Patents are usually narrowly tailored to a specific part of a design document of a complex system, not the entire thing. The idea is that a "person of ordinary skill in the art" can implement the normal stuff (ie the current state of the art) around the new innovation, and the new thing gives that system a non-obvious benefit.
A lot of research papers are written the same way. They will go into great detail on a specific thing like a protocol or a storage format and then say something along the lines of "bolt this onto Redis" before presenting their data.
I’m fine with that in research papers. They have a very different goal where practical applications are not necessary yet (or ever in some cases).
> The idea is that a "person of ordinary skill in the art" can implement the normal stuff (ie the current state of the art) around the new innovation, and the new thing gives that system a non-obvious benefit.
Why specify a protocol at all then? Im sure a person of ordinary skill in the art can also come up with a protocol without an implementation. Takes like 15 minutes if you don’t have to worry about pesky details like having a working implementation.
There is no benefit, obvious or not, because there is no implementation. Whether it is safer or faster or whatever would be defined by an implementation. They’ve patented the digital equivalent of letterhead while positing that it will make mail more efficient.
Have you ever designed a protocol before? I'm not referring to something along the lines of "slap these fields in a JSON" for a service that gets 1 QPS, but an actual wire protocol intended for millions of QPS per endpoint. A good wire protocol is extremely difficult to design, far more difficult than an implementation of that protocol, and involves thinking ahead about all of the possible implementations and faults you will see.
That's why protocols like TCP are designed by huge collaborations of engineering teams across companies, while an individual who knows the protocol spec can implement TCP in a couple of days.
A lot of research papers are written the same way. They will go into great detail on a specific thing like a protocol or a storage format and then say something along the lines of "bolt this onto Redis" before presenting their data.