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| Authored by: PolR on Wednesday, June 13 2012 @ 07:35 PM EDT |
My thinking is inspired of the printed matter doctrine which says (I simplify)
that you can patent a printing press or a printing process but you must leave
the contents out of it. There is a legal line that separates the
"substrate" which is physical from the contents. You can patent the
substrate as long as you don't encroach on contents.
In digital logic there is a duality between substrate and contents so there
should be a way to do that separation in some way. Of course if you think of the
hardware in terms of the symbols it processes then the separation is not made.
This is to say that you are right, if you look at things at the level of
symbols, whether the solution is hardware or software it should not be
patentable. In both cases the symbols are the same. To patent the hardware the
separation between contents and substrate must be made and the patent must be
limited to the specifics of the substrate. My treatment of the TTL NAND chip is
an example of how this may be done.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Wol on Wednesday, June 13 2012 @ 08:20 PM EDT |
No. Just because one is patentable doesn't mean the other one is. Let's go back
to the Jacquard loom.
You have a loom that is hard-coded to make tartan. You get a patent on "a
loom that makes tartan". That's fine, hunky dorey.
I have a loom that is soft-coded to make all sorts of types of cloth. My general
purpose loom is patented too. That's fine.
I now throw a couple of switches, and my loom stops making Hebridean cloth, and
starts making tartan. Am I infringing on your patent? No. Can I patent my loom
as "a loom that makes tartan"? NO! Because it is not a loom that makes
tartan, it's a loom that makes cloth!
What the invention does is in some respects irrelevant. If you have hardware
that does one specific thing, then you patent it for what it does. Your hardware
gate can be patented as a TTL NAND chip, because that's what it does. Your FPGA
chip can be patented as a FPGA chip because that's what it does. You can NOT
patent your FPGA chip as a NAND chip, because that's not what it does (yes it is
what it can do, but that's not the same thing - it can do plenty of other things
as well which your TTL NAND chip can't).
Cheers,
Wol[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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