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"Bilski" Case May End Business Method Patents
hey sends us to a blog at NYTimes outlining the upcoming appeal of the case known as "re Bilski," which could spell the end of patents on methods of doing business later this year. One patent expert is quoted: "I think this is the unraveling of business method patents... I think there is a process we are going to go through to get there and the Supreme Court is going to be the one that decides it." But another expert thinks the case is unlikely to bring down the whole class of patents: "Definitions of business method patents always end up being circular. You can't really ban something unless you can define it and no one is offering a definition we can use."
What gives?
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What I don't understand is: Why does the USPTO grant something, i.e. business method patents, if nobody is able to come up with a definition? They must use some kind of definition, otherwise this proves that "business method patents" are nothing more than hot air. Is it just all about the money? I think I already know the answer...
Obviously the things being patented are defined. The quote means they can't define what a "business method patent" is. It's kind of like that old quote about porn - "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Certainly I don't think "one click" et. al are inventions -- they are implementations of an idea accomplished high speed by other peoples inventions. But there isn't a device in "one click", ergo in my mind there was nothing to patent. So my hope would be that the ruling would also go back to more of the founding father's desires to give individual inventors rights to market their own technological devices for a limited period of time, not the great big multinational corporations, who tend to use and abuse the system as much as possible.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Defining what can be patented should be fairly straightforward but we keep getting tied in knots.
A "cash register" is a patentable device. It is a physical construct that performs a specific work function. Its inventors deserve compensation for its invention.
Using a cash register to calculate and record a business transaction is a method of conducting business. No one should be able to patent the idea that you use a cash register to conduct business becuase that use is obvious and implied in the original intent of the device.
If we apply this to something like the Amazon "one-click" patent, the specific software application that acts as the mechanism for conducting the sale may deserve some protection. However, the idea of letting a customer buy something by clicking once, does not.
My position, in short, is that functional constructs (physical or virtual) deserve protection but ideas about the use of a construct does not.
That seems a simple enough practical definition, but I'm sure there's some problem with it that someone will feel compelled to expose.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
If the definition is "you cannot patent an idea", then logically all patents should be banned. Because even if a patent involves physical things (e.g., a heart attack predicting gadget), the only thing of value in that is the idea. Everything else in there is just metal, plastic and silicon.
And banning all patents would be fine by me. Let the market work out how to protect and reward ideas.
Not quite. As Dave Barry put it:
/me shudders.
"The big problem with pornography is defining it. You can't just say it's pictures of people naked. For example, you have these primitive African tribes that exist by chasing the wildebeest on foot, and they have to go around largely naked, because, as the old tribal saying goes: "N'wam k'honi soit qui mali," which means, "If you think you can catch a wildebeest in this climate and wear clothes at the same time, then I have some beach front property in the desert region of Northern Mali that you may be interested in."So it's not considered pornographic when National Geographic publishes color photographs of these people hunting the wildebeest naked, or pounding one rock onto another rock for some primitive reason naked, or whatever. But if National Geographic were to publish an article entitled "The Girls of the California Junior College System Hunt the Wildebeest Naked," some people would call it pornography."
So no, just having certain areas exposed doesn't make an image pornographic (if it did, most biology and sociology textbooks would be 18+ only).
Also, maybe I'm being trolled, but did you just say that you find children in bikinis hot? Your argument makes perfect sense if you used adults instead of children, so I can only assume you specifically intended to clarify that you find children sexually attractive.
Business method patents allow a company to take control over better ways of doing business. One of the ways that businesses can cut costs is by adopting proven methods for increasing the efficiency of basic operations. This is common sense to anyone who gives it more than 10 seconds of thought. Should Starbucks be able to own a patent on the process of saving money by making a universal lid for its different sized cups? I don't think so because the cost to the economy is decreased efficiency at every other coffee shop that is barred from using this process without paying Starbucks.
The simplest reason for not supporting business method patents from a pro-IP POV is that the business that discovers the process will already benefit greatly if it can implement it internally, and no business method patent is going to be unique enough to warrant the sort of protection given to bonafide scientific discoveries.
I think you're taking your argument way too far. As far as I can understand it the parent never said that. Please re-read.
Your head a splode
Ah, so we shouldn't have -any- patents, because humans can be quite ingenious.
Well, how about this pragmatic distinction, then: "You may patent an exact description of the solution, but you may not patent the problem or the goal." It seems to me like that alone would weed out half the bogus patents in the USA.
So basically, just as an example of that idea:
- The exact building plans of a machine that predicts heart attacks, is describing the solution, and thus is patentable.
"Predicting heart attacks" is, however, a problem not a solution. It's a goal, not the means to reach it. It gives you no exact steps to take and exact mechanism to build to solve that.
"Predicting heart attacks" might be a part of the solution to another problem, but nevertheless that part is described as a goal, not as a way to solve it.
- As far as I'm concerned, you can even patent an exact algorithm that solves the programming problem of your choice, provided that you supply ample documentation as to how it does that, and why it works. (After all, that was the whole idea behind patents in the first place.)
You may not patent the problem or goal of that algorithm. So stuff like patenting "showing an applet on a page" should have never been patentable.
- You _can_ patent a way to produce a chemical. Heck, I'll allow even a gene or a protein, to pick some of the most maligned examples. Go ahead. If you know how to produce MCR-B in a vat, go ahead and patent it. But, bear with me, there's a "but" there.
But you cannot patent the general goal of interacting with a given mollecule. You can patent a gene, or rather a way of producing it, but you can't do something as silly as forbid someone to interact with it in any form of shape. You don't "own" the gene, you just own one method to synthesise it. If someone figures out a completely different medicine that interacts with the same protein or DNA strand, you can't lock them out.
Etc.
Yes, both the problem and the solution are ideas, but they're not the same kind of idea. More importantly, they serve diametrally opposite purposes. Figuring out a solution is good for us all. Even in the worst case scenario where you patent it just to forbid it from being done, after the X years expire, we'll all have your detailed description of the solution. But patenting the problem, like some of the trolls do nowadays, doesn't really help society at all. They're just adding burdens to those who'll actually find a solution. Patenting the problem is nothing more than staking a claim that you want to fleece whoever comes up with the solution. It runs contrary to the whole idea of stimulating research and progress, which is why we have patents in the first place.
Just as a side-note, this is really orthogonal to my other objections to patents, so it doesn't preclude them. Even if under this rule I'd allow an algorithm because it's a solution, not a definition of the problem, I'd still throw out those which implement already existing human processes. Sorry, no patenting the the same thing again with an "in software" strapped onto it. You get the idea. It's just one part of the filter I'd propose, not the whole one.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Presumably he was referring to stupid "child pornography" rulings that get mentioned here occasionally.