Judge Invalidates Software Patent, Citing Bilski

bfwebster writes "US District Court Judge Andrew Gilford (Central District of California) granted a summary judgment motion in DealerTrack v. Huber et al., finding DealerTrack's patent (US 7,181,427) — for an automated credit application processing system — invalid due to the recent In re Bilski court decision that requires a patent to either involve 'transformation' or 'a specific machine.' According to Judge Gilford's ruling, DealerTrack 'appears to concede that the claims of the '427 Patent do not meet the "transformation" prong of the Bilski test.' He then applied the 'specific machine' test and noted that, post-Bilski the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences has ruled several times that 'claims reciting the use of general purpose processors or computers do not satisfy the [Bilski] test.' Judge Gilford analyzes the claims of the '427 patent, notes that they state that the 'machine' involved could be a 'dumb terminal' and a 'personal computer,' and then concludes: 'None of the claims of the '427 Patent require the use of a "particular machine," and the patent is thus invalid under Bilski.' DealerTrack apparently plans to appeal the ruling. Interesting times ahead."

Comments

Similar to Donald Knuth's Logic

[eldavojohn]

'claims reciting the use of general purpose processors or computers do not satisfy the [Bilski] test.'

Sounds familiar to the kind of logic that Donald Knuth employs when discussing software patents. He tried reaching out to the EU Patent Office in an effort to avoid making algorithms patentable--he feels this has been a mistake in America. He recently sent the EU Patent Office Commissioner a 1994 letter he had originally sent to the United States Patent Office about patenting software. His argument is simple: (1) math cannot be patented (2) all algorithms are math (3) all software is one or more algorithms and so follows that software cannot be patentable. The USPTO replied by defining non-mathematical software to be patentable while purely mathematical software is not. Knuth sums himself up nicely: 'Basically I remain convinced that the patent policy most fair and most suitable for the world will regard mathematical ideas (such as algorithms) to be not subject to proprietary patent rights. For example, it would be terrible if somebody were to have a patent on an integer, like say 1009, so that nobody would be able to use that number "with further technical effect" without paying for a license. Although many software patents have unfortunately already been granted in the past, I hope that this practice will not continue in future. If Europe leads the way in this, I expect many Americans would want to emigrate so that they could continue to innovate in peace.'

Maybe the right way to approach this was to claim that general purpose processors are only capable of executing extremely complex mathematical algorithms--which should not be patentable. Therefor the software that runs on general purpose processors should not be patentable.

Re:Similar to Donald Knuth's Logic

[eldavojohn]

What is "non-mathematical software"?

Well, I've read a lot of Knuth's stuff and though I don't see quite eye to eye with him, I definitely agree with his views on this. The source of the idea of non-mathematical software seems to come from patent attorney Eugene Quinn:

I have been criticized quite a lot for statements I have made that computer software is not the same as math, and I simply cannot back away from that. Nevertheless, as I have read through comments provided to Groklaw I am not so sure that my critics and I are as far apart on this position as one would belief.

And yes, he goes so far as to cite E. W. Dijkstra's three claims:

• So much for the care needed to keep the arguments manageable: we can summarize it by stating that in programming mathematical elegance is not a dispensable luxury, but a matter of life and death.
• The programmer applies mathematical techniques in an environment with an unprecedented potential for complication; this circumstance makes him methodologically very, very conscious of the steps he takes, the notations he introduces etc.
• Much more than the average mathematician he is explicitly concerned with the effectiveness of this argument, much more than the average mathematician he is consciously concerned with the mathematical elegance of his argument.

And he claims these statements do not invalidate his idea that non-mathematical software should be patentable! Knuth and probably 90% of software developers will argue that Quinn is either ignorant or insane.

And these are the people arguing the case and ensuring software patents stand. Worse yet, Eugene teaches the most popular patent bar review course in the US. Ignorance begets ignorance.

Re:Similar to Donald Knuth's Logic

[tepples]

Would mathematics still be copyrightable?

Yes, a sufficiently large number can represent a copyrighted work. It can be represent a piece of music or a computer program. (A program is a list of instructions that describes a mathematical process in a way that a machine can carry out.) A program is copyrighted as a literary work, but the process that the program describes cannot itself be copyrighted in the United States per 17 USC 102(b). That's why some inventors have been trying to use patent law, which is designed to protect processes, to secure exclusive rights in algorithms.

Because any piece of music can be written down as a series of bytes

While we're still on the subject of musical copyright for a moment: Define the "hook" of a musical work as the first few notes of the memorable part. Then the Kolmogorov complexity of a hook can be estimated as having 40 bits or fewer, based on encoding each of the first eight notes in five bits: four bits for the pitch (0 to 15 relative to a standard scale), and one bit for whether the note is short or long. So there are only about a trillion musical hooks, and the birthday problem suggests that collisions start to become likely around the square root of that (a million). The music-theoretic rules of which pitches fit well together reduce the space even further. For comparison, the repertories of the major U.S. performance rights organizations, which have already surpassed 15 million (8.5 million for ASCAP and 6.5 million for BMI). So collisions such as "He's So Fine" vs. "My Sweet Lord" (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976)) quickly become inevitable.

Re:how long until the process becomes a "machine"

[russotto]

An algorithm cannot be a "specific machine", as an algorithm isn't patentable subject matter in the first place. For years, software has been patented by using dodges like "A device consisting of CPU, storage, input device, output device executing algorithm X". Bilski makes that dodge invalid.

Some software patents are even sillier, in that they patent the _media_ containing the software. Some of Microsoft's FAT patents are that way, for instance. I don't know if that dodge has been tested in court since Bilski (or even before)

Re:Software is equivalent to math.

[Alsee]

I was reading along and contemplating whether I wanted to make an appreciative/agreeing comment, until I ran into the part about MP3s.

I believe most readers would agree that MP3 "really is patentable"

Programmers overwhelmingly reject software patents, and I think they would generally cite the MP3 patents as a perfect example of such invalid patents.

The latest Supreme Court ruling touching on software patents was Diamond v Diehr. People on the pro-patent side often point to that case to affirm their position because in a binary yes/no way the ruling was in favor of the patent applicant, but in fact Diamond v Diehr was an extremely anti software-patent ruling.

You're right about "transformation" being a crucial issue, although you somewhat miss on the "product" angle. The Supreme Court stated that the clue to the patentability of a process patent was the transformation of an article to a different state or thing. The case was ruling upon an industrial rubber manufacturing process, and all of the language is clearly envisioning a physical-process physically-transforming a physical-article into a different state or thing. Note that the end product does not need to itself be patentable. A classic process patent would be such as the one for refining aluminum-ore into pure metallic aluminum. Aluminum metal is not a patentable invention, but transforming ore into refined metal is a patentable process.

They also explicitly ruled that an algorithm was not a patentable process, and explicitly warned that "insignificant postsolution [physical] activity" cannot be used to turn it into a patentable process. The MP3 patent is nothing more than a patent on the pure-math algorithm for mathematically transforming one sequence of numbers into a different (typically shorter) sequence of numbers. The act of sending that MP3'd sequence of numbers out to a speaker (typically sounding like music) would be an extremely insignificant postsolution (post software) physical activity, and that insignificant physical activity cannot be hijacked to transform non-patentable MP3 math into a patentable physical process claim.

What the Diamond v Diehr majority ruling actual stood for was the rather simple position that an otherwise valid patentable physical process was not magically REMOVED from being patentable subject matter simply because it added or included a math calculation somewhere along that physical process.

And earlier Supreme Court ruling (Benson) had already laid out the proper method for considering a process claim that included software. Any possible algorithm (any possible software) was to be treated as a familiar part of prior art, and the claim examined to see if it disclosed any OTHER inventive contribution. You can attach a computer to some physical devices preforming some physical transformation and obtain a patent if it discloses some novel non-obvious inventive contribution beyond the presumed-familiar-presumed-prior-art software.

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