Is Twitter's Patent Strategy To Not Get Any Patents?
from the good-for-them dept
We've noted in the past that Twitter is unique among many companies in its trademark strategy. Rather than threatening everyone and sending cease-and-desist letters all of the time, it has a very open (and free) licensing program, which has contributed to the rather large ecosystem built up around Twitter. The company will step in when dealing with clearly egregious attempts to use the trademark in a misleading or confusing way, but for the most part has been incredibly lenient.So what about the company's patent strategy. The company has been sued for patent infringement, but you must figure that it's collecting patents of its own, right? After all, even companies that are against software patents usually get them for defensive purposes, and there are plenty of things that Twitter has done that I'm sure the USPTO would approve. And, yet, Erik Sherman keeps checking the USPTO filings and can't seem to find any patents filed by Twitter.
Sherman notes that one of Twitter's major investors, Union Square Ventures, has been pretty outspoken about the harm that patents have done to start-ups (and how little benefit any of their start-ups have gotten from patents). However, when he asked Fred Wilson, from USV, about Twitter's patent strategy, Wilson told him he didn't know anything about it.
Of course, we've been told by some patent system supporters that if you're not getting patents, you're not actually inventing and that there's no incentive to invent without patents. So, do we assume that Twitter is doing nothing special at all... or that, perhaps, there are other incentives and other ways to compete rather than relying on patents?
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Or they're still trying to figure out how to file patents in 140 characters or less...
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Twitter inventions?
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Re: Twitter inventions?
If I were a betting man, I'd bet any of the following would be patents (or claims within a patent) approved by the USPTO:
i) A method for distributing messages from users to subscribers of that user
ii) A method for forwarding ("retweeting" if you will) messages with references to the original message from a user to their subscribers
iii) A method for real time search by long polling of a http request so that search results are returned in real time in any javascript capable browser.
And the worst part is that those are gross oversimplifications that don't even begin to highlight where the true innovation "behind the scenes" is occurring.
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Re: Twitter inventions?
They've really pushed real-time notification and search (at a massive scale) forward. Given the sort of patents we see all the time, you gotta believe the USPTO would approve patents on that subject matter.
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Re: Re: Twitter inventions?
You can't have guaranteed latency between 2 endpoints connected with IP stack.
No matter how valuable you think the Twitter is, there's nothing of engineering complexity there. NOTHING. Bunch of scripts+webserver. Repeat after me: valuable != complex.
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Re: Re: Re: Twitter inventions?
You can't have guaranteed latency between 2 endpoints connected with IP stack.
No matter how valuable you think the Twitter is, there's nothing of engineering complexity there. NOTHING. Bunch of scripts+webserver. Repeat after me: valuable != complex.
I just want to highlight this comment for its sheer ignorance. That is all.
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Re: Re: Re: Twitter inventions?
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Re: Re: Re: Twitter inventions?
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The patent system for software will have to fail or no one will be able to write any software without infringing. There goes innovation and the end of my career. I write new programs and do not infringe on copyrights. But how can I stop or compete with a patent on a process for a menu?
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They Despise Patents
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Perhaps they're just not public yet
Also, there's a quirk in US law that says if you disclaim the right to file patents internationally for your US patent, you don't have to publish them at all until they issue. This, of course, takes years.
Perhaps Twitter is trying something different, but the simpler explanation is probably that we just haven't seen their patents yet.
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twitter
(1) subscribe others and allow subscription of messages
(2) index all messages of all users and
(3) search and subscribe sources based on messages
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Re: twitter
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praying for rain
Again, there are patents and then there are patents. When firms lack quality they flood the PTO with applns. It's like praying for rain when your team doesn't have a chance.
bias, bias, zzzzzzzzzz
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Yep, sounds about right. Of course, by USPTO standards Twitter's rather bland (yet extremely popular!) idea would probably qualify for 87 patents, by reasonable standards 0 patents is about right.
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Now they have a patent filed
Expect more to follow.
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