Slashdot Mirror
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?"
This point has been made repeatedly, but nobody cares. The eHarmony patent was shown to be nothing more than linear algebra with particular names assigned to each variable. People have been pointing out the relationship between software and lambda calculus since before most Slashdot users were in high school, but it has had practically no impact on the legality or public opinion of software patents.
Palm trees and 8
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.
Palm trees and 8
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.