Sony UK Refused P2P Software Patent

blane.bramble writes "The Register reports that Sony cannot patent inventions in the UK that remove the anonymity of the peer-to-peer (P2P) user experience. Sony tried to patent a method of passing around user reviews of shared files, but the UK Patent Office rejected it, and then rejected it again on appeal. The article indicates the patents were rejected because the 'inventions' were not eligible for patenting. " From the article: "When a P2P user downloads a piece of content from another user's computer, be it a song or a game or a movie, he normally knows nothing about that user - or where that user obtained the content. Sony's proposal would change that experience. Sony describes a method for attaching a user history to content when it is shared among computers or other devices. When one user downloads a song, he can see who had it last and what he thought about it."

Comments

Obviousness doesn't matter

[paladinwannabe2]

No, the EU doesn't care whether or not a computer program is 'novel' or 'non-obvious'- the EU just forbids software patents, algorithms, and most other mathematical constucts from being patented. For instance, if Andrew Wiles wanted to Patent Fermat's Last Theorem he couldn't- not because it's obvious (it took mathematicians 350+ years to solve), but because it's a mathematical proof.

Not really a surprise

[Raphael]

It is not surprising that the court has rejected the patent. Most EU courts reject software patents or business method patents even though the EPO (European Patent Office) will grant them happily (contrary to the text and spirit of the patent convention). So that court did its job and rejected something that should never be patentable in Europe.

However, this could change in the future: the EPO is lobbying for establishing a "(European) Community Patent" process and for having a single European patent court, which would rule in case of patent disputes like this one. Given that the judges in that new court would probably come from the EPO, there is a high risk that they would grant the patent.

Time to support the FFII and the FSF Europe...

Re:honestly...

[Shrubbman]

Like, say, the comments feature in emule?

Re:he who can, does

[shawb]

Most of the world follows a first to file policy rather than a first to invent, and even the United States is moving towards this. The primary justification for following a first to file policy is that there is a lot of difficulty in proving prior art, or more importantly proving LACK of prior art on unpatented inventions.

While it may seem unfair to inventors, going on a first to file policy is theoretically more fair and effective in the long run than a first to invent policy; If you think patent trolls and submarine patents are bad, imagine what someone (party A) could do by surreptiously inventing a tech, documenting the invention without releasing the information to the public, then waiting for someone (party B) else to invent the same tech, patent it and actually bring it to market. Party A could then retroactively coopt the patent and demand exorbitant fees from the Party B with a much stronger bargaining chip than they otherwise would have, as party B has already invested a lot of capital into manufacturing, advertising, supply chain, etc. With a first to file policy, there is a public record of the patent so party B would know in advance whether the tech is available or not, and therefore be able to know in advance what the costs involved with production (I.E. whether they will have to pay a liscensing fee on the tech.)

Although this brings up another odd conundrum with patents. They can be quite detrimental to innovation if the license holder does not bring the patented idea to market and does not actively shop out the patent to be licenced. Basically, if the tech is not in some product on the market, another party researching along the same lines would have very little way of knowing that what they are researching has been patented untill enough R&D has been done that they could independantly file a patent on the same idea. Without enough information to file their own patent, it would be difficult to search the available literature and listed patents to find if the idea has been patented yet, especially if the patent is written in an obfuscated (whether intentional or not) manner. If the tech has already been brought to market, it is likely that researchers in the field would be familiar with the competition and the workins of the competitors products and know at a much earlier stage whether the product they are developing is indeed innovative. If the patent holder is actively shopping the patent out, it is likely that the promotional materials presented would have a much more clear synopsis of what the patent actually covers than actually reading the patent itself.