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?"

Comments

Re:not relevant if reducible to mathmatics.

[betterunixthanunix]

The problem is the definition of "implementation." If I patent, say, linear discriminant analysis, and implement it using C++, what did I get a patent on? A C++ implementation? My own personal implementation? No, in the current patent system, I get a patent on any implementation -- or in other words, a patent on the mathematics itself, to within a particular interpretation of the variables and results of the computation.

Re:not relevant if reducible to mathmatics.

[MightyMartian]

It is the central problem of allowing software patents. I think the parent has described why software patents are absurd as concisely as I have ever seen it done. In essence we're allowing the patenting of algorithms, which are at heart pure math. We are allowing the patenting of mathematics, because judges and juries are too fucking incompetent to understand the very basis of computational science. A fraud has been perpetrated on the legal systems of many countries, but rather than throw every single person who has sought a software patent in prison for fraud, we in fact reward them by permitting them to extort money. It's a travesty that very shortly is going to bring the entire industry to its knees. Once you start going after garbage-collected hash tables and refuse to recognize that such techniques are decades old, no one could hope to implement any kind of operating system or virtual machine or, fuck, most interpreters, without risking ending up having their asses sued off.