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Courts May Revisit Software Patents
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the courts may finally be gearing up to overturn the ruling that opened the floodgates for both software and business model patents. It's been nearly ten years since the US courts decided that business methods were patentable and that most software could be patentable — and we've all seen what's happened since then. With all the efforts to fix the patent system lately, it appears that the court that originally made that decision may be regretting it, and has agreed to hear a new case that could overturn that ruling and restore some sanity to the patent system."
Think of the people that patents DO benefit... I'm thinking any lawyer fighting to abolish patents won't exactly be pushing themselves to win the case...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
if you can't patent maths then why should you be able to patent software as it's nothing more than maths.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I just can't see the CAFC reversing themselves to any significant degree here. Most entities involved have way too much to lose.
I predict this will get quietly swept under the rug...again.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Consumers have everything to gain from this. Nowadays it's impossible to write a gui'd "hello world" without stepping through a minefield of patents. As a small business owner, it's unreasonable and likely impossible to expect me to research every patent and pay royalties/license fees for "a piece of software that beeps when it wants the user's attention", or other things. Only large companies can afford such things, and they use it stifle competition. (What do you think MS's sabre rattling over linux has been about?)
Any CS person will tell you that when it comes to software, there's more than one way to skin a cat - probably thousands. But software/business patents let you find one, and squash the rest.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
I'll admit I'm generalizing here, but anybody who ever thought lawyers, judges and legislators were actually intelligent rather than just clever, plausible and glib need look no further than the way the courts have dealt with hardware and software matters. The smug, bone-deep ignorance is as blatantly obvious as an elephant's...um...trunk.
If you need further evidence, consider some of the laws that have been enacted or are under consideration as a result. You get the impression these people think a computer is some kind of magic fetish that actually produces results.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
a new case that could overturn that ruling and restore some sanity to the patent system
No bets here, lawyers enjoy the complexity and confusion too much to make this any better. Congress just needs to change the law. In a business like computers which is evolving so quickly, say a 2 year patent then it expires. And you can only sue if you produce a competing product with it and have been harmed.
You need to stop patent trolls dead. Like RAID and bugs. Let innovation back into this business.
Actually, worse: It lets you think of one hypothetical way of skinning a feline, and block anyone else from skinning any quadruped. Even if you've not actually demonstrated that your way of skinning the quadruped will indeed work (or even could work).
Hmmm, what exactly is NOT maths in this world? :)
Patents are meant to cover a particular implementation in physical terms of a theoretical idea, and right now, they are often being used to try and cover the theory as well.
For example, my own pet hobby is working on a new way to factor large numbers. Let's say that my redneck republican self gets insanely lucky and bumbles into an algorithm that actually factors something in polynomial time, or even close enough to it so that RSA and the like are untenable. Since my approach depends on treating factor as a decision problem, it follows that if I did get really lucky and struck gold, that, it would be applicable to a wide range of other problems. Under today's law, patenting that would basically give me the right to apply that mathematical breakthrough for my own ends, when clearly, its in the interest of society that as many people should be allowed to exploit it. Basically, I would be allowed to charge money for any sort of an implementation of a combinatorial problem, which is absurd. Yes, I might theoretically build a billion dollar enterprise to milk this concept for all its worth, I would ultimately though screw everyone else with whom such a breakthrough might be useful, and damage the overall economy that many millions of times more.
Really, the dividing line is one of information and knowledge versus an actual real world device. As Jefferson so adroitly pointed out, information does not lose its value when it is copied. If I know something, and give that information to you, we both know something, and that doesn't hurt me that you know it. It does mean that I can't build some sort of an empire at your expense, but, given that we already went through the Catholic attempt, and then the various State attempts, to monopolize information, with disasterous results all the way around (and not a single success in 2000 years!), it is obvious that a social framework which allows information monopolies works to the disadvantage of mankind.
Quite ironically, those people whose livelihoods depend on information having value are the ones most arguing that information ought to be free. Patents are, in theory, today, supposed to protect IT workers and their inventions, but most GOOD IT workers these days remember that computer science as a field advanced even more before today's patent nuttiness. If we did anything, it would be to allow the shared discovery and utilitization of new techniques, but protect, if desired, commercial and open implementations. So, for example, if Microsoft invents a new GUI dongle, or on the flip side, someone invents a browser plugin, then, it would be better for everyone if you simply could not be sued for making your own implementation of that idea. That gives us a world where everyone's products can advance, we have IT for our customers and ourselves and leave the lawyers out, and everyone is happy.
It is really only the idiots at Wall Street, that have handed us the internet boom mess, the present mortgage mess and the previous S & L mess, that want to maximize every asset as much as possible with silly things like patents and create yet another bubble that will burst and screw the rest of us up. But really, Windows doesn't need any patents any more than Linux does. The value of both of those products is predicated on their overall customer experience, not some silly mining like claim staked out in Washington DC!
This is my sig.
3 years maybe?
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
- A rethink to head off not only having their wrists smacked but having the USSC start reviewing their cases much more often (complete with reversals) or
- A chance to put together a really solid and detailed ruling to give the USSC a reason to agree with them.
We won't know which they pick until this summer.Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
It's good this software patent regime might be re-visited, but what is unfortunate is that we as USA, are again simply following Europe on this issue. They have beaten us on all issues concerning the common man and IT by being more pragmatic. I hope this will change with a new administration next year.
Maybe there will be some hope that the court would draw some inspiration from the Constitutional authorization for the patent system, and limit the current excess of claims for ideas, cutting out a whole load of worthless and oppressive patents. The aim of the constitutional authorization for patents was 'to promote the progress of ... the useful arts'. 'Useful arts' used to mean hands-on making useful things.
Maybe there will be some useful amicus briefs.
-wb-
Prepare to be sued.
My blog
Interesting stuff.
Excellent post, I'd mod you up if I could.
Software and business processes are simply two more media within which invention may occur. It makes no sense to try to put certain media off limit to patents. There are only 3 criteria for a patent: Utility, originality and disclosure. Utility means it must be worth money. Originality means it must not have been done before nor even be obvious from that which has been done before. Real patent reform would simplify the current system by: 1) Removing all patent fees. Patent fees are an incredibly regressive tax on the most critical point of civilization: Creation. 2) Letting anyone establish priority by the simple expedient of posting to Usenet a digitally signed disclosure via an NNTP server at the Patent Office(s) which would then re-sign and time stamp the disclosure before replicating to Usenet repositories around the world. 3) By shifting the tax base to net assets rather than economic activity, thereby removing the government subsidy for centralized wealth that keeps centralizing wealth in the hands of the technically stupid who then keep useful, original and fully disclosed technologies from receiving appropriate bids. A perhaps non-obvious concomitant is to distribute the revenues so raised evenly to all citizens in a citizens dividend (raising the always-important question of who should really be a "citizen"). It is this last item that is critical to understand for real patent reform -- particularly with respect to the concept of "disclosure". In science, a key goal is to publish reproducible experiments. Reproducibility is also key to patent disclosure. The idea is that anyone with a reasonable, publicly available education in the relevant discipline(s) should be able to take the disclosure and "reproduce" the value of the invention. What that means is that there should, for any "valuable" invention, be no lack of bids to buy the patent outright -- bids whose magnitude are an objective measure of the invention's utility. The government then ensures that the technology is put to maximum use in the economy by removing taxes on economic activities, including those activities that make use of the technology, and replacing those taxes with a use fee for net assets in excess of subsistence properties, said fee assessed at the property's "no brainer" value times the "no brainer" rate of interest. This will raise the hackles of many-a pseudo-libertarian so I'll repeat to them the following reason this is consistent with libertarian philosophy: The function of government is to protect property rights, beyond those subsistence assets an individual would self-defend (home, tools, small territory/farm/hunting land) in the "state of nature" (perhaps you're more comfortable with Lockean terminology than "anarcho capitalism"). A precondition of government is that all property rights are under some sort of "duress": The threat of "taking" by force or fraud. This is the basis for using liquidation rather than market value. Moreover, since land is the most targeted asset for taking (even more than gold) it makes sense that the "in place" valuation be used since the taker would prefer their synergistic value. Now as to the interest rate: When banks use the net present value calculation to estimate the value of collateral -- assets which they "take" upon breach of contract -- is by thinking about the profit stream they, as naive owners, would be virtually certain to obtain by taking control of the asset. Since they are naive, they must not use the profit stream expected from knowledgeable owners, but rather by virtually any competent adult. It is in that sense that I mean "no brainer". So they project their "no brainer" profit stream upon which they need to run a net present value calculation, which means they need to pick an interest rate. They pick the interest rate that corresponds to being able to turn that asset into cash over the short term and sock it away somewhere over the short term until they can loan it out more intelligently: the risk free interest rate of modern portfolio theory aka short term tre
Seastead this.
Prepare to be sued.
P.S.: "Fiiiiive triiiiilioooons, two hundreeeed thir..."
A better analogy would be "if you can't patent chemical compounds, you shouldn't be able to patent drugs, as drugs are nothing more than chemical compounds".
...
Software is just a subset of math, just as drugs is a subset of chemical compounds. Your analogy make it sound like math is at a totally different level of abstraction than software. It isn't.
Or maybe we need a car analogy to make it perfectly clear
It's been nearly ten years since the US courts decided that business methods were patentable and that most software could be patentable -- and we've all seen what's happened since then.
Since then we've seen the emergence of Google as a powerful challenger to Microsoft. This is one example among many of a company whose entire existence, much less its massive success, is dependent upon a patent (# 6285999, in Google's case). If Google had not been able to patent its major innovation, then Microsoft could easily have co-opted the idea, and it would have dominated search as well as operating systems and office suites. Recall that most of Microsoft's meteoric rise took place during a time when software was not patentable. The absence of software patents is precisely what makes "embrace, extend, extinguish" possible. Software patents give the original innovator the power to stop that strategy in its tracks.
I believe that what Slashdot readers truly dislike are bad patents, not software patents per se. Software just has more bad patents than it should because of the way the PTO treated them. Until the courts basically forced the PTO to accept software patents, the PTO did not hire computer scientists as patent examiners. Even now, the PTO has a massive backlog of software patent applications, and as a result computer related applications have by far the longest median time to issuance (roughly 44 months!). The PTO tends to err on the side of issuance, and so we end up with a flood of terrible software patents.
How to fix this? The simplest way is to eliminate the presumption that patents are valid, which requires a patent challenger to prove invalidity by clear and convincing evidence (a standard almost as high as beyond a reasonable doubt). Instead, we should recognize that many patents are not valid and end the presumption of validity. That way, bad patents can be more easily challenged, and patent trolls will think twice before bringing spurious suits.
Most optimistic reading ever. It's highly unlikely they'd just throw them out, after charging for them and creating all kinds of jobs and even a few business models due to them. Not that they do any good for society, but they did do some good for a small segment which is going to be very vocal about keeping /some/ value.
That's not worse for the cat :).
:).
Patent the evil stuff, and only issue licenses to people already in prison or on deathrow
I'd disagree with you here. It's not us that are doing the "greedy reductionism", it's the compiler. Perhaps the truth is that those who think software is anything other than math are guilty of greedy expansionism? Imagining that a couple of abstraction layers makes a work worth more than it's functional form, which is clearly misguided because patents only cover functionality.
A HLL compiler is a tool, a trivial abstraction. Without that tool, you're doing math and manipulating the cpu directly. Software is math and there's no "greedy reductionism" required.
Take a simple ULA. It changes a signal input into a modified output. But if you make it the "obvious" way you may end up with a device that is more expensive, takes longer to get the answer or is too darn wasteful of energy to be used.
So you find out how to reorganise your circuit so that there's less interference (there's none of that in a software system, at least none mentioned in any software patent) so you can make it quicker or run it faster. You can find ways of reducing its' power requirements by changing the size of the components or its constituent transistors.
And if someone comes up with a different die that does the same thing, it's not infringing on YOUR patent because it's the DEVICE that is patented not the result. Unlike a software patent, which is all about how you want to do it, not how you actually HAD to do it. Worse, many are just "we want this result" and leave up HOW to get that result (the actual DEVICE patented) up to a secret sauce.
Real Life is tricky. And you only get the one bite at the cherry (tetrapack is a simple closure method, but if you find another way of simply closing a carton, that's not infringing).
I can see the issue with "business model" patents but what is wrong with software patents? Is there something I missed as to what type of software patents are allowed?
I'd like to make an intelligent comment on the lack of detail in the article, or some sensible prediction of what it means. But I'll confess my brain is kind of stuck at the stage of going:
...
Oh please oh please oh please oh please oh please oh please oh please oh please oh please oh please
In ancient times "One click buying" was called "Going to the general store, and asking for things - you would leave with them, and the owner of the store would write them down in an accounts ledger". Later on you would pay for it.
We all know there ain't no sanity claus
Courts, like all government, are so out of touch with the real world that they are essentially incapable of rendering rational decisions. Unfortunately, we Americans are too disposed to elect officials (including judges) based on appearance and rhetoric than on actual qualifications. In this age, any judicial nominee/candidate or other politician who cannot articulate what the internet is without referencing "tubes" or understand what an IP address and ISP are, is not qualified for office.
The patent fiasco and other nonsensical decisions clearly illustrate this.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
I read the patent law blog, and it seems a HUGE stretch to suggest the courts "may" revisit their ruling--there are multiple avenues for them to go down with regard to the case in question and thus it's a very, very, weak "may". Especially since the case is about an overly vague application involving trading based on risk.
I'm afraid someone overhyped a blog entry and then posted it on slashdot. But I think you're right too: the overall topic is definitely worthy of discussion.
Below I pasted the text of the actual court order from the CAFC granting the rehearing en banc. It appears that that the CAFC will be considering business method patents rather than software patents. More specifically, the CAFC seems interested in business method patents that contain a "mental process" as one of the steps. I don't think CAFC will be considering software patents at all.
The link in the techdirt article to PatentlyO provides much better information than the techdirt article.
IN RE BERNARD L. BILSKI
and RAND A. WARSAW
This case was argued before a panel of this court on October 1, 2007.
Thereafter, a poll of the judges in regular active service was conducted to determine
whether the appeal should be heard en banc.
Upon consideration thereof, IT IS ORDERED THAT:
The court by its own action grants a hearing en banc. The parties are requested
to file supplemental briefs that should address the following questions:
(1) Whether claim 1 of the 08/833,892 patent application claims patent-
eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. 101?
(2) What standard should govern in determining whether a process is patent-
eligible subject matter under section 101?
(3) Whether the claimed subject matter is not patent-eligible because it
constitutes an abstract idea or mental process; when does a claim that
contains both mental and physical steps create patent-eligible subject
matter?
(4) Whether a method or process must result in a physical transformation of
an article or be tied to a machine to be patent-eligible subject matter under
section 101?
(5) Whether it is appropriate to reconsider State Street Bank & Trust Co. v.
Signature Financial Group, Inc., 149 F.3d 1368 (Fed. Cir. 1998), and
AT&T Corp. v. Excel Communications, Inc., 172 F.3d 1352 (Fed. Cir.
1999), in this case and, if so, whether those cases should be overruled in
any respect?
This appeal will be heard en banc on the basis of the original briefs and
supplemental briefs addressing, inter alia, the issues set forth above. An original and
thirty copies of all briefs shall be filed, and two copies served on opposing counsel. The
parties shall file simultaneous supplemental briefs which are due in the court within 20
days from the date of filing of this order, i.e., on March 6, 2008. No further briefing will
be entertained. Supplemental briefs shall adhere to the type-volume limitations for
principal briefs set forth in Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 32 and Federal Circuit
Rule 32.
Any amicus briefs will be due 30 days thereafter. Any such briefs may be filed
without leave of court but otherwise must comply with Federal Rule of Appellate
Procedure 29 and Federal Circuit Rule 29. Oral argument will be held on Thursday,
May 8 at 2:00 p.m. in Courtroom 201.
But you have clearly violated my patent on "conveyance of verbal information with tonal accompaniment", colloquially known as "songwriting" and "singing", respectively, when composing and conveying the information, respectively.
Prepare to be sued.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
As a short-term solution, why doesn't the court just make open-source products exempt from patent violation? If you code something and release the code for it, you're not hiding anything, right?
I don't know how this all stacks on the international scene, or even how patent laws effect over the internet.
What i am wondering is how this might effect software systems developed by orgs that is intended for import over the internet to the US.
In particular i am wondering about Overlay TV (canadian) as they claim to have a patent on their "technology" but i find the system neither ingenious nor difficult to reproduce independently. The technology is clearly targeted to the web and is a software system developed by a Canadian company.
Why wouldn't the lawyers fight hard on both sides of the case? That's what they are paid to do. Court cases that shift around the boundaries of patent law do not hurt or help "the lawyers". It just changes where the fighting is but there will still be fighting.
For example, the recent KSR v. Teleflex case changed the rules on obviousness. That created lots of work. Suddenly there were new arguments to make in seeking new patents. There were also new arguments to make in invalidating old patents. Lots and lots of work.
The only way us patent lawyers would actually loose is if patents were outlawed.
I am a lawyer, but not yours. Anything I tell you might be a total lie intended to benefit my clients at your expense.
*from high earth orbit*
Egads! It's full of lawyers!
*drops planetbuster*
Its the only way to be sure...
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
Note also that there's trade secret on source code too, so you have THREE concurrent protections: copyright, trade secret and patent.
Note also that the car design version of a software patent would be "four wheels at each corner, with a lareg window at the front".
I bet you're a lawyer.
I guess that many programmers will be anti patent for a number of reasons:
You left out the biggest reasons to oppose software patents, they stifle innovation and they lockout others who come up with something innovative.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Math is an abstract concept, there is very little that IS math. A pendulum isn't math, math just describes it's motion. The gears in a watch aren't math, math just tells you what the ratio of gears should be. The gears themselves aren't math, they're physical objects. You don't assemble math into material objects, math is just a part of the rules of physics. Math is involved in the creation of many things, but the created thing isn't math.
Software, however, IS math. Or more pedantically, it's a machine-readable description of math. Does being machine-readable math make it more patentable than human-readable math? Without the machine to interpret the description and take tangible physical action, it is still nothing more than an abstract definition of mathematical operations. Just like the mathematical equation defining a pendulum's motion is just an abstraction until you build a pendulum and set it in motion, and if you do that, and patent it, you're patenting the physical device, not the mathematical description of its motion.
There's also reason to believe, based on Microsoft vs AT&T, that SCOTUS agrees with this interpretation that software by itself is just an idea and not patentable.
The enemies of Democracy are
Since then we've seen the emergence of Google as a powerful challenger to Microsoft.
Dude, if software patents were around when google was coming together Lycos would have sued them into oblivion. What an ironic company to use as an example.
Yes, it's true that some individual people do benefit from business process and software patents, but they do nothing to encourage innovation. In fact, they end up stifling innovation. Patents were meant to encourage innovation, not stifle it.
Do you actually believe this? Patents, from the very beginning, were devised to protect existing technology. Vested interests write the law, not some non-existent altruistic ideal handed down from the heavens.
Yes because patents were meant to encourage progress. Originally Thomas Jefferson, who didn't like corporations, opposed patents however his friend James Madison convinced him they could encourage progress.
FalconShould there be a Law?
"More than one way to skin a cat" actually (or according to some) originally referred to catfish, which are very had to skin and which often require variously devious approaches like nailing to a tree etc...
So it might cover skinning quadrupeds _and_ fish...
One thing that should fall out of the view of software being patentable as a model of a device is that the end user should have the right to modify any licensed copy of any software into anything else that uses the same covered technology just as you would be permitted to do with physical devices. For example, if you buy a device with vendor-provided software or you have an operating system that includes licensed, patented technology, you clearly have the right to use the covered technology modeled by that software - and you should be able to use some other arrangement of bits to provide the same covered functionality (as in drivers for a different OS, or a different OS entirely) just as you would be able to modify a physical device to better meet your needs.
A difference in my terminology I guess - when I see the word "socialism"
Well I used "socialism", "socialistic", wrong myself. Socialism was when government owned the means of production. A person could still own their own home but the factory they worked in was owned by the government. People do the same today with "liberalism". Liberalism means individual liberty and small government, but somehow some distorted the meaning.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Tragedy of the Commons is the system archetype, whose name is derived from the over-use and abuse of "common ground" in medieval England. The small villages there typically had a "commons", a grassy place for allowing each nearby farmer to bring in their "cow" to eat the grass...probably had something to do with the number of cows (1 per farmer), available grass, etc., and the "commons" area could meet all their needs, without grazing the land to dust. The commons benefited everybody (kinda sorta like "public domain"), without cost to any one individual. And, all common ground users cared for the common land. Because, it belonged to all, and...nobody.
Until, of course, one farmer got greedy and saw an opportunity to purchase another cow and take advantage of the "free range" grass...he now had TWO cows and could efficiently outproduce the others...giving him a bigger "market share".
Some of the others saw this and they, too, jumped on the bandwagon, each buying another cow...because it finally occurred to them that it was no more expensive to feed two than one, since the "everybody", and "nobody" bore the cost...
The greed continued...some of the others went out and bought TWO new cows... you get the picture...
It wasn't long before the "commons" was grazed to dust...the farmers had no means to support their large herds, went bankrupt, killed the cows, etc., and they all ended up on the public dole.
Fast forward to ~2000 CE, and up to the present. Our information society has exploded into logarithmic growth...Software methods and Business methods are mostly re-combinations of ideas and methods (prior art) that have been utilized in the past, but are word-smithed into "new" ideas. The prior art, which nobody owns, but benefits us all, is the commons...
The Patent Trolls are nothing more than the greedy farmers who saw an opportunity to take selfish advantage of "everybody's" and "nobody's" common ground. We have reached the point where the commons are grazed to dust.
The solution? Not sure there, but the only party that CAN implement a solution is a higher power...just as it was in Medieval England. The higher power is government, whether it be local (village) or Federal (as is our case here). Ultimately, it is our (U.S.) government's responsibility to provide for its' citizen's health, welfare and quality of life, by preserving the "commons" for the benefit of all.
Prior art,and the protection of prior art (the commons) is government's responsibility. I think the penalties should be severe for anyone who selfishly plunders the common ground...
F.P. Oglethorpe
Not if life saving drugs stop being developed, because the pharmaceutical companies spend millions proving a particular chemical is safe and effective and then get massively undercut by a third party manufacturer producing the same chemical via a different process.
It doesn't go like that, pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than they do on research. Not only that but government does a lot of research as well. According to this, "An alternative to pharmaceutical patents", in Europe the bulk of research is paid for by government. Now I don't know if that's true but in the US the federal government pays millions for research as well. An excellent example of this is Taxol. The NCI, National Institute of Cancer, part of the NIH or National Institutes of Health a government agency spend $183 million in taxpayers' money to develop Taxol. What did the NCI do with it? After spending all that money to develop and test the drug as a cancer treatment the NCI "sold", gave it away is more like it, all the data needed to win FDA approval of Taxol as a drug to Bristol-Myers Squibb for $43 million. In other words taxpayers paid more the $140 more than they got. And how much does BMS make selling Taxol? In 2000 BMS made almost $1 billion and they were expected to make more each year thereafter. Now I don't know how many doses are needed for one treatment with Taxol but while BMS has been able to lower the cost of making one dose to under $1 a full treatment costs a few thousand dollars to someone needing it or their insurance.
FalconShould there be a Law?
You can also add the trade secret. There's no requirement to go public if you do come up w/a clever idea if it really is unique and you think you can make money w/it.
Excuse me, but you are violating my trademark on 5,235,354,434,434.
Prepare to be sued.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Software simply doesn't fall into the realm of being of qualities supporting patent-ability, nor do business methods.
Abstraction Physics No Kidding.
However given that description and a notion of the order of these blocks, someone with average skill in the more specific art of image compression could readily write a JPEG decompression algorithm.
The thing about patents is that, given the right question, the answer is almost always straightforward. Arriving at the proper question is the hard part.
Before JPEG hit the scene we were ARC'ing TGA files and crap like that. I had to write RLE coders and decoders for punishment. Why wasn't there a widely-used DCT-based codec before JPEG? Did nobody say, "boy I wish we had smaller files to transfer," before JPEG?
The trick was somebody (name names, folks) said one day, "hmm, I bet if we apply a DCT to image data we could get pretty decent lossy image compression".
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Not that CmdrTaco could write a line of Perl or anything.
Seastead this.
Dude, everyone knows you can't copyright numbers. Now, my song, "Pentium Trillions, two hundreeeed thir..."
Where's a lawyer when you need one?
I am not sure if its a good idea, but it could be an interesting idea, with a small refinement.
Just as you say, you can "blow up" the code to 50,000 lines, but you can also blow up machine code and surround it with NOPs, or just make it extremely inefficient.
If, however, you move the burden of proof to the challenger, and he can implement the essence of the patented idea in any general purpose language as a program smaller than some constant, the patent is invalidated.
The problem is, defining "implementation of a patented idea" is quite fuzzy. Should it include the interface components required to actually put it in use? Should it be on a claim-by-claim basis?
I personally think that all software patents should be abolished, but I do think that if they aren't - they should at least be invalidated when someone can come up with a really short program that implements them.
Additionally, in the EU, the majority of income of patented drugs comes from EU governments, who buy these for their citizens as part of national health-care.
Its essentially the government paying for these drugs, why can't it pay for R&D more directly, and cut the inefficient patent process out of the loop?
Judge(s): We should revisit these software patents!
Microsoft: [rattles change box]
Judges(s): Case adjourned!