The bottom line: Supreme Court will never invalidate software patent.
Image this if Supreme Court does invalidate software patent.
A big sticker will be on the US map and shows, “Welcome to take all software inventions you want. All my software inventions are yours. Oh. BTW, yours in your country are still yours!” You see how this affects global competitions in software and finance industries.
However, the current patent system still has room for improvements.
1. Software innovation changes too fast. The patent length should cut to 5 years (excluding the waiting time to get the patent). I have discussed this previously, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2409917
2. Patent non-practicing entities (excluding public research institutions and schools) should be banned to sue anyone. However, even so Patent Trolls still know how to get around this. This just increases difficulty, but definitely won’t stop them.
3. Claim description has many ways to interpret. This is where the money is spent in litigation. If a standard structure and a list of words are allowed to be used in the software claim description, this probably makes easier and faster to find out if a software patent is valid. But I have to admit this is a hard problem to solve.
In my opinion yelp has no (exclusive) right to the user contributed data contained in its site. Google should not have to provide attribution to "yelp" if they scrape my yelp review, it should provide attribution to me.
Google Place and Facebook Place will be the two dominant local review sites.
If you are running a local review site, what can you do to survive?
Probably more and more people just go to Google Place and even write reviews there because Google Place will be listed on the top of the Google search results. Don’t think most local review sites can defend themselves from Google’s search power.
The value of the social search is not the result itself. It's that you have someone you know to consult on your searched subject.
For example, I will probably see my friend's opinion in a social search result. I might actually not like what he said or suggested, which he does not know that I don't like it. However, I do know I can ask him about the subject to find out his experiences or maybe get his second opinion.
That becomes powerful because it might cut the time for you to find the information you want. It's also more likely to save us from getting nowhere to find things we want.
So, relationships do help us find things quickly. And for those friends who give me wrong opinions will definitely lose my trust.
Would you give years of hard works freely to someone who just waits to gain benefits from your hard works? Majority of the answers will be NO. Therefore, a patent system is still needed in order to protect inventor's hard works from being stolen by big sharks.
However, there are problems with the current patent system. Why Innovation is stifled. Why trolls and litigation are likes wildfires. They all come down to one root cause. The current patent system treats all patents the same and does not factor in that the speed of the innovation in each industry is different.
If we just look at the innovation speed of the software industry and the 20 years patent length, the problems mentioned earlier become obvious. Say if the software patent only last 5 or less than 10 years, the problems become mitigated. Trolls will need to justify the litigation costs vs revenue generated in less years. Many paper patents will become no value at all.
Also, because the patent length is shorten to less than 10 year, it’ll force inventor to wait until implementation or commercialization of the patent is mature before filing the patent application. Otherwise, by the time implementation or commercialization is ready, the patent will most likely due soon.
>"...when you don’t actually know what you are doing..."
This is where CEO's psychology starts melting down.
Uncertainty leads to fear and fear leads to panic. It's like driving a car blindly. What a CEO needs is a light which points to a right direction, whether this direction is really right or wrong is another topic.)
This is just my own view. All uncertainties can be grouped into two categories: Vision and Culture.
Vision is like a guiding system, it tells your customers (consumer, employee, and investor) where your company is going. Culture is like an internal machine which take your company to where you want to go. When these two things are defined and guidelines are created, uncertainties become clear. It's because now you have two groups of high-level guidelines to tell whether you should handle an uncertainty seriously or not.
However, even your company have a good vision and great culture, you will still feel uncomfortable. It's the feel like driving at 200 MPH when you are used to drive at 70 MPH. Experiences can certainly help to ease this feeling when you gradually increase driving speed.
The other way is to build a data-driven company from beginning. This is like flying a jet plane which you do not visual see what's going on outside, but rather you see if you are doing well through dashboard panels. But at least a CEO must learn and know what information is important in order to have a meaningful dashboard. This is getting too long. Any feedback on my opinion is welcome.
There will always be people who will post pictures publicly at different places. (similar to Youtube)
There will always be people who will check out who are the crowds in different places. (similar to Youtube)
With almost every phone being equipped with camera in the future, there will be even more pictures than video stored in Youtube.
They probably will let you find people who have similar interests in each location.
When they have a huge stored pictures and people's location preferences, I am sure they'll have ways to generate revenues.
If college kids love and often use this application, they should have a chance (I think). Otherwise, ...
Image this if Supreme Court does invalidate software patent.
A big sticker will be on the US map and shows, “Welcome to take all software inventions you want. All my software inventions are yours. Oh. BTW, yours in your country are still yours!” You see how this affects global competitions in software and finance industries.
However, the current patent system still has room for improvements.
1. Software innovation changes too fast. The patent length should cut to 5 years (excluding the waiting time to get the patent). I have discussed this previously, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2409917
2. Patent non-practicing entities (excluding public research institutions and schools) should be banned to sue anyone. However, even so Patent Trolls still know how to get around this. This just increases difficulty, but definitely won’t stop them.
3. Claim description has many ways to interpret. This is where the money is spent in litigation. If a standard structure and a list of words are allowed to be used in the software claim description, this probably makes easier and faster to find out if a software patent is valid. But I have to admit this is a hard problem to solve.