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New USPTO Test Could Limit Software-Based Patents

Posted by timothy on from the counting-but-on-fingers dept.

bizwriter writes "The high tech industry has been waiting for a Supreme Court decision in the Bilski case to decide fundamental questions, like when you can patent software. But there's a new test from the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (PDF) that just became precedential, meaning that it offers new grounds on which the US Patent and Trademark Office can deny patents on machines that use mathematical algorithms."

1 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Its a little too late... by martin-boundary · · Score: 0, Troll
    Of all the intellectual property concepts, patents are fundamentally the most repugnant.

    Whereas trade secrets do no impose any burdens on others, and whereas copyrights at least only apply to actually produced works after the fact, patents are censorship of ideas in other people's heads.

    It is fundamentally repugnant to allow some random stranger on the other side of the country to dictate to me what I can and cannot do with the ideas I get in my own head, even for a limited time. It is a form of thought censorship, in many cases retroactive if you didn't know an idea was patented already. Patents should not exist, ever.