Canada Courts, Patent Office Warns Against Trying To Patent Mathematics

davecb writes "The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) has recently published two notices for patent examiners relating to patent interpretation, and in particular computer-related/business method type patents saying: 'for example, what appears on its face to be a claim for an "art" or a "process" may, on a proper construction, be a claim for a mathematical formula and therefore not patentable subject matter.'"

Comments

this is why mathematicians are poor

[Anonymous Coward]

all they can aspire to is the Fields medal, but then again they even refuse that or bigger prizes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman

Abolish all patents and copyright

[roman_mir]

AFAIC all patents and copyright should be abolished on a general principle that government has no authority to protect or promote any business (or private protection scheme of any ideas or implementations) in the first place and all of a sudden the problem disappears. You want protection? It's your private business, use trade secrets and contracts.

It should be noticed that the decision in the story does not do that. You can patent your business idea or implementation, but it should be an idea or implementation that is not a pure math. So you can't patent a theorem on faster signal transformation but probably can patent business idea on using your faster formula to achieve a specific result.