[lispit]

It's the "patent pending" part that sucks. They're trying to patent the idea of changing your video card's CLUT (color look-up table) to reduce eye strain, which is a fairly obvious and trivial thing to do once you know that blue light affects melatonin production.

[coldtea]

>It's the "patent pending" part that sucks. They're trying to patent the idea of changing your video card's CLUT (color look-up table) to reduce eye strain, which is a fairly obvious and trivial thing to do once you know that blue light affects melatonin production.

On the other hand, since nobody else has done it (or patented it yet), real life proves that it's not that "obvious".

Like the "egg of Columbus" some thing are obvious in retrospect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus

[lispit]

I said "obvious and trivial thing to do once you know that blue light affects melatonin production." In the past people did other hacks with CLUTs (like some early 3D games baking gamma correction into the CLUT so that proper linear lighting could be displayed without an expensive postprocessing pass). If you were aware of the blue light effect (I'm not a sleep scientist, I don't know how long they've been aware of it) and had some low-level graphics programming knowledge, I don't think it would require great leaps to come up with this solution. It's just that no one else was interested in or aware of this problem.

Regardless of whether it was obvious or not, I hate the idea of extremely simple solutions being locked up behind patents, keeping the world today worse for the sake of hypothetical future innovations. It seems especially scummy the way they're trumpeting over social media about the harm that blue light causes while quietly trying to profit over an extremely simple solution to it. More than likely they know that Apple will never allow this on their app store because of the potential for abuse the necessary APIs would provide, and their end game is hoping the angry mobs will convince Apple to implement this as an official feature (and thus, pay them royalties). And more than likely, Apple would have implemented this years ago, had f.lux been an open source student research program with no patent applications attached.

[conistonwater]

Obvious or not is a bit of a red herring. The key test should be whether somebody would have done the same thing without a patent. If they would have, then a patent is unnecessary - the government shouldn't be in the business of granting arbitrary monopolies, only those monopolies that specifically promote something, for example, research. If a patent is granted for a thing that would have been done anyway, then that patent is a kind of a dead loss for society.

In the case of flux I think it's relatively clear that it would have been done without a patent, but maybe some people would disagree.

[CamperBob2]

There are only two real incentives that we, as a society, have to grant patent protection. One is to ensure that inventors have a fair chance to recoup their R&D investment. The other is to offer an alternative to trade secrets, where innovative insights are hidden from the rest of us, potentially forever, by a single proprietor.

Obviously, neither of these applies here. There is absolutely no reason for us to grant patent protection to f.lux. This is so "patently" obvious that the burden of proof falls on those who would argue otherwise.

[Spivak]

Somebody else has already done it. https://github.com/jonls/redshift has been by go-to for a few years now. It's my suspicion that Jon has no intention of patenting the idea.

[mangeletti]

This is also true (also called hindsight bias).

[upofadown]

The original stated intent of f.lux was to reduce eye strain by matching the colour temperature of the screen to your surroundings. The idea about circadian light came later, it was probably their users that came up with that.

... which would hurt my head except that I have concluded that software patents are just straight up insane. There is no point in trying to figure anything out with respect to them.

[mangeletti]

I was starting to feel confused about the anti-commercial sentiment I was seeing in here, noting that this is a forum created by one of the most successful venture capital firms in technology.

But, then I saw your comment. I can get on board with this comment. The fact that they're attempting to patent something so trivial puts them right up there with the likes of Intellectual Ventures, etc., IMHO.

[EarthLaunch]

Yes, HN is fundamentally more anti-intellectual than it is anti-commercial.

[morgante]

If it's so obvious, how come nobody else does it?

Also, to be clear, I doubt they're getting a patent on "changing your video card's CLUT (color look-up table) to reduce eye strain" but rather on the specific method they use for doing so.

[lispit]

How else would you reduce the amount of blue light emitted by a monitor using a CLUT except by changing it to reduce the amount of blue light emitted?

[elipsey]

Yep. They care so much about public helath that no one is allowed to be healthier with paying them. Classy move.

[pbhjpbhj]

Can't you level that complaint at all pharma firms though too?

At least if it doesn't encourage those behind f.lux to continue beneficial activities (promoting the benefit of redshifted screen use) then it should encourage others to develop health focussed apps in the hope of getting paid?

FWIW I use redshift.