Yes it does. Determining whether or not it actually is would require looking at the complete prosecution history, which is the very first thing Xfire's lawyers will do. It is possible that "message" in the claim language refers specifically to a particular message structure as disclosed in the patent, or it could be that "messenger clients" refers specifically to software with a couple of required features. One could look for hints of this in the disclosure, but could not know for certain what the attorneys used to argue such generic claim language. I would be -extremely- surprised if the claims were not rejected once, and the attorneys replied by bringing in specific details from the disclosure.
ince I'm not particularly bright for having "invented" that method, and everybody and their dogs has been doing it forever because it's freaking obvious, does this patent look like yet another something-that-I-may-sue-someone-over-in-the-futur e patent application?
First of all, "obvious" in the dictionary means NOTHING with regard to patentability. That said, this does appear somewhat "obvious" under 35 USC 103 and related case law. I'd argue that it's a simple adaptation of a chat room - as you said, IRC. Nothing in the independent claims strikes me as remarkably clever, rather they have combined the idea of IRC chat rooms to create multiplayer games. Again, we would need to see the prosecution history to see what the lawyers said about this, or whether the examiner ever challenged it.
Shouldn't they replace the monkeys at the USPTO by humans at some point?
In fairness, shouldn't they replace the critics with people who have a clue? (I mean it lightly, don't take offense.) You truly cannot look at JUST the patent to figure out if there is infringement (but you can sometimes figure out if there is NO infringement.) For this case to proceed, Xfire will look up the prosecution history and see how Yahoo!'s attorneys have defined all the terminology in the claims. When that's done, they'll probably attack the validity of this freshly-printed and untested patent, either with prior art (UT99 might be old enough to beat the priority date of this patent (which could easily be 18 months before the actual filing date)) or with an obvious argument (again, under 35 USC 103, not the dictionary meaning of "obvious".)
Yet another FYI - if, during the course of prosecution, Yahoo!'s lawyers changed the scope of the independent claims to avoid the examiner's prior art, under Festo, Yahoo! can lose the doctrine of equivalency in their claim language. This means that if Xfire does not specifically use "messenger clients" (because their clients do something beyond "messenging") then they are not infringing on this patent.
As you can see, there could be quite a lot going on under the surface. It could be that Yahoo!'s attorneys borked this application up so bad (on the inside) that it could have literally claimed to have invented science, be issued, and be completely unenforceable.
Hope that's informative. You can guess from my other posts that I'm probably just trolling with facts.;)
While we're giving full disclosure, what are your credentials? They don't appear to be listed on your user profile.
Holy shit! A professor of Economics is clearly an expert in law! He can also perform heart transplants because he is DEAN AT HARVARD OMGWTFLOLBBQ!!!. He WROTE A BOOK! The book was published by PRINCETON Press! Clearly he is qualified to circumcise newborn babies!
Full disclosure - I have a BS CS and BS Mathematics and left grad school to work in IP law. Also, I work in IP law. Granted, I'm not a professor of economics, however I spend 50 hours each week dealing with IP law and the US Patent system. And in case I was too subtle, I make every cent of my income by working in IP law.
Guess what - I met a guy who is an EXPERT WHEAT FARMER and he says that AOL IS ALL YOU NEED for the INTERNET. Clearly, this is authoritative evidence that anything except for AOL is a burden on the economy.
It's cool that you got modded funny and I got modded troll. Truth hurts, being obtuse is funny. In fairness, you're right; I don't fully disclose my credentials, and I don't -fully- disclose them here.. but I'm not about to create a PR situation for my employer while replying to the inanity on Slashdot (referring primarily to the original post) - I hope you understand.
The parent post is intellectually offensive for a number of different reasons.
1. The USPTO recieves about 350,000 applications per year and issues about 70,000 per year. The numbers alone indicate that many applications are rejected, disproving the parent's point.
2. Of the roughly 350,000 that were issued in the last 5 years, the parent has found 5 silly patents. The percentage of silly patents is best expressed in scientific notation with a negative exponent, disproving the parent's point.
3. The parent is clearly unaware that a patent is worthless untill it has been tested in a courtroom. Step 1 of any infringement defense is to attempt to invalidate the patent, something I think would be trivial for every patent he's listed. If he has ANY evidence that these patents have survived an validity challenge, he MIGHT have the BEGINNING of a clue WTF he's talking about, but he doesn't have any of that evidence.
4. Nice link to IEEE - they're clearly legal experts. Oh wait, they know about technology, not law. Patents are legal animals that have technology as content. With my thinking cap on, I declare that IEEE does NOT possess patent law expertise.
5. The parent believes that the "US Patenting Office" appears to "patent just about everything", demonstrating that he doesn't have a clue. There is no such thing as a "US Patenting Office", but if there were, I imagine they would "patent just about everything". There IS a US Patent & Trademark Office, but it does not patent anything. Inventors patent things, the USPTO issues patents. While this is not material to the topic at hand, it goes a long way to reveal that the parent is talking out of his ass about something he does not understand.
So in conclusion: If you care to reply to me and talk about how stupid I am, etc. etc., blah blah blah, please include an analysis of exactly how enforceable you think those patents are. Please stress the part about "you think". For example, please outline how the infringement lawsuit for "Method of Swinging on a Swing" would play out in a courtroom.
What's a stupid patent? Something you hang on the wall. What's a strong patent? Something you use to protect your IP. Next time you think you have a point, look at the patent and decide whether it is a stupid patent or a strong patent (including strong patents for stupid things.) If you don't feel qualified to make that judgement, maybe you don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about.
that this is a patent application. Search through these and you'll find time travel, arithmetic, faster-than-light communication, and perpetual motion machines.
Microsoft may think this is patentable, but I really doubt the USPTO will agree. IANAPatentLawyer, but I work in IP law and correspond with patent attorneys on a regular basis.
Okay, my stance on software patents is that they are impossible to enforce uniformly
Perhaps, but ENFORCING patents is not the job of the USPTO.
Windows XP has billions and billions of lines of code. Each line of code is a completely uniquely designed manufactured object.
You can say so, but this is completely false under 35 USC 101 and related case law.
The preposterousness of using $35 million dollars to analyze the work of billions of dollars of software coding should be obvious to all--legal analysis of a body of code is more difficult and expensive than actual analysis.
Probably true. Notice that I said $35 million to hire new examiners. I'm not sure what the total budget for the USPTO is, but rest assured it's at least several hundred million. Further, your observation is correct but the conclusion is incorrect. It is unreasonable to expect the USPTO to perform a perfect, flawlessly exhaustive search of the prior art on every application - during infringement lawsuits, it is common for the defense to spend over $100,000 and a man-year of work in this very endeavor, whereas the USPTO collects $1000-2000 and allows the examiners to take about 15-20 hours. This is because the USPTO was never intended to produce a perfect, flawlessly exhaustive search. The examination process, as it regards prior art, has always been and always will be (for the forseeable future) a coarse sieve. In general, the examination process is supposed to prevent ludicrously weak patents from being issued, not to ensure that every patent is completely perfect.
Of course, everybody makes mistakes sometimes, and when mistakes happen, the USPTO has an established practice and procedure to reopen examination of patents if the situation warrants it.
Additionally, a little understood fact about a patent is that an issued patent is completely and literally worthless unless it can withstand a validity challenge in an infringement suit. The USPTO can conduct their $1000, 20 hour search and issue a patent that YOU and I both know is not novel. NO BIG DEAL.++ If the assignee tries to ENFORCE that patent, it will immediately be invalidated. This is how the system has worked for over a hundred years - to "fix" this would mean filing for a patent would cost in the neighborhood of $100,000 regardless of whether or not it eventually issues - and that's a solution I would rather not have.
The problem is that too many of things that get patented are things that could have been invented by undergrad interns like one-click shopping--or like probably all computer-human interface design patents ever issued--but require years of man-hours of highly educated labor to actually prove the uniqueness of.
Hm, but there's nothing anywhere that says something that an undergrad intern came up with shouldn't be patentable. Additionally, the problem with rejecting such applications with prior art is often not because the examiner must prove the uniqueness, but rather because he only has so much time to find adequate disclosure of the invention with a solid date. Simply KNOWING that the one-click shopping technique was well known in the past is meaningless - if the examiner cannot find a clearly dated reference that discloses the claimed invention, in as much detail as the applicant chooses (defined by his original application), then the patent must issue.
Also, just for the record, "obvious" under 35 USC 103 has basically nothing to do with the word "obvious" in the dictionary. I wish it weren't so, but wishing isn't worth much. "Obvious" under 35 USC 103 basically means you have two (or more, but hopefully only two) references that can be combined to teach the claimed invention, plus documented evidence (in either reference, or less preferably, a third reference) that suggests they should be combined for some advantage, plus all the references come from related arts. You won't find that in a dictionary...
The court system is a great resource for purely legal related stuff. The court system is an infinitely worthless resource for software IP related stuff because almost nobody who works in it exhibits even the slightest understanding of how software is developed.
While that is your opinion, and you are certainly entitled to your opinion, the minor inconvenience of reality is that the court system and how it relates to IP related "stuff" (often referred to as IP law) is the Master and Commander of this topic. You can babble about how worthless it is until your dying day - it will remain Master and Commander of this entire topic.
Evidence or citation for this claim?
It is called case law. You mention elsewhere that you communicate with lawyers. Ask these lawyers about case law that has defined and established the USPTO's practice regarding 35 USC 101. One of my favorites is In re Sarkar, which is sadly not considered as authoritative as other cases. If your attorney is worth his weight in salt, he will explain to you that if Sarkar were considered the controlling law regarding software related inventions, then basically any "software only" invention would be unpatentable, regardless of how it is claimed. (In contrast, software related inventions which MUST require interaction with some external, tangible equipment would not be covered by Sarkar.) The judicial branch gives more weight to other cases, unfortunately, and the USPTO is therefore not able to apply cases like Sarkar at will.
I trust that suffices. Some of this exercise is left to the reader.
Nice one. Call someone slanderously false, but then admit that he or she is absolutely correct in your next sentence.
Uh, nice one. Mischaracterize what your opponent says, then defeat that mischaracterization. If I were distracted by shiny things, I would be impressed. Please reread. Non-patent literature is one of the most valuable resources available to the USPTO and extensive access to IEEE, ACM, Proquest, Safari, the Library of Congress, and numerous other sources are provided to the examiners. As I previously explained, a patent will always be a preferable piece of prior art for at least the reasons of unquestionable dating and the concept of constructive reduction to practice. You can search the MPEP online or ask your lawyer what constructive reduction to practice means.
Here's the problem. If every time I write a line of code, I have to call a lawyer, then software is going to be many, many, many orders of magnitude more expensive. Governments that refuse to accept the American software patent regime will accomplish way more than we will. American corporations that are wising up to how broken the current system will just have to outsource as much of their business as they can--they won't be able to sell in America, but if we don't wise up how insane our legal system has become we won't have much of an economy worth selling to anyway.
This is, of course, hyperbole. That would be A problem, but it is not the existing problem. The very concept of case law is an evolving definition that reflects how the judicial branch of government interprets and defines the law. The USPTO acts as part of the executive branch of government. Please note that I am not disagreeing with your stance about software patents (however this is vaguely defined in general and especially thus far in our conversation), but rather where the source of the problem lies.
This, of course, comes from my direct and daily experience with the United States IP law, not as some would say, "out of my ass".
What is slowly dawning on everyone is that a truly fair and uniform software patent regime would cost us many, many times more man hours of legal labor per year than the number of lawyers on our entire planet times the number of hours in an entire century.
I'm sorry, but do YOU have a reference? The US Congress has autho
The problem is that the patent office has no concept of 'novel' or 'obvious' and that prior art means 'already patented'.
Of course, you mean "no concept outside of that which was delivered to them by judges, whose job it is to define concepts such as 'novel' and 'obvious' in regard to 35 USC 102 and 103".
Slashdot is a great resource for IT related stuff. Slashdot is an infinitely worthless resource for IP related stuff because almost nobody who posts here exhibits even the slightest understanding of how the system works.
Case in point, people at Slashdot seem to firmly believe that the USPTO gets to decide what is novel or obvious, or more broadly, gets to interpret law. This notion could not be more false. The USPTO acts according to case law, and anything the USPTO does can ultimately be appealed to a Federal court - meaning that a failure to act according to existing case law would land the USPTO in the hot seat inside a courtroom.
Also, the people in executive positions at the USPTO, except for John Dudas (who is appointed by either the Secretary of Commerce or the President, I don't recall which), have been completely replaced in the last few years. Despite this rather glaring evidence that the USPTO is internally aware of problems at the office, 'experts' at Slashdot incessantly bark about how nobody at the USPTO has a clue about anything. In fact, many people at the USPTO are experts in not only their technology, but ALSO in IP law - a qualification that almost nobody at Slashdot shares.
I know I'm jumping on a small comment and unleashing a bit of a rant, but I'm trying to frame it constructively and I direct it to the Slashdot audience in general. Uninformed ranting is exactly that - nobody at Slashdot likes the guy who mindlessly praises closed source software for misunderstood virtues. Likewise, nobody in IP law gives any credence to Slashdotters reiterating the false idea that the USPTO gets to define what is 'novel' or 'obvious'. The situation is completely analogous, and if the Slashdot crowd intends to become anything but a joke regarding the American patent system, I strongly urge devoting more time to learning and less time to ranting.
Regarding the issue of "prior art means 'already patented'", this is, of course, slanderously false. There are, however, incredible advantages to using existing patents as prior art over non-patent literature, the least of which are unquestionably documented dates and constructive reduction to practice in compliance with 35 USC 112. Until every Joe Nobody's website meets those criteria, searching the wide internet for that mythical piece of prior art that sufficiently teaches a claimed invention is often the definition of time wasted on the government's dime. Hell, it isn't even remotely unusual to come across published journal papers that don't display any type of date. Again, that's my attempt at being informative - just one of at least a dozen reasons why existing patents are vastly superior to hunting for non-patent literature.
I'm sure your mother thinks you're really smart, but I think you're rather dull. My point was subtle - a technique used by grown ups. If 3000 deaths due to terrorism justify a $38 billion budget for a new department, where is the $50 billion federal budget for renal failure? With our education system in jeopardy, where is the massive increase in federal spending on education?
Had you engaged your thinking cap before replying, you would have discovered that I am speaking to the concept of priorities. Look it up.
An American is about FIFTEEN TIMES more likely to die of renal failure than terrorism. TEN TIMES more likely to be killed by a gun than die of terrorism. About four times more likely to die from falling (ahem, presumably this doesn't count falling off the WTC). An American is statistically more likely to drownd than die of terrorism, and yes that includes people living in the desert.
If you're going to put it into perspective, use some hard evidence.;)
Why doesn't someone set up a "honey pot" that automatically trolled through the nastiest of the nasty of the various "terrorist" web sites, and see what happens? -Saeed al-Sahaf
Our enemies are allied against us! They have always been allies, and they are all united in their efforts to destroy us! They seek to kill your children with vaguery and also they are united! United together, and they have always been allies!
All kidding aside, I do think you're wrong. You're trying to reason with someone and summarize with: Sorry for this off topic post, but anyone who thinks Saddam had ANY part in 9/11 or that Osama and Saddam were allies has been watching too much Fox News or is too gullible to filter out the neo-con propoganda.
If your summary is accurate, the rest of your argument is an attempt to teach pigs to sing. Don't bother. Just fill'em up with contra-propaganda. Example: I'll never refer to John Fascist Ashcroft again in my life without the word Fascist. I don't need to explain it and it doesn't need to be 100% accurate - the effect is even better this way.
The downside to having the PC in your living room handling your audio (CD, radio) video (DVDs) and TV and recording (PVR) is that you have all your eggs in one basket.
Additionally, how much marketing effort has been put into "buying a PC for each of your kids as well as one for the parents"? Now he proposes combining so much functionality into one device, it reinvents the problem of "too few computers" in the home.
You're right about "too few interfaces" for one person to multitask, but it's also "too few interfaces" when Ma & Pa want to watch a movie but KidA wants to play a game and KidB wants to check her email.
Not to mention DVD players. I can understand if people want a DVD burner/drive on the PC for storage purposes, but I'd rather watch a movie on my television. Sure, I could buy a video card with TV out, but now we're talking about buying a DVD drive, a video card, running my PC (and assorted noise), all so I can watch a movie.
The alternative is my silent DVD player which cost less than a nice video card, and I get to enjoy it on a screen that's almost twice as large as my monitor.
But on the other hand, this is the company that integrated the browser with the OS, granting an internet client full access to the miracle of ActiveX, let alone the entire issue of Outlook. I have to admit that he's doing something right; they aren't short of cash. However, they sure as hell are not going to sell me anything that's a combined media box.
Technically, no, but I'm exactly the case you describe. I write and record my own music as a hobby. One of my hard drives is filled with passionately named masterpieces such as "X.mp3" (where X is an integer). (You see, while writing music, I don't write lyrics. It seems absurdly pretentious to name songs in my library of instrumental works, hence I name them sequentially by integer.)
If I ran their stupid little utility, it would mark all my independently written, recorded, and produced works as potentially criminal files.
It would question the legality of the works of independent artists. Hm, move along now, there is no mystery here.
Says the AC
Perhaps people will give a shit about your opinion some day when you have actually seen the inside of a real life game company.
to which I reply:
Perhaps people will give a shit about your opinion some day when you have actually seen the inside of a real life game company.
There's this thing called "history". Look into it. None of Nintendo, Sega, or Sony got a start in the business by developing games with American developers.
And hey, logging in is free - even an unemployed software developer can afford that. Have some dignity.
And I'm sure the people in charge at EA feel really bad about it as they deposit bag after bag of money into the bank.
I'd be shocked if the US doesn't lose 50% of its programming/development jobs over the next 15 years. There's virtually no reason to keep the majority of them here in the states except quality.. and quality is proving to be no reason at all. Of course, some will still survive, but The History Channel still finds a modern day blacksmith and put him on TV once in awhile.
I'm sure I'll be flamed and/or modded flame bait for saying such a thing, but 15 years from now people will claim they saw it coming in 2005, just like me. Such is life.
In college I had a friend who was part of the psychology & education department who had a very intricate strategy to playing the game.
It involved a case of beer and incessantly gloating about how he had you figured out, he knew what you were going to play, he could read your mind, you already lost, you are an amateur challenging the master, he's toying with you, he's letting you win to feel confident so he can crush you, blah blah blah.
Meanwhile, he would choose the same move every single time. As soon as he lost twice in a row, he would switch to a different move and play it over and over. I'm not sure if he -actually- won more than 50% overall, but with enough beer it definitely he definitely had the effect of being the roshambo champion.
And hell, for college students with beer on a sunny weekday afternoon, that's good enough in my book.
The Patent Office is moving to use exactly the same guidelines for patenting genes as they use for all other chemicals.
Just my attempt to be informative:
The USPTO will continue to apply existing case law until an application is denied and taken to the Patent Board of Appeals or an issued patent is litigated and appealed to a higher court, whereby proper procedure (from board of appeals) or new case law (from appeals court) tells the USPTO that the old case law is inappropriate.
I've drawn plenty of ire around Slashdot for spreading hateful things like facts regarding the USPTO, and I'm deliberately not engaging in this topic (biotech is not my area of expertise), but it would be nice if the Slashdot discussion were cognizant of how the system works.
I'm not flaming or correcting you, just taking a chance to toss in my two cents.
You really need to figure out how to identify class warfare. I pointed out that it's a pity that someone would declare higher education pointless because it's for rich people. It isn't strictly for rich people; it is also for people making sacrifices in order to become rich. That such an institution would be looked upon with disdain by the lower economic strata is a loss by all accounts.
If you believe this is class warfare, I recommend taking a class. Maybe you have a community college nearby.
You make it sound like there is some organization of rich folks that meets weekly in smoke filled rooms to discuss and plot the downfall of the middle class.
No, you make it sound like I make it sound like there is some secretive organization. If I actually had made it sound like this, you are presumably well equipped to expose this idea as baseless. Unfortunately for your argument, I insist that you address the comments I have made rather than the comments you wish I had made.
Have you ever thought for one moment that perhaps the widening of the middle class was an unsustainable abberation to begin with?
Oh my, and after all that, words of wisdom have been cast down from the mount! Seriously, I've never known wisdom to roll uphill. I posted just last week that the middle class has been a historical anomaly of the last few hundred years and proving to be increasingly difficult to sustain. Maybe you have been reiterating my thoughts and passing them off as your own insight? Probably not. My thoughts were far more eloquent, precise, and relevant to the discussion.
In conclusion, I'm sure you'll just tell yourself that I'm some jerk with a conspiracy, but you're such a smart and special person that you were right all along. I'm just too dumb to understand your wisdom. That's a good feeling to have as long as you can count change accurately. Meanwhile, I'll go about my life unscathed by your wisdom and intellect. Have a great day.
"Ivy League" = Fucking rich, so who cares either way ?
You're only a contrapositive away from "Community College" = Kenny McCormick, so who cares?
Someone will write a book one day called "The Rise and Fall of the American Middle Class" and plug it on the talk show circuit as a quaint look at a historical curiosity. The rich people will chuckle at those uppity poor people and the other social class will marvel that there was a time when the rich let it happen.
Isn't it enough that the already-rich attack the inroads to a middle class life? Isn't it simply unnecessary that the poor also hate the middle class?
Ah, America. Liberty is just enough rope for most people to hang themselves.
By the way: Nobody gives a damn about them anymore, redundant expensive education. There's far too many lawyers around and nobody really wants to be a doctor.
The first "sentence" is, at best, a run-on. Also, "there's" is a singular pronoun yet it refers to "lawyers", a plural noun. Additionally, "nobody really wants to be a doctor" is quite a flimsy statement. I personally have two close friends in medical school who would like to become doctors, thus disproving your statement.
Of course, I'm sure you don't care that I would point out your mediocre language skills, right?;)
Remember, BSE came about because of greedy farmers,
By this you mean "farmers trying to make a profit and support their livelihoods". I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm equally greedy for going to work on Monday.
feeding dead cows (meat) to living cows (herbivores).
As I understand it, and I'm not an expert, the problem was returning brain matter into the feed supply. Had they simply chosen to discard the brain (and spinal cord?) material from slaughtered cattle, there would have been no chance to spread the BSE protein or whatever and thus no BSE problem. Feeding cattle meat to living cattle was NOT the cause of the problem.
I do know that Diamond v. Diehr was not the last court decision known to mankind. You should know that it was the last Supreme Court decision pertinent to software patents. Later decisions, most notably Alappat, were made by lower courts.
Splendid, but I fail to see how this is relevant to your original statement that the USPTO interprets law as it sees fit - particularly to serve its own greedy interests. Of course, a quick survey of the fees schedule would reveal that the USPTO profits more from quickly rejecting a patent than from issuing it and collecting maintenance fees (present in the MPEP but likely out of date since they were updated in the last 2 months), but.. sigh.. it gets really tedious to debate against pedagoguery so, whatever.
And I am not the only one who noticed that Alappat was "illogical, inconsistent with precedent and with sound principles of patent law". Read the dissenting judge's opinion.
Spectacular. This was not, however, the issue to which I took exception. This is not an example of the USPTO interpreting law however it sees fit - this is an example of the USPTO complying with the majority decision in a court case. In many circumstances, I would agree with the dissenting judge's opinion and am not fully satisfied with the current definitions of statutory software methods, but this was not the original topic of discussion.
I do know that they only hear about half the cases they are asked to hear, and that their previous opinions called for legislative clarification. I presume most of the judges see the ball as being in the legislature's court at this point, and the Court has moved on to other matters.
Yes, there are snags in the judicial system, but there have always been snags and it was designed to be a healing system, not a perfect system. I, too, would like to see some further clarification or some more, shall we say "enlightened", case law regarding software patents. That situation in no way infers that the USPTO has been interpreting the law, on their own and without judicial oversight, however they please.
Small words are easy to misunderstand. Diehr did not contradict earlier opinion that software for a general-purpose digital computer is not statutory material for a patent. The Court never decided about software that does not fall into this category, e.g. compiler techniques, and said it called for legislative clarification. However, all the software patents I've seen discussed on Slashdot (e.g. arithmetic coding for JPEG) are for general-purpose digital computers, and definitely not statutory according to all the rulings. People interpret Diehr as meaning you can re-word your software patent to sound like a process patent and then it's valid. That's not what they said; in fact section IV of the opinion explicitly says they're not saying that. People are determined to misinterpret it.
I don't know why you feel qualified to opine about this publicly.
all the software patents I've seen discussed on Slashdot
were discussed by people who don't have the slightest clue what they were talking about. The think that "obvious" under 35 U.S.C. 103 means the same thing as "obvious" in a dictionary, they think that mathematical algorithms are patentable, and they think that the USPTO interprets law. All three of those examples are false.
What I find most astonishing is that you feel qualified to maintain your ludicrously false argument in light of minor inconveniences such as facts and reality.
for general-purpose digital computers, and definitely not statutory according to all the rulings.
You are clearly unfamiliar with MPEP 2105 and 2106 which set forth in clear language that which is and which is not statutory. Being that MPEP stands for "Manual of Patent Examination Procedure" and it is this tome with which you are unfamiliar, it is truly impressive that you would continue to suggest that you are right in this argument.
MPEP 2106 in particular explains several examples of what is and is not statutory with direct references to the judicial decisions (interpretations of the law made by people who are qualified to interpret law) establishing them as such.
You argument is directly analogous to claiming that Microsoft Windows was the first operating system to use a mouse pointer. It is false, it is clearly false, anyone who makes such a claim demonstrates that they are unqualified share their opinion as expert, and saying it makes you look like a fool.
In summary, if you had the requisite knowledge to debate this topic, you would know that 1) the judicial branch interprets law, 2) Diamond v. Diehr was not the last court decision known to mankind, 3) later decisions have affected what is or is not statutory regarding computer-related inventions, 4) MPEP 2105 and 2106 will explain those decisions in easy to understand words, and 5) patents are examined and issued according to the MPEP.
Your initial statement was utterly false and wrong. As I said earlier, a 4 second Google search would inform you why it was utterly false and wrong. Lastly, the ridiculous notion that you alone can see the light while an entire department of the federal government is staffed by bumbling idiots necessarily implies that the authority of the entire judicial branch of the federal government is systematically flaunted and steam-rolled by bumbling idiots (who had the gall to put such a flagrant abuse of power into a printed manual, eight revisions deep) and nobody but you has figured it out. In fact, this would also imply that the judicial branch is either staffed by bumbling idiots are completely ineffective at drawing and enforcing the boundary around their Constitutionally-granted authority. If the judicial branch is staffed by bumbling idiots who sit idly by while the USPTO usurps their power, then who are we to let bumbling idiots interpret the law? This whole line of reasoning is entirely absurd and defeats itself.
Maybe you're right. The cunning devils at the USPTO have shown that the judicial branch are a bunch of idiots who don
Slashdot Mirror
Yes it does. Determining whether or not it actually is would require looking at the complete prosecution history, which is the very first thing Xfire's lawyers will do. It is possible that "message" in the claim language refers specifically to a particular message structure as disclosed in the patent, or it could be that "messenger clients" refers specifically to software with a couple of required features. One could look for hints of this in the disclosure, but could not know for certain what the attorneys used to argue such generic claim language. I would be -extremely- surprised if the claims were not rejected once, and the attorneys replied by bringing in specific details from the disclosure.
ince I'm not particularly bright for having "invented" that method, and everybody and their dogs has been doing it forever because it's freaking obvious, does this patent look like yet another something-that-I-may-sue-someone-over-in-the-futur e patent application?
First of all, "obvious" in the dictionary means NOTHING with regard to patentability. That said, this does appear somewhat "obvious" under 35 USC 103 and related case law. I'd argue that it's a simple adaptation of a chat room - as you said, IRC. Nothing in the independent claims strikes me as remarkably clever, rather they have combined the idea of IRC chat rooms to create multiplayer games. Again, we would need to see the prosecution history to see what the lawyers said about this, or whether the examiner ever challenged it.
Shouldn't they replace the monkeys at the USPTO by humans at some point?
In fairness, shouldn't they replace the critics with people who have a clue? (I mean it lightly, don't take offense.) You truly cannot look at JUST the patent to figure out if there is infringement (but you can sometimes figure out if there is NO infringement.) For this case to proceed, Xfire will look up the prosecution history and see how Yahoo!'s attorneys have defined all the terminology in the claims. When that's done, they'll probably attack the validity of this freshly-printed and untested patent, either with prior art (UT99 might be old enough to beat the priority date of this patent (which could easily be 18 months before the actual filing date)) or with an obvious argument (again, under 35 USC 103, not the dictionary meaning of "obvious".)
Yet another FYI - if, during the course of prosecution, Yahoo!'s lawyers changed the scope of the independent claims to avoid the examiner's prior art, under Festo, Yahoo! can lose the doctrine of equivalency in their claim language. This means that if Xfire does not specifically use "messenger clients" (because their clients do something beyond "messenging") then they are not infringing on this patent.
As you can see, there could be quite a lot going on under the surface. It could be that Yahoo!'s attorneys borked this application up so bad (on the inside) that it could have literally claimed to have invented science, be issued, and be completely unenforceable.
Hope that's informative. You can guess from my other posts that I'm probably just trolling with facts. ;)
Holy shit! A professor of Economics is clearly an expert in law! He can also perform heart transplants because he is DEAN AT HARVARD OMGWTFLOLBBQ!!!. He WROTE A BOOK! The book was published by PRINCETON Press! Clearly he is qualified to circumcise newborn babies!
Full disclosure - I have a BS CS and BS Mathematics and left grad school to work in IP law. Also, I work in IP law. Granted, I'm not a professor of economics, however I spend 50 hours each week dealing with IP law and the US Patent system. And in case I was too subtle, I make every cent of my income by working in IP law.
Guess what - I met a guy who is an EXPERT WHEAT FARMER and he says that AOL IS ALL YOU NEED for the INTERNET. Clearly, this is authoritative evidence that anything except for AOL is a burden on the economy.
It's cool that you got modded funny and I got modded troll. Truth hurts, being obtuse is funny. In fairness, you're right; I don't fully disclose my credentials, and I don't -fully- disclose them here.. but I'm not about to create a PR situation for my employer while replying to the inanity on Slashdot (referring primarily to the original post) - I hope you understand.
1. The USPTO recieves about 350,000 applications per year and issues about 70,000 per year. The numbers alone indicate that many applications are rejected, disproving the parent's point.
2. Of the roughly 350,000 that were issued in the last 5 years, the parent has found 5 silly patents. The percentage of silly patents is best expressed in scientific notation with a negative exponent, disproving the parent's point.
3. The parent is clearly unaware that a patent is worthless untill it has been tested in a courtroom. Step 1 of any infringement defense is to attempt to invalidate the patent, something I think would be trivial for every patent he's listed. If he has ANY evidence that these patents have survived an validity challenge, he MIGHT have the BEGINNING of a clue WTF he's talking about, but he doesn't have any of that evidence.
4. Nice link to IEEE - they're clearly legal experts. Oh wait, they know about technology, not law. Patents are legal animals that have technology as content. With my thinking cap on, I declare that IEEE does NOT possess patent law expertise.
5. The parent believes that the "US Patenting Office" appears to "patent just about everything", demonstrating that he doesn't have a clue. There is no such thing as a "US Patenting Office", but if there were, I imagine they would "patent just about everything". There IS a US Patent & Trademark Office, but it does not patent anything. Inventors patent things, the USPTO issues patents. While this is not material to the topic at hand, it goes a long way to reveal that the parent is talking out of his ass about something he does not understand.
So in conclusion: If you care to reply to me and talk about how stupid I am, etc. etc., blah blah blah, please include an analysis of exactly how enforceable you think those patents are. Please stress the part about "you think". For example, please outline how the infringement lawsuit for "Method of Swinging on a Swing" would play out in a courtroom.
What's a stupid patent? Something you hang on the wall. What's a strong patent? Something you use to protect your IP. Next time you think you have a point, look at the patent and decide whether it is a stupid patent or a strong patent (including strong patents for stupid things.) If you don't feel qualified to make that judgement, maybe you don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about.
Microsoft may think this is patentable, but I really doubt the USPTO will agree. IANAPatentLawyer, but I work in IP law and correspond with patent attorneys on a regular basis.
Perhaps, but ENFORCING patents is not the job of the USPTO.
Windows XP has billions and billions of lines of code. Each line of code is a completely uniquely designed manufactured object.
You can say so, but this is completely false under 35 USC 101 and related case law.
The preposterousness of using $35 million dollars to analyze the work of billions of dollars of software coding should be obvious to all--legal analysis of a body of code is more difficult and expensive than actual analysis.
Probably true. Notice that I said $35 million to hire new examiners. I'm not sure what the total budget for the USPTO is, but rest assured it's at least several hundred million. Further, your observation is correct but the conclusion is incorrect. It is unreasonable to expect the USPTO to perform a perfect, flawlessly exhaustive search of the prior art on every application - during infringement lawsuits, it is common for the defense to spend over $100,000 and a man-year of work in this very endeavor, whereas the USPTO collects $1000-2000 and allows the examiners to take about 15-20 hours. This is because the USPTO was never intended to produce a perfect, flawlessly exhaustive search. The examination process, as it regards prior art, has always been and always will be (for the forseeable future) a coarse sieve. In general, the examination process is supposed to prevent ludicrously weak patents from being issued, not to ensure that every patent is completely perfect.
Of course, everybody makes mistakes sometimes, and when mistakes happen, the USPTO has an established practice and procedure to reopen examination of patents if the situation warrants it.
Additionally, a little understood fact about a patent is that an issued patent is completely and literally worthless unless it can withstand a validity challenge in an infringement suit. The USPTO can conduct their $1000, 20 hour search and issue a patent that YOU and I both know is not novel. NO BIG DEAL.++ If the assignee tries to ENFORCE that patent, it will immediately be invalidated. This is how the system has worked for over a hundred years - to "fix" this would mean filing for a patent would cost in the neighborhood of $100,000 regardless of whether or not it eventually issues - and that's a solution I would rather not have.
The problem is that too many of things that get patented are things that could have been invented by undergrad interns like one-click shopping--or like probably all computer-human interface design patents ever issued--but require years of man-hours of highly educated labor to actually prove the uniqueness of.
Hm, but there's nothing anywhere that says something that an undergrad intern came up with shouldn't be patentable. Additionally, the problem with rejecting such applications with prior art is often not because the examiner must prove the uniqueness, but rather because he only has so much time to find adequate disclosure of the invention with a solid date. Simply KNOWING that the one-click shopping technique was well known in the past is meaningless - if the examiner cannot find a clearly dated reference that discloses the claimed invention, in as much detail as the applicant chooses (defined by his original application), then the patent must issue.
Also, just for the record, "obvious" under 35 USC 103 has basically nothing to do with the word "obvious" in the dictionary. I wish it weren't so, but wishing isn't worth much. "Obvious" under 35 USC 103 basically means you have two (or more, but hopefully only two) references that can be combined to teach the claimed invention, plus documented evidence (in either reference, or less preferably, a third reference) that suggests they should be combined for some advantage, plus all the references come from related arts. You won't find that in a dictionary...
I
While that is your opinion, and you are certainly entitled to your opinion, the minor inconvenience of reality is that the court system and how it relates to IP related "stuff" (often referred to as IP law) is the Master and Commander of this topic. You can babble about how worthless it is until your dying day - it will remain Master and Commander of this entire topic.
Evidence or citation for this claim?
It is called case law. You mention elsewhere that you communicate with lawyers. Ask these lawyers about case law that has defined and established the USPTO's practice regarding 35 USC 101. One of my favorites is In re Sarkar, which is sadly not considered as authoritative as other cases. If your attorney is worth his weight in salt, he will explain to you that if Sarkar were considered the controlling law regarding software related inventions, then basically any "software only" invention would be unpatentable, regardless of how it is claimed. (In contrast, software related inventions which MUST require interaction with some external, tangible equipment would not be covered by Sarkar.) The judicial branch gives more weight to other cases, unfortunately, and the USPTO is therefore not able to apply cases like Sarkar at will.
I trust that suffices. Some of this exercise is left to the reader.
Nice one. Call someone slanderously false, but then admit that he or she is absolutely correct in your next sentence.
Uh, nice one. Mischaracterize what your opponent says, then defeat that mischaracterization. If I were distracted by shiny things, I would be impressed. Please reread. Non-patent literature is one of the most valuable resources available to the USPTO and extensive access to IEEE, ACM, Proquest, Safari, the Library of Congress, and numerous other sources are provided to the examiners. As I previously explained, a patent will always be a preferable piece of prior art for at least the reasons of unquestionable dating and the concept of constructive reduction to practice. You can search the MPEP online or ask your lawyer what constructive reduction to practice means.
Here's the problem. If every time I write a line of code, I have to call a lawyer, then software is going to be many, many, many orders of magnitude more expensive. Governments that refuse to accept the American software patent regime will accomplish way more than we will. American corporations that are wising up to how broken the current system will just have to outsource as much of their business as they can--they won't be able to sell in America, but if we don't wise up how insane our legal system has become we won't have much of an economy worth selling to anyway.
This is, of course, hyperbole. That would be A problem, but it is not the existing problem. The very concept of case law is an evolving definition that reflects how the judicial branch of government interprets and defines the law. The USPTO acts as part of the executive branch of government. Please note that I am not disagreeing with your stance about software patents (however this is vaguely defined in general and especially thus far in our conversation), but rather where the source of the problem lies.
This, of course, comes from my direct and daily experience with the United States IP law, not as some would say, "out of my ass".
What is slowly dawning on everyone is that a truly fair and uniform software patent regime would cost us many, many times more man hours of legal labor per year than the number of lawyers on our entire planet times the number of hours in an entire century.
I'm sorry, but do YOU have a reference? The US Congress has autho
Oh and PS - I'm aware of the irony in my use of the word "rant". It was intentional. ;)
Of course, you mean "no concept outside of that which was delivered to them by judges, whose job it is to define concepts such as 'novel' and 'obvious' in regard to 35 USC 102 and 103".
Slashdot is a great resource for IT related stuff. Slashdot is an infinitely worthless resource for IP related stuff because almost nobody who posts here exhibits even the slightest understanding of how the system works.
Case in point, people at Slashdot seem to firmly believe that the USPTO gets to decide what is novel or obvious, or more broadly, gets to interpret law. This notion could not be more false. The USPTO acts according to case law, and anything the USPTO does can ultimately be appealed to a Federal court - meaning that a failure to act according to existing case law would land the USPTO in the hot seat inside a courtroom.
Also, the people in executive positions at the USPTO, except for John Dudas (who is appointed by either the Secretary of Commerce or the President, I don't recall which), have been completely replaced in the last few years. Despite this rather glaring evidence that the USPTO is internally aware of problems at the office, 'experts' at Slashdot incessantly bark about how nobody at the USPTO has a clue about anything. In fact, many people at the USPTO are experts in not only their technology, but ALSO in IP law - a qualification that almost nobody at Slashdot shares.
I know I'm jumping on a small comment and unleashing a bit of a rant, but I'm trying to frame it constructively and I direct it to the Slashdot audience in general. Uninformed ranting is exactly that - nobody at Slashdot likes the guy who mindlessly praises closed source software for misunderstood virtues. Likewise, nobody in IP law gives any credence to Slashdotters reiterating the false idea that the USPTO gets to define what is 'novel' or 'obvious'. The situation is completely analogous, and if the Slashdot crowd intends to become anything but a joke regarding the American patent system, I strongly urge devoting more time to learning and less time to ranting.
Regarding the issue of "prior art means 'already patented'", this is, of course, slanderously false. There are, however, incredible advantages to using existing patents as prior art over non-patent literature, the least of which are unquestionably documented dates and constructive reduction to practice in compliance with 35 USC 112. Until every Joe Nobody's website meets those criteria, searching the wide internet for that mythical piece of prior art that sufficiently teaches a claimed invention is often the definition of time wasted on the government's dime. Hell, it isn't even remotely unusual to come across published journal papers that don't display any type of date. Again, that's my attempt at being informative - just one of at least a dozen reasons why existing patents are vastly superior to hunting for non-patent literature.
I'm sure your mother thinks you're really smart, but I think you're rather dull. My point was subtle - a technique used by grown ups. If 3000 deaths due to terrorism justify a $38 billion budget for a new department, where is the $50 billion federal budget for renal failure? With our education system in jeopardy, where is the massive increase in federal spending on education?
Had you engaged your thinking cap before replying, you would have discovered that I am speaking to the concept of priorities. Look it up.
Man, that's HARDLY putting it into perspective.
Death Stats
An American is about FIFTEEN TIMES more likely to die of renal failure than terrorism. TEN TIMES more likely to be killed by a gun than die of terrorism. About four times more likely to die from falling (ahem, presumably this doesn't count falling off the WTC). An American is statistically more likely to drownd than die of terrorism, and yes that includes people living in the desert.
If you're going to put it into perspective, use some hard evidence. ;)
Enjoy the weather in Cuba.
Our enemies are allied against us! They have always been allies, and they are all united in their efforts to destroy us! They seek to kill your children with vaguery and also they are united! United together, and they have always been allies!
All kidding aside, I do think you're wrong. You're trying to reason with someone and summarize with:
Sorry for this off topic post, but anyone who thinks Saddam had ANY part in 9/11 or that Osama and Saddam were allies has been watching too much Fox News or is too gullible to filter out the neo-con propoganda.
If your summary is accurate, the rest of your argument is an attempt to teach pigs to sing. Don't bother. Just fill'em up with contra-propaganda. Example: I'll never refer to John Fascist Ashcroft again in my life without the word Fascist. I don't need to explain it and it doesn't need to be 100% accurate - the effect is even better this way.
Additionally, how much marketing effort has been put into "buying a PC for each of your kids as well as one for the parents"? Now he proposes combining so much functionality into one device, it reinvents the problem of "too few computers" in the home.
You're right about "too few interfaces" for one person to multitask, but it's also "too few interfaces" when Ma & Pa want to watch a movie but KidA wants to play a game and KidB wants to check her email.
The alternative is my silent DVD player which cost less than a nice video card, and I get to enjoy it on a screen that's almost twice as large as my monitor.
But on the other hand, this is the company that integrated the browser with the OS, granting an internet client full access to the miracle of ActiveX, let alone the entire issue of Outlook. I have to admit that he's doing something right; they aren't short of cash. However, they sure as hell are not going to sell me anything that's a combined media box.
Fucking A!
Technically, no, but I'm exactly the case you describe. I write and record my own music as a hobby. One of my hard drives is filled with passionately named masterpieces such as "X.mp3" (where X is an integer). (You see, while writing music, I don't write lyrics. It seems absurdly pretentious to name songs in my library of instrumental works, hence I name them sequentially by integer.)
If I ran their stupid little utility, it would mark all my independently written, recorded, and produced works as potentially criminal files.
It would question the legality of the works of independent artists. Hm, move along now, there is no mystery here.
Perhaps people will give a shit about your opinion some day when you have actually seen the inside of a real life game company.
to which I reply:
Perhaps people will give a shit about your opinion some day when you have actually seen the inside of a real life game company.
There's this thing called "history". Look into it. None of Nintendo, Sega, or Sony got a start in the business by developing games with American developers.
And hey, logging in is free - even an unemployed software developer can afford that. Have some dignity.
And I'm sure the people in charge at EA feel really bad about it as they deposit bag after bag of money into the bank.
I'd be shocked if the US doesn't lose 50% of its programming/development jobs over the next 15 years. There's virtually no reason to keep the majority of them here in the states except quality.. and quality is proving to be no reason at all. Of course, some will still survive, but The History Channel still finds a modern day blacksmith and put him on TV once in awhile.
I'm sure I'll be flamed and/or modded flame bait for saying such a thing, but 15 years from now people will claim they saw it coming in 2005, just like me. Such is life.
It involved a case of beer and incessantly gloating about how he had you figured out, he knew what you were going to play, he could read your mind, you already lost, you are an amateur challenging the master, he's toying with you, he's letting you win to feel confident so he can crush you, blah blah blah.
Meanwhile, he would choose the same move every single time. As soon as he lost twice in a row, he would switch to a different move and play it over and over. I'm not sure if he -actually- won more than 50% overall, but with enough beer it definitely he definitely had the effect of being the roshambo champion.
And hell, for college students with beer on a sunny weekday afternoon, that's good enough in my book.
Just my attempt to be informative:
The USPTO will continue to apply existing case law until an application is denied and taken to the Patent Board of Appeals or an issued patent is litigated and appealed to a higher court, whereby proper procedure (from board of appeals) or new case law (from appeals court) tells the USPTO that the old case law is inappropriate.
I've drawn plenty of ire around Slashdot for spreading hateful things like facts regarding the USPTO, and I'm deliberately not engaging in this topic (biotech is not my area of expertise), but it would be nice if the Slashdot discussion were cognizant of how the system works.
I'm not flaming or correcting you, just taking a chance to toss in my two cents.
For my part, I award +1 Informative.
You really need to figure out how to identify class warfare. I pointed out that it's a pity that someone would declare higher education pointless because it's for rich people. It isn't strictly for rich people; it is also for people making sacrifices in order to become rich. That such an institution would be looked upon with disdain by the lower economic strata is a loss by all accounts.
If you believe this is class warfare, I recommend taking a class. Maybe you have a community college nearby.
You make it sound like there is some organization of rich folks that meets weekly in smoke filled rooms to discuss and plot the downfall of the middle class.
No, you make it sound like I make it sound like there is some secretive organization. If I actually had made it sound like this, you are presumably well equipped to expose this idea as baseless. Unfortunately for your argument, I insist that you address the comments I have made rather than the comments you wish I had made.
Have you ever thought for one moment that perhaps the widening of the middle class was an unsustainable abberation to begin with?
Oh my, and after all that, words of wisdom have been cast down from the mount! Seriously, I've never known wisdom to roll uphill. I posted just last week that the middle class has been a historical anomaly of the last few hundred years and proving to be increasingly difficult to sustain. Maybe you have been reiterating my thoughts and passing them off as your own insight? Probably not. My thoughts were far more eloquent, precise, and relevant to the discussion.
In conclusion, I'm sure you'll just tell yourself that I'm some jerk with a conspiracy, but you're such a smart and special person that you were right all along. I'm just too dumb to understand your wisdom. That's a good feeling to have as long as you can count change accurately. Meanwhile, I'll go about my life unscathed by your wisdom and intellect. Have a great day.
You're only a contrapositive away from "Community College" = Kenny McCormick, so who cares?
Someone will write a book one day called "The Rise and Fall of the American Middle Class" and plug it on the talk show circuit as a quaint look at a historical curiosity. The rich people will chuckle at those uppity poor people and the other social class will marvel that there was a time when the rich let it happen.
Isn't it enough that the already-rich attack the inroads to a middle class life? Isn't it simply unnecessary that the poor also hate the middle class?
Ah, America. Liberty is just enough rope for most people to hang themselves.
By the way:
Nobody gives a damn about them anymore, redundant expensive education. There's far too many lawyers around and nobody really wants to be a doctor.
The first "sentence" is, at best, a run-on. Also, "there's" is a singular pronoun yet it refers to "lawyers", a plural noun. Additionally, "nobody really wants to be a doctor" is quite a flimsy statement. I personally have two close friends in medical school who would like to become doctors, thus disproving your statement.
Of course, I'm sure you don't care that I would point out your mediocre language skills, right? ;)
Remember, BSE came about because of greedy farmers,
By this you mean "farmers trying to make a profit and support their livelihoods". I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm equally greedy for going to work on Monday.
feeding dead cows (meat) to living cows (herbivores).
As I understand it, and I'm not an expert, the problem was returning brain matter into the feed supply. Had they simply chosen to discard the brain (and spinal cord?) material from slaughtered cattle, there would have been no chance to spread the BSE protein or whatever and thus no BSE problem. Feeding cattle meat to living cattle was NOT the cause of the problem.
Splendid, but I fail to see how this is relevant to your original statement that the USPTO interprets law as it sees fit - particularly to serve its own greedy interests. Of course, a quick survey of the fees schedule would reveal that the USPTO profits more from quickly rejecting a patent than from issuing it and collecting maintenance fees (present in the MPEP but likely out of date since they were updated in the last 2 months), but.. sigh.. it gets really tedious to debate against pedagoguery so, whatever.
And I am not the only one who noticed that Alappat was "illogical, inconsistent with precedent and with sound principles of patent law". Read the dissenting judge's opinion.
Spectacular. This was not, however, the issue to which I took exception. This is not an example of the USPTO interpreting law however it sees fit - this is an example of the USPTO complying with the majority decision in a court case. In many circumstances, I would agree with the dissenting judge's opinion and am not fully satisfied with the current definitions of statutory software methods, but this was not the original topic of discussion.
I do know that they only hear about half the cases they are asked to hear, and that their previous opinions called for legislative clarification. I presume most of the judges see the ball as being in the legislature's court at this point, and the Court has moved on to other matters.
Yes, there are snags in the judicial system, but there have always been snags and it was designed to be a healing system, not a perfect system. I, too, would like to see some further clarification or some more, shall we say "enlightened", case law regarding software patents. That situation in no way infers that the USPTO has been interpreting the law, on their own and without judicial oversight, however they please.
I don't know why you feel qualified to opine about this publicly.
all the software patents I've seen discussed on Slashdot
were discussed by people who don't have the slightest clue what they were talking about. The think that "obvious" under 35 U.S.C. 103 means the same thing as "obvious" in a dictionary, they think that mathematical algorithms are patentable, and they think that the USPTO interprets law. All three of those examples are false.
What I find most astonishing is that you feel qualified to maintain your ludicrously false argument in light of minor inconveniences such as facts and reality.
for general-purpose digital computers, and definitely not statutory according to all the rulings.
You are clearly unfamiliar with MPEP 2105 and 2106 which set forth in clear language that which is and which is not statutory. Being that MPEP stands for "Manual of Patent Examination Procedure" and it is this tome with which you are unfamiliar, it is truly impressive that you would continue to suggest that you are right in this argument.
MPEP 2106 in particular explains several examples of what is and is not statutory with direct references to the judicial decisions (interpretations of the law made by people who are qualified to interpret law) establishing them as such.
You argument is directly analogous to claiming that Microsoft Windows was the first operating system to use a mouse pointer. It is false, it is clearly false, anyone who makes such a claim demonstrates that they are unqualified share their opinion as expert, and saying it makes you look like a fool.
In summary, if you had the requisite knowledge to debate this topic, you would know that
1) the judicial branch interprets law,
2) Diamond v. Diehr was not the last court decision known to mankind,
3) later decisions have affected what is or is not statutory regarding computer-related inventions,
4) MPEP 2105 and 2106 will explain those decisions in easy to understand words, and
5) patents are examined and issued according to the MPEP.
Your initial statement was utterly false and wrong. As I said earlier, a 4 second Google search would inform you why it was utterly false and wrong. Lastly, the ridiculous notion that you alone can see the light while an entire department of the federal government is staffed by bumbling idiots necessarily implies that the authority of the entire judicial branch of the federal government is systematically flaunted and steam-rolled by bumbling idiots (who had the gall to put such a flagrant abuse of power into a printed manual, eight revisions deep) and nobody but you has figured it out. In fact, this would also imply that the judicial branch is either staffed by bumbling idiots are completely ineffective at drawing and enforcing the boundary around their Constitutionally-granted authority. If the judicial branch is staffed by bumbling idiots who sit idly by while the USPTO usurps their power, then who are we to let bumbling idiots interpret the law? This whole line of reasoning is entirely absurd and defeats itself.
Maybe you're right. The cunning devils at the USPTO have shown that the judicial branch are a bunch of idiots who don