Supreme Court Review of Bilski Heats Up

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The Supreme Court's review of In Re Bilski (discussed here numerous times) is heating up, having attracted no less than 44 friend-of-the-court briefs from almost everyone with a stake in the patent system. Patently-O provides a nice summary of who is arguing against Bilski. The two questions before the Supreme Court are whether or not a process must satisfy the particular machine or transformation test, and whether this test improperly excludes many business methods in spite of the wording of 35 U.S.C. 273, which specifically allows business-method patents. So far, the case has attracted legal filings from nearly every large company or group whose patents might be threatened. You can read briefs from Yahoo, IBM, Borland, Dolby Labs, the BSA, and many others, even one from some guy claiming to speak on behalf of the State of Oregon."

Comments

Best quote

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the brief submitted by Mark Lemley et. al sums up my opinion the best.

The distinction on patentable subject matter should be based on the distinction between applied and abstract inventions.

It doesn't get much simpler than that in my mind. If you are patenting an applied method, applied algorithm (read: implementation), applied design (blueprints or machines) etc. then sure, you should be able to patent it. Barring prior art, public domain, etc.
But if all you have is an idea, too bad- do something with it.
I guess the thing that surprised me was, when I was taught about patents back in high school that is essentially what they told me the criteria was all along. Then I grew up & found out how twisted it really is, and then IP and software patents got into the mix, and because the politicians & courts had no clue what they were talking about, managed to hose the whole thing.

Re:Best quote

[radtea]

I think the best quote is: a general purpose computer should be considered a "particular machine."

This is the core contention behind the justification of software patents. It incorrectly treats all of the specific coding of any algorithm implementation as irrelevant to the patentable subject-matter, because the algorithm could theoretically be made to run on any Turing architecture.

Anyone who has ever actually implemented an algorithm, much less anyone who has invented one, knows that this is nonsense: algorithms are not implementations, and to be "useful" an algorithm has to be properly implemented in a specific language and, frequently, on a specific machine or limited range of machines, because real computers are not Turing machines. Turing machines don't have interrupts, amongst other things, which is why they are deterministic and mathematically tractable.