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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 11 2012 @ 12:32 PM EDT |
| Maybe we can preempt some of them and prevent other religions from using them! [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 11 2012 @ 11:53 PM EDT |
Basically, you are claiming that anything that affects the real
world should be
patentable.
Yes, that is what I am
claiming.
That is NOT what the law says, that is NOT what the
Constitution says.
Actually, yes, that is what the "useful"
clause of the "novel, useful and non-
obvious" criteria
means.
Patents are not a right, they are a choice.
Let's not get into rights and choice, but it's pretty easy to see that any
"rights"
you care to claim are yours are nothing but a choice society made to
allow you
to have because society deemed it better on the whole to let you have
them.
Change your society and your rights change. For example, it's easy to say
women should have equal rights when you're in a Western country, but go to
a
Middle-Eastern country and, whoa, where did those rights go?!? "But it's
wrong!" you say. Sure, tell that to the dudes who'll stone you to death for
suggesting they are wrong. I'm sure your right to a speedy trial by your peers
will get you out of that one.
Society made the wrong choice
and is now paying the price.
Nobody has been able to show that
conclusively, and economists have been
trying for years now. Sure people of the
anti-IP persuasion cite Boldrin/Levine,
Bessen and co. liberally but
conveniently forget to acknowledge, or rather,
even conceive, the existence
of
the many papers finding severe flaws in their work.
I don't know what
definition of "abstract" you are using to make the
assertions that abstract
things affect real life, but in this context, the word
assumes the first 3
meanings from
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/abstract -
1. thought of apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or
actual
instances: an abstract idea.
2. expressing a quality or
characteristic apart from any specific object or
instance, as justice, poverty,
and speed.
3. theoretical; not applied or practical: abstract
science.
These are the things that patent law is not allowed to
cover. I cannot see a
single example or assertion of yours where you explain
how something that
fits that definition can affect the real world. Abstract
concepts don't affect the
world; rather, abstract concepts are
attributed
after-the-fact to things that are already affecting the world, not the
other
way
around. (E.g. poverty is a huge problem with countless causes, but it's not
the
abstract concept of "poverty" that causes it.)
You suggest
"religion" as an abstract concept, but the set of rules imposed by
a specific
faith that some
people adopt as their own and execute are not abstract;
they are very
specific rules, such as "thou shalt not work on a Sunday". If
people actually
execute these instructions, it's no longer abstract. You
suggest addition and
subtraction as
abstract concepts that affect the world.
But they don't affect the real world
until you perform those operations
to achieve some practical goal
like calculating a tip!
They are no longer
abstract then! Similarly, software is not abstract because
executing it affects
the real world. Valid software patent claims don't typically
claim the abstract
ideas of "addition" or "subtraction", they claim "a method of
calculation for
the practical purpose of leaving a tip using addition or
subtraction." (See the
Swype patent claim for a good example of this.)[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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