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The Supreme Court Doesn't Understand Software
An anonymous reader writes We had some good news yesterday when the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated a software patent for failing to turn an idea into an invention. Unfortunately, the justices weren't willing to make any broader statements about the patentability of basic software tools, so the patent fights will continue. Timothy B. Lee at Vox argues that this is because the Supreme Court does not understand software, and says we won't see significant reform until they do.
He says, "If a sequence of conventional mathematical operations isn't patentable, then no software should enjoy patent protection. For example, the 'data compression' patents that Justice Kennedy wants to preserve simply claim formulas for converting information from one digital format to another. If that's not a mathematical algorithm, nothing is. This is the fundamental confusion at the heart of America's software patent jurisprudence: many judges seem to believe that mathematical algorithms shouldn't be patented but that certain kinds of software should be patentable. ... If a patent claims a mathematical formula simple enough for a judge to understand how it works, she is likely to recognize that the patent claims a mathematical formula and invalidate it. But if the formula is too complex for her to understand, then she concludes that it's something more than a mathematical algorithm and uphold it."
He says, "If a sequence of conventional mathematical operations isn't patentable, then no software should enjoy patent protection. For example, the 'data compression' patents that Justice Kennedy wants to preserve simply claim formulas for converting information from one digital format to another. If that's not a mathematical algorithm, nothing is. This is the fundamental confusion at the heart of America's software patent jurisprudence: many judges seem to believe that mathematical algorithms shouldn't be patented but that certain kinds of software should be patentable. ... If a patent claims a mathematical formula simple enough for a judge to understand how it works, she is likely to recognize that the patent claims a mathematical formula and invalidate it. But if the formula is too complex for her to understand, then she concludes that it's something more than a mathematical algorithm and uphold it."
Everything to do with money
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
If somebody comes up with a novel patent compression algorithm, why shouldn't they be able to patent it? I read the argument about math not being patentable, but I don't really understand why. A new data compression algorithm that is truly novel seems like it should deserve some protection so that the inventor can get rewarded for her work. No?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Going further, all possible inventions can be described as a series of mathematical algorithms. So then nothing should be patentable at all, ever! But perhaps the question shouldn't be self consistency, courts like to hold that up as an ideal but rarely if ever follow through. But what makes the most sense economically. Theoretical papers have shown that what would be best for everyone is a rather stringently light form of patentability and protection, with strict rules as to specificity, prior art, and etc.
That, ideally, would be the goal here. But then that would also ask the Supreme Court to understand advanced concepts of everything including law, software, and economics. Which is probably asking a lot of a group of barely evolved apes that we all are.
It seems to me that Kennedy left the door open to software that does something only software can do. The patent they ruled on was an escrow service in software (or something like that). The software angle added nothing to the idea of an escrow service. Data compression on the other hand is a different domain.
How about legislation limiting software patents to 1 year expirations? It'd give just enough protection, hopefully, for startups wanting to get a food hold in the business world, while hopefully preventing big companies from attacking each other year after year.
At least according to some philosophers and physicists, everything corresponds to algorithms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Any patented process and device can be described wholly in algorithmic terms. Does this mean nothing should be patentable? Of course not. There's no sharp dividing line in these things, and this is my point -- there are soft lines here, just like there are soft lines between things that are best described as mathematics, and things that are best described as software processes. Ultimately they all reduce to mathematics, but that in itself doesn't make them unpatentable. The disputes here are on where along a continuum to place a threshold, and everyone has their own favourite point. The summary suggests this is lost on Mr. Lee, who chooses to see this as purely black and white and cut off anything that reduces to mathematics. The problem with that is that, if you were to take this to its logical conclusion, then nothing whatsoever would be patentable. Then again, Mr. Lee may just be radical enough to believe that, even if he's not upfront about it for strategic reasons.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I'd suggest the justiced read a little bit from the late computer scientist Dijkstra liked to imagine a world where math was patentable. He was president of "Math Inc" "the most exciting and most miserable business ever conceived." Where he imagined that an important mathematical proof had been patended, and was demanding all the mathematicians that relied on it to pay up!
My dear Jonathan,
After so many years of silence, you will be surprised to receive such a long letter from me. But, read on, and you will understand that this time I must address myself to a lawyer I can trust and of whom I know that he understands.
Remember our schooldays, when we argued about the relative merits of the Greek and the Roman culture? How I defended the Greeks by quoting Plato and you the Romans by quoting Cicero, and how the unsettled question did not impair the friendship and companionship between the two of us? (Happy youths, who could argue hotly about the relative superiority of classical cultures, whereas, today, the inferiority of contemporary civilization seems to be the only common meeting ground!) Our fates were decided that evening by the choice of our heroes: you chose law and I chose mathematics and our ways parted. (It is a strange thought that, if in that same discussion, I had chosen Homer and you Horatius, we might both have become professional poets and our paths might have continued to cross each other....)
Dear Jonathan, I am in a fix. I leave it to your great wisdom or to your worldly experience to decide for yourself, whether my problem is that I don’t understand them, or whether they are so short-sighted that they are unable to understand me. But the long and the short of it is that I am in a fix, I have painted myself into a corner to the extent that I need legal advice, imagine! As you know —Hugo has certainly told you something about it— I am presently responsible for Mathematics Inc., the most exciting and most miserable business ever conceived. It is really most exciting, because —beside being a most flourishing business (and that is saying a good deal, these days)— by blending the strength of Greek contemplation with that of Roman enterprise, we are changing the face of the world! Our problem is, however, that apparently the world is not quite ready for this (truly!) “Cultural Revolution” and is beginning to fight back in a most unartistic manner, just because it —and in particular: its legal procedures!— cannot cope with it. There are legal procedures for the protection of property of “things”, but there is no true protection of property of “ideas”, and of such nature are the products of Mathematics Inc. (There are, of course, patent law and copy-right, but as you read on, you, as a lawyer, will immediately see that in our cases they are insufficient.)
One of our most successful product lines is connected with what used to be known as the Riemann Hypothesis, but now should be named our Theorem. To bring you into the picture, Riemann —originally trained to become a Lutheran minister!— was one of those romantic mathematicians of the nineteenth century, who maintained his fame by dying young enough to ensure that nobody saw that he himself was also unable to prove his conjecture. Riemann completely missed the vision and imagination, needed to escape from the prejudices of the pre-industrial society and, according to the tradition of the period, he fought his problem single-minded: the amateur, needless to say, failed miserably.
To supply the missing proof was for Mathematics Inc. an obvious target, not only because we have built up the first (and only) corporation in the world, that is technically capable of constructing such a proof, but also, because commercially it is a most attractive proposition. The point is that whole flocks of mathematicians have made themselves dependent on it and have (somewhat irresponsibly) based whole branches of mathematics on Riemann’s assumptio
AccountKiller
But if the formula is too complex for her to understand, then she concludes that it's something more than a mathematical algorithm and uphold it.
Thus demonstrating that the entire patent problem is because women cannot understand simple mathematical algorithms.
I understand the sentiment but at the same time, won't be surprised if the judges, like most Americans I've met, believe the USA has the best of everything mankind can think of.
It does not follow that the supreme court does not understand software just because they don't share the same definition of it that you do. I believe the reason that math is not considered patentable, that it does not have a physical representation. But computers most definitely can project themselves into the physical world. To the extent this is true, software should be considered as patentable as any other complex items which physically exist. There is no reason that a complex electronic device which could equally be produced by software should enjoy more patent protection, as software can in theory take just as much time to develop.
Now, I tend to agree that almost all the software patents I have run across I would consider invalid (including a couple I have filed myself, just to defend against patent trolls), but there are categories of things I think should be patentable as far as software goes. I would say that when encryption algorithms first came out, that they should have been eligible, since they took a non-trivial amount of effort to develop and had a number of practical uses.
If I invent a machine with 100 switches, and I have designed what each of those switches do, I should be able to patent this machine.
Nobody else should be able to come along and "invent" turning on switches 3, 18, and 92.
If I invent a computer with 256 opcodes, and I have designed what each of those opcodes do, I should be able to patent this computer.
Nobody else should be able to come along and "invent" using opcodes 0x03, 0x18 and 0x92.
They hate anything newer than 0 AD. That is the way of their kind. All of them hate anyone that isn't an old white man. That's why every decision they've ever made has been so racist and hateful. After they decided to fuck us over and declare us only 3/5 of a person, that is when smart people gave-up on them. They claim minorities are not complete people. That is the way of their kind. They want us all to die. That is what those Republicans live for. That and guns, and the SCOTUS loves to flood the streets with guns. They've done nothing to stop gang-related violence since their kind supports it. Fuck them and their hatred of the Internet.
Racist!
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Oh shit! Sorry. Picked up the wrong cue card. I'll try again.
Sexist!
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
It's the thing that makes the magic box go!
I was perhaps too subtle in pointing out the inappropriate assumption that all judges are women. "... a judge ... she ..."
A Patent can be issued for a novel and useful composition of matter or process. A theorem is neither, and is indeed not patentable. But an automated process, like the bottle capper at the end of a beer bottling production line, is carrying out a potentially patentable process, even though it may be implemented in a way that depends crucially on the operation of an embedded control program. Agreed so far? Let's take another step: how about the PageRank algorithm that processes information in a way that grew up in an empirically-driven manner without any central core of mathematics? I think that there is a sensible argument to be made that we are still in patentable territory under present law. Dammit. I'd like to see most software patents eliminated, but their continued existence is not good evidence against SCOTUS understanding of software.
Sewing machines are just wheels and a needle moving at specific rates and times. Software is just algorithms doing basic math. Computers are boxes of transistors indicating electrical 1's and 0's, and the transistor was a patented device.
The Supreme Court drew a line between generic things being done with generic computing devices, and novel things being done with generic computing devices.
And he's mad that the whole concept of a software patent didn't get thrown out, at the Supreme Court, this time. This whole thing is a signaling to the appellate federal courts (which normally hear these things) that the standards need to be toughened. Said appellate courts have a recent history of being extremely pro-patentholder on software patents. They'll knuckle down, or the Supreme Court will hear a case and have to rule again.
Nothing about the Supreme Court ruling implies a failure of understanding.
This "supreme court" has proven itself in a court of law that it is completely unqualified to govern the United States. They simply do not understand the consequences of anything, let alone their decisions.
We really need to rethink the way the supreme court is chosen.
With regard to this, one helpful thing in the ruling is that the Court says that old and ubiquitous technologies don't count when judging if an abstract concept has been transformed into a patentable application of said abstract concept.
(Patent lawyers are up in arms about this, complaining that the Court has "mixed up article 101 (subject matter) with articles 102 (prior art) and 103 (obviousness)". To get more patents, they want to reduce the "abstract ideas" exception to a theoretical concept that only happens inside people's brains any patent application can pass.)
So Timothy's right (as usual), but still, at least we have the Justices acknowledging that algorithms shouldn't be patentable, and that "on a computer" doesn't make a non-patentable concept patentable. All we have to do is bridge that last gap and show them that all software is math:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Softw...
For Alice v. CLS, more analyses listed at the end of this page:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Alice...
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
their presumed knowledge is limited to application of 87 US 1.d.23 and related precedents, for instance. they spend 7 to 8 years in university for that, and suck up to politicians for the rest. it is up to the lawyers on both sides to reduce a case to words of one syllable at a 5th grade level of reading to make complex systems understandable. judges' heads swim if you can't lead them through a nasty stew of undocumented code to a conclusion in less time than it takes to search Nexus-Lexus for prior rulings. just how it is.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Software are just instructions that run on a processor.
I do not think any software should be legally patentable, and look forward to the day the rest of the global legislative community realizes it, too.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Reading a book to someone is perfectly legal, reading a book on the radio to lots of people is conceptually equivalent to visiting them one by one and reading the book to them, it just saves a bit of time to do it in parallel. Conceptually this pretty much the same thing, but they are not the same from a legal perspective. Same goes for patentability of software, just like art or porn, you know it when you see it, but pinning down the definition is non-trivial - and doesn't need to be pinned down as much as you might expect for practical legal purposes.
Personally I don't support software patents at all, however there is a tendency from technical people like myself to expect the legal system to follow more logical rules than it does.
Patents were created to help protect the upfront capital investments required for creating physical goods. We came up with a set of rules that protect against utterly absurd misapplications of this temporary monopoly. The justices are trying to apply these baseline protections to an area of investment and innovation that is radically different. If only we could just pass a law saying "this is stupid" and move on....
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
At least according to some philosophers and physicists, everything corresponds to algorithms
The difference between "it" (physical things) and "bit" (information) is that unlike "it", "bit" can be copied. This allows distinguishing methods that work on "it" from methods that work on "bit".
Good news! Programs are theorems. I direct your attention to the Curry–Howard correspondence. Every program corresponds to a mathematical proof, and vice-versa.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
the Supreme Court does not understand software
Simple. Appoint RMS to the Supreme Court and let all other judges go. Bring on the software patent cases!
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
This is my belief, my religion. So what business does Congress have to make law prohibiting the practice of my religion. Particularly if I have been pre-programmed to implement some device or algorithm in a certain manner by The Master Race.
to explain to a judge that the claimed patent covers something that a human being can do with nothing more than a sufficient supply of paper, pencils, and time?
I'm reminded of how upset the Court got when it turned out that the real heart of one patent was that it claimed infringement by doctors making the mental connection between a lab test and a diagnosis. It wasn't that the lab test was unique, it was that any test that informed the physician of the measured physiological indicator would lead to the diagnosis.
Can't some member of the patent bar get the Court to the same realization with regard to software? Or is it that any party with the warchest to show up before the SCOTUS has too much invested in the current regime?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
> if the formula is too complex ... to understand
The one who made a hash of the "rounded corners" case was.
She was a gomer too.
He does not understand the fact the Supreme Court tends to limit its decisions to only what is required to decide a case. His comment make Him look ignorant.
The weird thing about this is that other than its verbosity, it sounds like something a corporate IP lawyer at a company might write to another one, and that a Justice at any level would find perfectly reasonable, even ordinary, in the arena of law.
I don't think this article quite hits the nail. Specifically, its interpretation of the ruling is wrong (though IANAL). Having said that, this is certainly a positive ruling (if you are, like me, opposed to software patents), and in general my impression is that the trend is clearly against software patents. I'm not sure if there is any software patent the court would eventually uphold, but it generally prefers to avoid such sweeping rulings on matters that are not immediately before it. That is, the court is not entirely sure that no software patent can pass the muster, so it prefers to wait until it sees more credible software patents (like compression algorithms, apparently) to rule on those.
The article claims the Supreme Court ruled that the "invention" is not patent-eligible because "each step does no more than require a generic computer to perform generic computer functions". However, this is not the whole analysis and is akin to saying that no electrical circuit can get patent protection if it can be divided into basic components.
Let me quote the relevant parts from the ruling.
In Mayo, we set forth a framework for distinguishing patents that claim laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas from those that claim patent-eligible applications of those concepts. First, we determine whether the claims at issue are directed to one of those patent-ineligible concepts. If so, we then ask, "[w]hat else is there in the claims before us?" To answer that question, ***we consider the elements of each claim both individually and "as an ordered combination"*** to determine whether the additional elements "transform the nature of the claim" into a patent-eligible application. We have described step two of this analysis as a search for an "'inventive concept'"--i.e., an element ***or combination of elements*** that is "sufficient to ensure that the patent in practice amounts to significantly more than a patent upon the [ineligible concept] itself."
(page 7, emphasis added, internal quotations removed)
That is, the "elements", or the steps the algorithm in question performs, are to be considered both individually and as an ordered combination. The article somehow reads the second prong of this analysis entirely out, but such a reading is not faithful to the decision. Similarly to how an electrical circuit that consists of basic components can still merit patent protection, the court leaves open the possibility that an algorithm composed of "ordinary" steps might be eligible if the steps "as an ordered combination" contains an "inventive concept" that is "sufficient to ensure that the patent in practice amounts to significantly more than a patent upon [an abstract idea] itself".
The text that the article quotes is from page 15 of the ruling:
***Taking the claim elements separately***, the function performed by the computer at each step of the process is "[p]urely conventional.". Using a computer to create and maintain "shadow" accounts amounts to electronic recordkeeping--one of the most basic functions of a computer. The same is true with respect to the use of a computer to obtain data, adjust account balances, and issue automated instructions; all of these computer functions are "well-understood, routine, conventional activit[ies]" previously known to the industry. In short, each step does no more than require a generic computer to perform generic computer functions.
But this is only the paragraph that analyzes the claim elements separately. What the article does not recognize is the paragraph that immediately follows:
***Considered "as an ordered combination,"*** the computer components of petitioner's method "ad[d] nothing . . . that is not already present when the steps are considered separately." ***Viewed as a whole***, petitioner's method claims simply recite the concept of intermediated settlement as performed by a generic computer. See 717 F. 3d, at 1286 (Lourie, J., concurring) (noting that the rep
The judgement reflects current law. The article uses the weasel word "if" to continue to promote the anti-patent lobby's favorite lie:
"If a sequence of conventional mathematical operations isn't patentable,
Okay, if, but the first half is false. The idea that inventions based on math is simply a falsehood detained to confuse those who a) don't know any better and are too busy or two lazy to read the couple of paragraphs that is the actual law.
The law says what isn't patentable is "the laws of nature, including the laws of mathematics".
That laws of physics aren't patentable. Does that mean that any invention based on the laws of physics is unpatentable? Obviously not. An elevator is an application of the laws of physics. You can patent an elevator design. You can't patent gravity. PageRank is an invention that is an application of the laws of mathematics. You can patent PageRank. You can't patent the associative law of addition.
That's the law. Some people want to change the law, and that's fine. Current law is that you can't patent the fundamental natural laws of a science, and can patent an invention which makes use of the science.
Patent attorney here.
The struggle that the Supreme Court is having with software has less to do with their understanding of software but rather is about whether business methods should be patentable. At least three justices are in agreement that they should not be.
So slashdotters, help me out here: If you assume business methods should not be patentable, how do you distinguish between business methods implemented on computers and/or the internet, and other software innovations such as those in compression, cryptography, or other algorithms? Because once there are five justices on the court or a majority of congresspersons willing to kill business methods altogether but maintain the patentability of true innovation in software, they are going to need to announce what test to apply.
The court distinguished the patent overturned here from those patents that "purport to improve the functioning of the computer itself." Can anyone do better?
"Unfortunately, the justices weren't willing to make any broader statements about the patentability of basic software tools, so the patent fights will continue. "
It is not up to SCOTUS to legislate from the bench. All SCOTUS does is look at what is at issue in the specific case and rule on that, and that precedent is applied to other cases that arise under the EXACT SAME circumstances.
SCOTUS cannot and SHOULD NOT make broader statements that are extrajudicial to the case at hand.
Somehow he never patented his ideas.
the Supreme Court does not understand software, and says we won't see significant reform until they do.
In a healthy democracy, reform should come from the legislative branch.
Certainly those types of patents are bad, and potentially invalid. The scenario you described, where someone attempts to patent result rather than the mechanism is invalid and should be held invalid. Note that this is true whether the mechanism uses gears to perform multiplication or transistors. That problem is completely separate from and unrelated to software or math. It's a bad patent because there's no invention, just a goal or result.
I don't know that anyone has done an analysis to see whether or not more invalid "result" patents have been issued for bit-based "inventions" than molecule-based inventions. Whether the mechanism is made of wood or of bits, I know patents that are too broad have been issued in both.
Of course it's conceivable that some patent examiners could have had trouble distinguishing between the result of a software mechanism (find quality web pages) and a particular mechanism for doing so (PageRank). "High quality" web pages could be determined by any number of mechanisms and PageRank is just one of many different mechanisms that might be invented.
A patent on some hypothetical one-tap checkout in supermarket is no better or worse than Amazon's 1-click patent for online shopping. I think so long as we need intellectual property, patents in US are better than copyrights, as they last for borderline sane limited time. Software or physical objects, I think the test should be weather an expert in subject area who is not familiar with a particular patent would be surprised after reading it.
I am not certain, but isn't it always possible to express any mathematical procedure in some other, non-obvious homomorphic representation that doesn't appear to be the same procedure at a cursory level, and could be the equivalent of a "clean room" reimplementation that achieves the desired result and might be argued to be independent development? I am not a mathematician, but as a possible example, any mathematical procedure is thought to be computable by a universal Turing machine, but is equally expressable in terms of Church's lambda calculus (Church-Turing hypothesis/conjecture/whatever). I thought it took some work to show the non-obvious equivalence of these approaches. In terms of examples from physics, the equivalence of Newtonian mechanics with Lagrangian, Hamiltonian mechanics, and the Hamilton-Jacobi equation; or the equivalence in quantum mechanics of wave mechanics, matrix mechanics, Dirac's formulation, Von Neumann's formulation, Feynman's path integral formulation, Wigner's quantized phase space representation and Schwinger's field representation.
No, I was just joking with ya. :^)
Actually, I'm surprised there weren't others jumping on you about your comment. Not everyone can find the humor.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Basing patentability on whether something in computing is or is not a mathematical algorithm is, well, patently stupid. Computing (hardware or software) is applied mathematics in its basest form. Everything to do with computing relies on mathematics. Hardware to perform calculations and software to setup the conditions of those calculations. If it wasn't math we wouldn't need a computer to do it! Igit judges!
Your argument is entirely false.
Any mechanical contraption is just an arrangement of things that uses a set of known facts...
Mathematical fact is a different kind of truth than statements about the real world. Truths produced by means of different methodologies are generally not comparable. For example:
Mathematical truth is always true, given a set of axioms. Empirical truth is only true to the limits of our observations. Religious truth is an oxymoron.
The fundamental difference between a machine and an algorithm is what you have stated: a machine uses a set of facts, in our current discussion mathematical facts. As vux984 said, software is a description of facts. In theory, all algorithms could be run in your head. By all means patent a device to perform these operations -- patent a dozen different machines. Implement a Curta Calculator using bamboo, chrysanthemums, and birdsong, and another device which calculates digits of pi by applying thumbscrews to grad students. However, treating the underlying math as if it had a real existence is to misunderstand what math is. Devices are not algorithms; they do not depend on your choice of axioms. Logical statements or mathematical statements can be represented or implemented by things that exist in the real world, but in the words of Phillip K. Dick, "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away," and mathematics fails this criterion.
It is a popular pasttime of capitalists to claim ownership of things which do not have a real existence. This is eminently rational, and I would be happy to remunerate them in any similarly non-existent coin.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
You misunderstood the argument. A' is still fundamentally dependent on your choice of axioms. It is not untrue because it is not the same as A, it is merely different. It does not cover the same domain.
The only way that you cannot reduce math to a tautology is if you start introducing real-world concepts into your equations: "two plus squirrel equals five", by which we mean a living, breathing animal.
Mathematical truths do not describe the real world. They have no real existence, which is why we can say they will be the same in all universes. They can be represented or implemented by things that exist in the real world, but mathematical truths have no more real existence than religious truths. For an example, we may take Euclid's fifth postulate (briefly, that parallel lines will not cross). For centuries it was assumed that Euclid's geometry was the only geometry that existed, because it describes the world that we can trivially measure and see. A proof of the fifth postulate eluded mathematicians for centuries, and eventually it was discovered (not invented) that discarding the fifth postulate resulted in geometries that were not the geometry of Euclid, but were still valid mathematically. Today we understand that non-Euclidean geometry more accurately describes the universe on large scales.
Mathematical truths depend wholly and solely on your choice of axioms. They can be descriptive of the universe. They can be described in the universe. They are entirely abstract concepts, with no real existence. "2 + 3 = 5" is not the same kind of truth as "water is wet", or any other empirical fact. They are not dependent on observation.
And you're asking why we think it's silly to treat algorithms the same way as devices. Obviousness ain't in it. You also can't patent the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And sure, you can't patent stars, like jd said, but stars at least exist. It's difficult to describe how badly you've misunderstood this subject.
Someone mod this up. It's true. Look at the history of these types of suits. Where it's a foreign entity, they are FAR more likely to be ruled against, rather than for.
I was looking for the Roland MT-32 ROMs the other day, to use in some emulators, figuring I'd have to scour some piratebay-type sites to get. Nope, turns out Roland LOST the lawsuit on having their ROM code passed around, because they "...failed to properly register the MT-32's original ROM code in accordance with the Berne Convention Implementation Act, which came into force on March 1989. As such, the original ROM code of the MT-32 is in the public domain and can be freely used, distributed, and modified without the permission, express or implied, of the Roland Corporation." (Wikipedia: Roland MT-32)
Think that would have happened if Roland were a US company? No way, Jose.
Are you seriously asking what an abstract concept is?
It's something that doesn't exist in the real world. If the justices could not come up with a definition, they're disturbingly ignorant. Mathematics is entirely dependent on your choice of axioms. You can accept Euclid's fifth postulate, and discover a composite truth of Euclidean geometry, or reject it and describe some aspect of non-Euclidean geometry. Both are equally valid (though not at the same time) and both describe the real world to some degree. They are however solely logical concepts which do not exist in any real sense. Empirical facts, (e.g. "fire burns things") are true based on observations about the real world, and are only true to the limits of our observational abilities. Mathematical truths are true regardless of observations; they are true in all possible universes, whether those universes include observers.
To quote Phillip K. Dick, "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Math is not real. Asserting ownership rights over a non-real concept is a popular delusion, but one which should not be tolerated. The cynic in me would suggest that the reason for the Court's confusion in these matters is that they are making an analogy to the concept of justice, which is also both abstract and widely sold.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
So even granting that Huffman's invention was worthy of a patent, that patent should be on the method of file compression - not on the compressed file format itself. Royalties should be collectible on the compression software (the part that implements the patent), not on the decompression software, which simply reads the file.
Popular file formats become de-facto standards, and a patent on the format that covers reading it becomes more than a monopoly on the format - it becomes a monopoly on the data contained in the file, which becomes inaccessible without paying patent royalties. So, sure, if you invent a great file format - patent it, and if it's really great, people will pay. But don't allow the fact that a video content provider chose to pay for a particular video compressor grant control of the video data to to the patent holder on the compressor. Or allow the fact that an SD card manufacturer chose to use a FAT32 filesystem (and paid a royalty to do that) prevent you as the purchaser of that card from reading the data you store on it from any device you want to plug it into.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
The law is that to be patentable, it must be a new, non-obvious invention. Snow shoes are not new. "Snow shoes for the moon", if somehow new, would probably be obvious under your scenario.
Most certainly the goal or result "a way to walk on the moon" isn't supposed to be patentable, which is what this thread is about.
> You can patent an elevator because it isn't obvious. You cannot patent a spring because it is.
> Everything in mathematics is ultimately obvious.
The number of unsolved problems in mathematics demonstrates how very false that is. For thousands of years, thousands of people have been trying to come up with an efficient way to find the square root of a large number. Despite a few million man-hour hours being devoted to the problem, the method has not yet been found. Therefore, it is decidedly not obvious.
Like square root, people not only haven't been able to find solutions to the halting problem, they have't even been able to figure out if there IS a solution. We can't figure out if there is a method, much less find it. Certainly the solution isn't obvious.
> You can patent an elevator because you invented it. Nothing in mathematics is invented, only discovered. (You cannot patent Antarctica, either.)
Someone discovered that if you attach a pump to a hose, then to a hydraulic cylinder and ... you end up with a mechanism that will usefully lift people. That was true before it was discovered. ... you end up with a mechanism that will usefully find high quality web pages.
Someone discovered if you count the number of web pages, and count the number of links on each web page
There's no qualitative difference between the two. "If you put this mechanism together and operate it in this way, it will do this thing" is true whether the mechanism is made of wood, iron, or electrons.
The law is is that you can't patent the laws of nature, you can patent using them in a particular way o accomplish a particular useful thing. I happen to think that's about right. We just need to follow that law, to not grant a patent unless it's new, non-obvious, and useful.
> How many patents have flooded the system that are nothing more than column and row name descriptions with simplest data base functions applied.
I'll bite. Is the answer zero? One?
Certainly no one should be granted a patent on "make files smaller", that would be a patent on the goal rather than the mechanism. A certain method of compression may certainly be new, useful, an non-obvious. However, given a file compressed in a certain way, the mechanism to uncompress it is probably obvious to one skilled in the art. Therefore, decompression is not patentable under current law, because you anything obvious to one skilled in the art is not patentable.
Of course, the patent office sometimes messes up and issues patents on things that are not patentable under established law. They need to do a better job. Perhaps someone could come up with a system to encourage people knowledgeable about a subject to assist by pointing out these problems, crowdsourcing in a way. Maybe something like a bounty - if you're the first to file a valid reason a patent application is patentable under law, you get half of the filing fee. I'm sure something that simple wouldn't quite work, but maybe something along those lines.
But "laws of nature" is not a well defined term.
E.g., is "all electrons have the same charge" a law of nature? A matter of definition? True? False? It depends on how you are looking at them?
If nobody has called something a law of nature, does that mean that it isn't? What if only 3 people have called it such? Is it still a law of nature if it eventually turns out to be invalid? (Either in special cases, or because it's a special case of some other "law of nature".)
FWIW, legal terminology is generally a century behind the technical fields to which it refers, BECAUSE once the laws start using a term, the professionals stop using it, because the laws misapply and misdefine the term. It would be nice if the only reason for the errors were lack of understanding of the technicalities by those not of the profession, but there's usually a fair bit of evidence that it has been intentionally misinterpreted. This isn't surprising as legal cases are only made by someone with an ax to grind.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
In fact an accurate title would be "The Supreme Court Doesn't Understand". These dullards do not even understand that free speech is not money nor that corporations are not people. And congress is even more mindless. The phrase advise and consent means exactly that. If congress advises the president not to install an official the constitution still requires them to consent to the appointment. The language could not be simpler. Nowhere was the congress instructed to consent or deny an appointment. The founders were smart enough to realize that the advice of congress could be mindless and worthless and that the president always has the right to appoint. Then there is my favorite " The right to bear arms". Just what lame fool decided that bear means own or possess or that some people could be excluded? To bear means to carry. It really is that simple. You have the right to carry arms. It is that simple. That does not mean open or concealed or limited right to carry. You simply have the right to carry arms.That means that seniors, people who have finished prison sentences, and anyone who is considered mentally competent at the moment is allowed to carry a gun or rifle. I know a lot of people don't like that but seriously how can the term "bear" be confusing?
Agreed, that was a bad change. I think we should go back to requiring a specific description of the implementation, either engineering drawings or the equalivent. Shelf space is no longer an issue since a 3TB drive could hold at least a million such patents in pdf or other format. A broom closet with a storage server in it would be sufficient to hold all US patents.
I somewhat disagree that copyright covers a mechanism. Copyright covers a specific DESCRIPTION of a mechanism, but not the mechanism itself. Gears and levers are one way of performing multiplication. Software code is another way of doing the same thing. Realizing that a gear is a piece that does multiplication, a button is input, and a light bulb or flag is output, you can compile any mechanism to either hardware or software. The nature of the mechanism exists apart from any particular description of it or compilation of it. It's the mechanism that should be patentable, and that's true even though it means we have to provide patent examiners with training in how to recognize a mechanism vs a material (wooden lever vs multiply the force) or a goal.
As a user of free software, I agree with the justices. Maybe they should try linux?
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Isn't https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... going to help Supreme Court?
Casteism
Maybe they could use a far easier and blunter example. "Dear old people, you are allowing people to patent Math. You know, the thing you use to determine long it is going to take you to get home tonight. If you can wrap your head around this you donkuses are giving copyright protection to a principal we use to understand the functioning of the universe. Not a bright idea."
I strongly believe software should be subjected to copy right laws only. No software or code should be patentable.
US Courts, particularly the Supreme Court, generally prefer to make narrow decisions instead of broad ones. Occasionally they'll make a fairly activist decision, like the Miranda Warnings, or the Exclusionary Rule that says cops can't use illegally obtained evidence, but most of the time they'd rather decide a case on some relatively narrow grounds, such as rejecting somebody's argument because they didn't file the lawsuit before some deadline, or didn't have standing to make the case, or there were specific details as well as general legal principles and they could get the conclusion they wanted in this case based on the details instead of having to make new laws.
In this case, if I understand it correctly, they went sort of for the middle. They didn't throw out the whole concept of software patents, but there's a large class of software and business method patents like
Claim 1: Something obvious (or well-known, or prior art, or otherwise unpatentable Claim 2: Do (Claim 1 thing) with a computer! (or On The Internets!) Claim 3: Profit!!and they've tossed those out. That's separate from an earlier class of patents, from back in the days that you weren't able to patent software, that would take some algorithm and describe a machine that implemented it, in ways that sort of got around the rules by claiming that some competitor's software was a software implementation of their hardware design and therefore infringing.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
> the bulk of the patents out there
If you were an alien reading our newspaper headlines, you'd see that the bulk of headlines are about people who make several million dollars per year. Based on bulk of the stories mentioning physical feats or physical attributes, you'd think most of us throw a football 65 yards and run a mile in 80 seconds. These things make the news precisely because they are UNUSUAL. If you look at news stories about patents, you'll read about the most unusual ones. The normal ones aren't newsworthy.
From the artical's references:
"Patents are supposed to create a positive incentive for innovation by enhancing the profits of companies that develop new technologies. If the patent system is working properly, the average firm's patent portfolio should generate more profits than the total cost of defending against patent infringement lawsuits from other firms. If, in contrast, litigation costs exceed patent profits, that suggests the patent system is actually creating a net dis-incentive to innovation."
I agree with the first sentence, but the second seems more suited to a patent system designed to provide work for lawyers and patent clerks. The dis-incentive in the third sentence is real, but it's the system setup by the business practice in the second sentence that is the cause.
When you license a patent, you are basically paying a person not to sue you.
The price is whatever the the person can get.
In a situation where only a few patents are holding up a large project, the price can far exceed the value.
Which says two things.
First the above second sentence indicates that the license fees are a measure of a patent's 'innovation value'.
They are really more a measure of the streangh of the holder's negotiation position.
Second, there is a strong incentive to have patents which do not provide details sufficient to actually build anything, but are sufficient to permit a thread to sue.
This leads to a new definition of the term inventor. Working hard and actually building a useful gadget is unnecessary.
Staking a claim for 'intellectual property' in a direction someone else might work is sufficient.
This is the way to optimize a corporate patent department's bottom line impact.
This is what the second sentence is saying.
So what does all this have to do with S/W patents?
First, S/W is a fundamental tool these days used to implement all sorts of complex gadgets what were science fiction a few years back.
Second, it seems that useful S/W programs are composed of a plethroa of algorithms and the claim stakers have figured this out. It's hard to write some novel and useful programs without stepping on ground claimed by folks who in many cases have never considered the problem being solved, let alone actually solved it.
Third, the mental effort required to work around these claims far exceeds the 'innovation' benefit in the claims.
So what do we do?
First recognize the problem. Our attempt to create an incentive for innovation has been contorted into a dis-incentive by folks gaming the system.
The natural pace of S/W innovation calls to question the necessity of the patent bargain in the first place.
(Is society more likely to have more neat gadgets if we allow a click to buy patent or not?)
All the childeren are not above average. Everybody is not an inventor. Patents should be relatively rare. The list of things to dis-allow a patent should be taken seriously and a few more things added.
Obvious, works (actually working) , fully described, useful (but not too useful to prevent future innovation), not just wearing down the patent examiner
Building block ideas that used to be freely published are now claimed, limiting their use by folks actualling building useful gadgets.
SCOTUS is not tasked with reform, that is the job of the legislature (and God help us with what they might do).
The difference is that with the elevator you patent the implementation, and with an algorithm you patent all equivalent operations.
Sweat of the brow is not a consideration in patentability.
Mathematics is "obvious" because it is tautological. It also, critically, does not describe the real world. It is an abstract concept. You don't get to patent abstract concepts as if they were real things. Make the real thing, and patent that. And no, you don't get to add "on a computer" to an abstract concept and patent that. If you're not doing wacky new things with your circuit board, then you don't get a patent. If your "innovation" is not fundamentally tied to how you are manipulating the physical world in new and interesting ways, then you don't get a patent. You do not get to assert property rights over something that does not have a real existence. You definitely don't get to do that and claim ownership of all possible implementations of that non-real thing (or if you want to be generous, all implementations that can be created on general-purpose computer hardware).
It's not enough for you capitalists to sell your own mother, you have to sell her thoughts and dreams as well -- and all the rest of our thoughts as well. If you want to own an idea, copyright it, or patent a specific implementation. Patenting abstract concepts is just dumb.