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The Death of Nearly All Software Patents?
An anonymous reader writes "The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc. In a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in article 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three — the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal — the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they 'result in a physical transformation of an article' or are 'tied to a particular machine.'"
Good news at last!
Common sense prevails.
Hopefully patent trolls will not be able to lobby against such changes; as for once, I daresay that certain major corporations are likely to be somewhat supportive, the current patent mess is as much a pain for them as for everyone else.
These restrictions bring patents back in line with their original intention, and hopefully will help reduce the excessive (patent) litigation so prevalent in the US...
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face - Ben Williams
The famous Overture's PPC patent which microsoft is trying to accuire through Yahoo should become invalid as well, resulting in "interesting times" to say the least.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Hope this gets done quickly, because the EU and other players are pushing for software patents and one of the main arguments is "harmonisation with the global (read: US) systems".
And I'm very keen on finding out what their next pseudo-argument is gonna be.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Somehow I've got the feeling that if this goes through, there will be a lot of patent attorneys making a lot of money writing clauses into software patent applications along the lines of:
"whereby said process causes an electron to move from transistor a to transistor b"
since way down at a quantum level, the bit state of a block of memory is a physical process.
Alternatively, I'm sure there will be a lot of "software appliance" patents showing up under the argument that once its an "appliance", its no longer a general purpose computer.
I even wonder if the Curry-Howard correspondence can't be used in court to invalidate "ALL" software patents as this a theoretical which equats any progam and (algorithm) to a mathematical formula. I wonder if this has been already tried in court !!
Then I got one, and was paid good money for it (sold it to the company I was working for).
And now it may become invalidated. Hmmm... While some software patents are ridiculous, such as the XOR algorithm and the "one-click" purchase of Amazon, others that involved true ingenuity and shrewdness perhaps should remain? If the same intellectual "energy" goes into creating an algorithm as it does, say, a widget, should it not be awarded *some* protection?
I am really mixed on this because of all the abuse software patents have seen. At the same time, when the whole notion of patents was drafted, that was no such thing as "software" Now, we have software running everywhere, including controlling such machines as the car you drive.
I know I will be hissed and booed, but perhaps there is *some* place for *some* software patents.
But in today's high seas of corporatism, many patents are abused anyway, and not just software ones. Big corporations will use their patents as "head whackers" where one corp will sue and counter-sue over patents just to gain market advantage, as opposed to exploiting the market for a patent. It's a fine distinction, one I am not sure about.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Traditionally, you cannot patent discoveries. Discoveries aren't something new or novel that you created. You just found something that already existed. For instance, if you discoverd Klausonium - a new element awesome for everything from T-Shirts to nuclear weapons - you couldn't patent it because its existence isn't owed to you; it existed before you found and it would continue to exist whether you tell people about it or not.
Likewise, gene sequences shouldn't be patentable because they are discoveries. The European Patent Convention expressly forbids patents on discoveries. US patent law is slightly more vague allowing patents on "new. . .compositions of matter". One could argue that a gene sequence is a composition of matter, but it certainly is not new.
Well, I'm done thinking. Good luck with Klausonium. Hope you can be first to market :-).
Your not patenting the patent; you are patenting the physical machine.
That is flatly incorrect.
A machine patent claims a particular configuration and interrelation of components: "an A connected to a B and applying pressure to a C..." etc.
And the components don't even need to be particularly stated: a general reference to a "fastener" or a "fastening means" can cover anything that holds part A to part B (a bolt, a nail, a clip, tape, a piece of rope, glue...)
Even in the machine arts, the focus of the patent is the operative principle: the concept of using force, pressure, torque, etc. in a particular way to achieve a particular result. Any machine operating according to that concept is covered by the patent. Of course, that principle may be described with an example, such as a particular combination of parts. And the patentee may find it convenient to describe his own embodiment - the particular components that he chose. But the patent claims, which define the scope of the patent, can be very broad and generic - even in machine patents.
This point is so poorly misunderstood here at Slashdot that I'll write it again: For all types of patents, the defining limitation is the operative concept. So it has ever been.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Mathematics is not a science. Science employs inductive reasoning, while mathematics employs deductive reasoning. That's why my university had a "Department of Math and Science".
Software is not "an engineering discipline." The process of writing software is an engineering discipline. Software itself is a self-consistent logical construct following a strict syntax -- in other words, it's math.
But there is a difference between finding a gene that exists in nature and manufacturing one that nature never created.
Sure it's kind of an open and shut case when you're talking about parts of genes that already exist. The problem is that people now have the capability to make genes from scratch.
Why shouldn't someone be able to patent a gene they made that lets you grow five noses?
That's intended as a strawman argument, right?
I think that we could probably go on with additional reasons for a week....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Sure they do. Earlier this year, in Tafas v. Dudas, GlaxoSmithKline sued the USPTO over its new "continuation rules package" that imposed new procedural requirements on certain patent applications. The CAFC not only heard the case, but came down loud and hard against the USPTO, finding that it had exceeded its authority. Although cast in procedural language, the new rules effectively altered the landscape of patentable inventions - a substantive change that only Congress was authorized to make.
Now, that was for a set of rules that were facially procedural. The USPTO's position here is not even facially procedural - it is a completely substantive decree that they will regard a whole swath of inventions as unpatentable.
The CAFC will definitely hear this case, and I've got some safe money on a USPTO smackdown.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.