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The Post-Bilski Era Gets Underway
bfwebster writes "A set of pharmaceutical process patents for 'evaluating and improving the safety of immunization schedules' (Classen v. Biogen et al.; see US Patents 6,420,139; 6,638,379; 5,728,385; 5,723,283) were held to be invalid due to unpatentability. The decision was appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but was upheld with a terse citation to In re Bilski (which decision we discussed here). Here's the entire text of the appeals decision: 'In light of our decision in In re Bilski, 545 F.3d 943 (Fed. Cir. 2008) (en banc), we affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment that these claims are invalid under 35 U.S.C. 101. Dr. Classen's claims are neither "tied to a particular machine or apparatus" nor do they "transform a particular article into a different state or thing." Bilski, 545 F.3d at 954. Therefore we affirm.' It will be interesting to see what happens when these same standards start getting applied to software-related patents."
For us non-laywers and not interested enough to spend time looking up those court cases but interested enough to understand what the significance of this is, can someone please translate the summary into plain English?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
As a software examiner I can say that this honestly doesn't change a lot in our art unit. If the implementation could occur in someone's head then no physical transformation takes place (i.e. software steps that aren't claimed to be on a computer.)
There are only a small amount of applications this effects and it's very easy to overcome, although I unfortunately can't go into much more depth than that.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Hey, since that is a transformative act, why not patent it? Then you can prevent anyone else from trying to "punish jews."
While you're at it, why not extend the patent to *ALL* hate crimes? And WAR? Be nice if hate crimes and war were impractical because of potential patent violations.
And you could patent stupidity. We could all use an outbreak of common sense.
It's a virtual invention and gets no protection. Patents after Bilski pretty much have to be tied to a particular machine or change something in meat-space.
For a software patent, "the machine" is the machine that results when the software is running on it. For example, when a computer is running a spreadsheet application, "the machine" is a "spreadsheet machine." (Don't believe it? Look it up.)
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Ooops. That says "post-Bilski" not "post-Bikini".
Darn. And I was looking forward to visiting the bikini-free beach this summer. :-|
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
And you could patent stupidity.
I'm quite certain that'd be one case in which prior art would not go unnoticed.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Properly, software, as a written work, should be covered by copyright and not patents anyway. This was true in the past, and the changes that allowed software patents to become common are precisely the cause of all the problems everybody is now trying to fix.
If the current Bilski ruling does not change this effectively, then reasonable people will continue to push until it is changed. In other words, our goal (no joke or exaggeration) is to put you out of a job.
Hey, since that is a transformative act, why not patent it?
Sorry, prior art. Look up Genghis Khan v Asia.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Actually, the Wikipedia page for Bilski quotes the court as having said:
"We leave to future cases the elaboration of the precise contours of machine implementation, as well as the answers to particular questions, such as whether or when recitation of a computer suffices to tie a process claim to a particular machine."
So I think the question remains open.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
either legally or conceptually. This identical issue was settled by the courts almost 150 years ago, when the "music industry" of the time was up in arms about piracy of music for player pianos.
Industry argued that the paper rolls should be patentable, because they constituted physical items that controlled a physical machine. The courts ruled (quite properly, in my opinion) that the physical form of the music is irrelevant; it might be possible, for example, to make a machine that could read music directly off the paper it was written on. Does that make it fundamentally a "different" product or work from the original? The answer was unequivocally "NO".
The same holds for written vs. compiled software: there is no fundamental difference between the results of software that is run in realtime by an interpreter (which reads the source code directly), and the results produced by the same program when compiled. If the interpreter and compiler are constructed properly, the output is identical. Therefore there is no legal (or moral, or ethical, or logical) difference. For all practical purposes they are the SAME.
It is precisely because industry has managed, after all this time, to finally get the courts to be sympathetic to the position that software should be patentable that we are having all these troubles. During the long period when it was understood and accepted that software was a copyright issue rather than a patent issue, such problems seldom arose. Now they are everywhere. Also, software patents have a chilling effect on innovation; we have seen this time and again, even some really egregious examples. It is clear by now that software patents have very little if any societal benefit, in proportion to the harm that they cause.
It still will need to pass the hurdle of "obviousness" under KSR, which basically lays down a standard of using commonly known components in accordance with known techniques and getting the predictable result is highly likely to be "obvious" and thus fail patentability.
What I found interesting in this case is that the courts have told the patent attorneys in this case that the Bilski ruling actually means what it says, and that trying to game their way around it will result in summary execution of thier case.
The rules have fundamentally changed.
The spreadsheet application can only do spreadsheets.
To the contrary, I bet most spreadsheets today are turing-complete, meaning they can conceivably simulate any computer program.
It's not called general purpose computer for nothing, you know.
Free Manning, jail Obama.