you
can't tell what it's boundaries were until you get to-
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-the appellant court. What most people thought
it's boundaries were turned out to be wrong.
153
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- One of the key properties of programming languages
is they're very very precise.
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You can look at any program language in any language,
in C, Python, any language like this,-
155
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-and you know exactly what it's doing. You can look
at two pieces of service code and you can say-
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"Are this doing the same thing or different things?"
And we do this because computers are very picky-
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-and we need to tell the computer exactly what we
need to do in order to accomplish some task.
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The language of patents is almost the opposite.
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There's an advantage in being vague, and being broad,
being non-specific, because the broader your language-
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-the more things you, sort of, catch in your net.
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- So it is a large problem in our patent system just
defining simply what is the context or the borders-
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-of the patent. And what does it cover,
and what does it not cover.
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And that ambiguity causes a lot of chilling effects,
because people are going to avoid doing anything-
164
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-that could possibly be covered by the patent, even if in
reality the patent wouldn't cover what they wanna do.
165
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- Let's imagine that in the 1700s the governments of
Europe had decided to promote the progress of-
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-symphonic music, or as they thought, promote it.
Will a system of musical idea patents, meaning-
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-anybody who could describe a new musical idea in
words could get a patent which would be a monopoly-
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-on that idea and then he could sue anybody else
that implemented that idea in a piece of music.
169
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So a rhythmic pattern could be patented, or a sequence
of chords, or a set of instruments to use together,-
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-or any idea you could describe in words. Now imagine
it's 1800 and you're Beethoven, and you want to write-
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-a symphony. You're gonna find it's harder to write a
symphony that you won't get sued for, than write-
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-a symphony that sounds good. Because to write a
symphony and not get sued you're gonna have to-
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-tread your way around thousands of
musical idea patents.
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And if you complained about this, saying it's getting in
the way of your creativity, the patent holders would-
175
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-say "Oh, Beethoven you're just jealous because we
had these ideas before you."
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"Why should you steal our ideas?"
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- People has been making music for thousands of
years. There were never any need for patents in-
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-the field of music. And since the computer industry
has made programming possible, people have been-
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-developing software as well, since right from the
beginning, there was never a need to have patents-
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-in this field in order for the activity to happen.
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- Almost everything we were doing back before 1980,
1981, those things, patent played no role in it.
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Cut & paste, the embedded ruler in a word processing,
word wrapping, a lot of the things that are real-
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-important and we take for granted, and that are much
more innovative in many ways than patents we have-
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-today, 'cos patents can be on some very minute
things, that's the way the law works.
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Those things happened, we had great
advances without patents.
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- One of the worlds most respected computer scientists,
187
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Donald Knuth, has said that if software patents had
been available in the 1960s and 70s when he was-
188
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-doing his work, that it's probably the case that
computer science wouldn't be where it is today.
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There would be blockades on innovation that could've
seriously prevented the kinds of technical solutions-
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-that we take for granted today.
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- The programmer writing a long program might
conceivably need to check whether 500 or-
192
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-thousand different techniques are patented, and there
is no way that she possibly could.
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- The Patent Office issues hundreds of software patents
all the time. Every Tuesday they issue 3,500 patents-
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-and a large number of those relate to software. It's
just impossible to review all those patents every week-
195
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-to make sure you're not doing something that could
infringe them.
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- So there's a provision in the US patent laws that
basically holds patent infringers, ahem, at I guess-
197
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-a greater liability if they are shown to willfully
infringe. So basically the idea is that if you knew-
198
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-about a patent and you infringed on it, you should
have a stricter penalty than if you didn't know about it.
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But what this results in is a situation where there is a
real disincentive to follow what patent has been made-
200
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-and what new inventions there has been through the
patent system, because if you read every patent or-
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-there's evidence to show that you have read patents,
then you are liable for willful infringement, you knew-
202
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-about the patent and you infringed it anyway, and the
penalty is triple damages.
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- A number of people suggested that software
should be removed from the-
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-scope of patentability. Can you comment on that?
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- Yes, well, I obviously disagree with that. And I don't
believe that software should ever be removed.
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It's one of our greatest sources of technical innovation
in this country. And to come up with a test that would-
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-somehow eliminate software would,
I think, be a disaster for the economy.
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- Mike and I estimate that outside of pharmaceuticals
and chemicals the patent suits are actings of like-
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-10 or 20 percent tax. You know, the small developer
developing something, down the road he has to pay-
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-that tax. And every small company I know in software,
as long as they've been around a few years and hit-
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-the market, somebody is asserting a patent against
them, they're running into some potential difficulties.
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00:21:27,200 --> 00:21:31,609
They very frequently feel obligated to get patent
themselves for defensive purposes.
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So all of that activity is a tax. It's not something that's
helping them innovate, it's an unnecessary activity.
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- The primary thing we do is an issue tracking system
called RT, or Request Tracker, so it's customer service,-
215
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-help desk, bug tracking, network operations, anything
were you've got a whole bunch of tasks that need to-
216
00:21:53,756 --> 00:21:58,089
-get kept track of. And you need to know what
happened, what didn't happen, who did it,-
217
00:21:58,339 --> 00:22:04,609
-who didn't do it, when. It's kind of a to do list on
steroids designed for a whole organization.
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00:22:04,859 --> 00:22:10,297
Pretty much everything is open source or free software,
under one license or another.
219
00:22:10,547 --> 00:22:18,009
We'll get consulting customers or support costumers
who add indemnification language to our standard-
220
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-contract or need us to sign theirs. And it says, in the
standard legalities, it's gonna say something like-
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-we indemnify and hold them harmless and agree to
pay their legal fees and sacrifice our firstborn, if-
222
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-something happens and someone discover that our
software is violating a somebody else's patent.
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It's very very rarely the case that we end up signing
something that has that kind of language in it.
224
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But it eats up a lot of legal fees.
225
00:22:48,726 --> 00:22:59,648
- Look at the innovative people in software in ICT,
and ask "Would they be better of if the patent system-
226
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-was abolished?" The answer is probable "Yes".
227
00:23:03,411 --> 00:23:11,472
- Who's benefiting? Patent lawyers is number one.
Number two, you've a small number of so called-
228
00:23:11,722 --> 00:23:17,822
-trolls who are benefiting, but it's not clear even most
of them is making much money.
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You're seeing more recently, in the last 4 or 5 years,
companies like Intellectual Ventures and-
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-hedge fonds who are acquiring large volumes of these
trash patents and using them to extract hundreds-
231
00:23:32,614 --> 00:23:38,129
-of millions of dollars from companies. They're
benefiting, they maybe the biggest beneficiaries.
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- There's a lot of bad press in the last few years
about the harm that's caused by software patents.
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And we think that's had a political influence on the PTO
to get them to slow down their issuance and start-
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00:23:49,518 --> 00:23:51,444
-rejecting them, and that's what has
resulted in the Bilski case.
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00:24:00,270 --> 00:24:07,630
- Well the biggest, first bad press story was the
Blackberry patents, where all the Congressional-
236
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-representatives have their Blackberrys and there was
a company called NTP that sued the manufacture of-
237
00:24:12,478 --> 00:24:17,425
-Blackberry saying that all Blackberrys infringed it's
patent. Well, NTP was this company which is just a-
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00:24:17,675 --> 00:24:22,532
-one person holding company, they didn't make any
products or services themselves, and so-
239
00:24:22,782 --> 00:24:29,764
-this got a lot of attention in the Wall street Journal and
Washington Post, and Congress persons were really-
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-upset that they may lose their Blackberrys and they
may not be able to communicate efficiently.
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00:24:34,289 --> 00:24:40,950
So that caused a lot of attention, then you had all these
patents on banking methods and imaging for checks,-
242
00:24:41,200 --> 00:24:44,188
-those patent holders were asserting against the
banking industry, and the banking industry has-
243
00:24:44,438 --> 00:24:47,686
-a lot of influence on Capitol Hill, and so they've been
going down there and saying "Look, these types of-
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-patents are causing us lots of harm." Then you add
into that the whole patent troll phenomenon in-
245
00:24:52,803 --> 00:24:58,457
-Eastern District of Texas, with small patent holders
suing large IT companies like Google, Microsoft-
246
00:24:58,707 --> 00:25:04,293
-IBM and Hewlett Packard. And all these companies
also have legislative influence, and they've said-
247
00:25:04,543 --> 00:25:08,612
-"These types of patents are causing real harm to our
business, they're costing us jobs, they're increasing-
248
00:25:08,862 --> 00:25:13,881
-the price of products and services that we offer to our
customers, and you need to do something about it."
249
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- The situation we find ourselves in is that the lower
court, the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit,-
250
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-is essentially a court for patents,
for hearing patent cases.
251
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And this is the first time the Supreme Court has
taken up that scope of patentability.
252
00:25:40,991 --> 00:25:47,852
And specifically this test that was implemented by
lower court, does talk to software patents.
253
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And so, it's basically a 20 year history of software
patents being granted due to the lower court.
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00:25:55,974 --> 00:26:01,286
And so, we're hoping that the Supreme Court will
clear up the mess that the lower courts created.
255
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And restamp it's authority which basically said that
you cannot have software patents.
256
00:26:06,315 --> 00:26:12,078
- When you saw the arguments that where brought
by Bilski's lawyer, the patent bar is in some sense-
257
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-an organized lobby. And an expansive subject matter
that's available to be patented is in their interest.
258
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And it's clear that that was frustrating to some of the
justices. Some of them were frustrated by how-
259
00:26:26,656 --> 00:26:28,685
-expansive patentable subject matter has become.
260
00:26:28,935 --> 00:26:34,553
- They seem somewhat dismissive of the idea that
you could patent this particular idea.
261
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- I think people has a hard time getting over the idea
that you can get a patent on hedging commodity-
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-risk. But if you actually look at the claims and look
at what's in there, it is a process and it's no-
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-different than any other process. It just may be
that it's not the way that they thought of patent-
264
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-law in the past.
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- We were encouraged by the comments by the
justices which showed that they were skeptical-
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-and which suggested that they understood that
software is little more than a series of steps,-
267
00:27:02,880 --> 00:27:08,441
-that could be written out as mathematical formula,
or written out on a piece of paper, or, as was-
268
00:27:08,659 --> 00:27:11,638
-mentioned by one of the justices,
typed out on a typewriter.
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- Software patents on a general purpose computer
have never been explicitly endorsed by this court.
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And this court has also shown no compunction about
reversing rules that've held for a very a long time.
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They clearly thought that the petitioners here was
trying to get a patent on something very basic,-
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-some basic forms of human activity.
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MORE THAN 200,000 SOFTWARE PATENTS
HAVE BEEN GRANTED IN THE U.S.
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PROGRAMMERS FIND IT INCREASINGLY DIFFICULT
TO WRITE SOFTWARE THEY WON'T BE LIABLE
TO BE SUED FOR
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NOW IMAGINE...
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Переклад українською версіі 2.0 Артем Пилипчук (Artem Pylypchuk).
Ліцензія CC-BY-NC-SA
TODO:
- translate the rest
- clean up english text
- modify display time to make them readable
