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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 12 2012 @ 04:57 AM EDT |
So we can agree that many uselessly vague and even invalid patents are granted
in practice. This is probably not limited to software, although it seems most
common in this field.
You have already suggested leaving resolution of disputes to the courts, because
"examiners will not get the job done anyway".
In general, I agree with this opinion, but I think that there should be a
stronger deterrent to filing vague and overbroad patents.
As it is, a patent troll can sue for huge sums and only risk losing his own
lawyer fees.
Maybe there should be some clause in the law that allows the courts to recognize
such abuse and make the patent trolls pay the defendant's cost (and maybe this
clause already exists and is just underutilized, I don't know the law that
well).
An alternative would be to follow the reasoning of Boldrin/Levine as mentoned
elsewhere and abolish patents altogether.
If attempts to fix the patent system fail, I think this would clearly be the
lesser evil, even if Boldrin and Levine are not entirely correct in their
conclusions.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Ian Al on Wednesday, June 13 2012 @ 03:27 AM EDT |
I now make reasonable assumptions about the existing technology.
The patents rely on two key features; communication and a freeform,
character-based display.
The communications would be modems over telephone lines using international
standards for modem communication. The display is a cut-down version of the
Visual Display Unit technology in common use. The characters would probably be
upper-case, inverted upper-case and 'line and box drawing' characters.
It is a trivial task to use the built-in modem and the chips dealing with the
character display to produce custom pages and use the existing cursor keys to
select inverse-high-lighted options.
The VDU screen technology had been in use for decades for word processing and
spreadsheets. A questionnaire form is a trivial addition to a fax machine
considering that it must be simple because of the limited display area.
All the 'computing' would be on the central server just as it was for all VDU
modem access to mainframes.
Any device with the required display and communications capability would have
had the required technology in place, already.
Only the idea was novel. It made no changes to the hardware in the supporting
devices (general purpose mainframes and general purpose VDU devices). The
patents are just software changes on a central general purpose computer and
sending the required characters to and from the general purpose display unit.
The fax unit and any other device being used with the patent is being used in
its standard 'VDU peripheral to a remote computer' mode.
The patents are a bit like patenting the general, but novel, idea of using a
wrench as a hammer.
---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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