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Patent 5,893,120 Reduced To Pure Math
An anonymous reader writes "US Patent #5,893,120 has been reduced to mathematical formulae as a demonstration of the oft-ignored fact that there is an equivalence relation between programs and mathematics. You may recognize Patent #5,893,210 as the one over which Google was ordered to pay $5M for infringing due to some code in Linux. It should be interesting to see how legal fiction will deal with this. Will Lambda calculus no longer be 'math'? Or will they just decide to fix the inconsistency and make mathematics patentable?"
I've collected various examples of this argument here:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Software_is_math
However, you have to remember that this is *not* the end of the discussion (or at best, this will result in this one patent getting invalidated or narrowed).
When faced with "software=math" arguments, judges still argue that *applications* of math to real world problems can be patentable.
What we need is legislation saying that writing, distributing, selling, and using software cannot constitute a patent violation.
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Politics has been indisturbed by the facts of the real world for as long as history allows us to judge. All you have to do is look beyond the Solons, Washingtons or whatever your countrys famous politicians are - the day-to-day dealings of politics is a horrible mess and always has been, and things like truth, fact or evidence are way down the list of things to worry about.
The judicial branch is often quite a bit more pragmatic, but also caught up in its own world. The most important problem being that they try hard to be consistent, so change is hard to get. Once a higher court has decided on an interpretation of law, the lower courts usually don't disagree too much, and it requires a new case with new facts to get everyone to revisit the decision.
Which is cool because it means good decisions stand and aren't easily challenged just because you have a lot of money. The problem is that it takes considerable time to get rid of bad decisions. In the long run, the system works very well, but in the short run, it often fails when new facts, ideas, technologies, etc. are involved.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Sure, software is math. I'll accept the point as stated.
Likewise, books are language. Can books be copyrighted? No one owns language.
Wrong. Words, when put together, form sentences which form paragraphs which form stories, which in turn can be copyrighted. But stories are not paragraphs, paragraphs are not sentences, and sentences are not words so the fact that words cannot be copyrighted by itself is not relevant to stories.
Mathematical formulae however, when put together they're still formulae, merely a longer (and probably more descriptive) one, and mathematical formulae cannot be copyrighted or patented.
There's a big difference between saying "you could probably do that with a computer" and actually doing it with a computer, which is what a software patent would cover.
Except this isn't saying "you could probably do that with a computer", this is saying "you can do that with a computer like this". Allowing software patents but denying math is much like allowing copyright over hexadecimal numbers but disallowing it for decimals: there exist a way to transform one into the other that's formally proven to work for any and all elements of either set, so anything that works for members of one set *must* work for the other and to declare otherwise is to automatically fall into a contradiction. If you'd study Math or CS it'd be much clearer as to how and why, if you must know, but that's kind of outside the context of this post.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Nobody is arguing against protecting a specific implementation of an algorithm (although copyright already provides this protection).
The problem is that when you patent an algorithm, you don't just patent that expression of that idea, like you do with a book or a power drill. You patent all the expressions of that idea. It would be like writing a book on some topic, and then owning the rights to all books on that topic until the patent runs out. You own a whole chunk of the language, every possible expression of you idea, not just the particular one you came up with.
Likewise, when you patent an algorithm, you have patented an entire (admittedly fairly confined) branch of mathematics, having to do with expressions of that algorithm. This is distasteful, and, as the current software patent climate has shown, has terrible chilling effects on the software industry as a whole.
There's a difference. Copyright covers only the specific expression. Patents cover the whole idea.
For example, the copyright on Harry Potter covers the story on Harry Potter, and derived works. A patent on Harry Potter OTOH could look like this:
Claims: ...
1. A story about a normal, underprivileged boy who turns out to be special.
2. As 1, where the specialty is that he actually is the son of a magician.
3. As 1, where the boy lives in England.
4. As 2, where the boy himself gets educated in magic.
You see, it would cover a lot of possible books, most of which would have very little relation to Harry Potter. Even worse, it would even apply to books of authors who never heard of Harry Potter (unlikely in case of Harry Potter, but the same would be true for quite obscure books as well). Or imagine that someone else had filed such a patent before, without actually writing such a book, then Harry Potter would not have been a success story, but a nightmare for J. K. Rowling.
Patents have to be much stricter in what they can be applied to because they are much broader in scope.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Last thing I'd want to do is come up with some whizbang unpatented compression technique, only to find out some MegaMondoCorp has turned it into a multi-billion dollar product leaving me in the dust. on the other hand, I don't want to be sued because my for loop looks too similar to some code sitting in some code base unused for 20 years.
so you want to both have your cake and eat it too?
to be protected yourself but have the ability to go after others?
as it stands it's impossible to tell with certainty if you've violated one of the millions of patents out there as the problem is functionally equivalent to the halting problem.
so you build your lovely wizzbang application and make a profit and someone can swoop in and take it all away over a patent you have not a chance in hell of finding.
Copyright covers only the specific expression.
This was long one of the cornerstones of US copyright law. You must have been in a Rip van Winkle nap while that principle was being excised from the law by clever judges over the last few decades. Sadly, you can't even write a completely novel imagining of an older Holden Caulfield's behaviour without falling afoul of the current 'copyright' case law.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
That entire argument is pure semantics, however. The patent holder has not invented some novel new device for information storage and retrieval which physically implements the algorithm, they've simply come up with a set of instructions for existing machines which allows them to perform that algorithm. To make a less than perfect analogy, a waiter, if given instructions to wash dishes for the evening, does not in fact become a new person who is a dishwasher rather than a waiter. They're just doing something different than they did before.
The fact that the patent office considers this an "invention" is an absurd technicality. Maybe you can technically twist the letter of the law to fit the idea of a patent on a software technique, but at that point you've completely abandoned the spirit of the law. While the judicial system is busy tangling over fine points of language, America's technological industries are going to hell in a hand basket. Unless you're a massive multinational corporation, good luck trying to implement any useful software without using at least a couple dozen "novel" computational techniques from the last two decades...