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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 12 2012 @ 03:26 PM EDT |
You're talking to engineers, so you need to be precise.
>In one sense, anything is capable of anything.
That's a strawman. Moving on...
> And so a general computer is capable of anything.
Noboday said this. We said computers are turing-complete:
they can perform a (rather large) set of calculations whose
boundaries were understood before the invention of the
computer.
> But in another sense, the capability is not present until
the proper software is written.
This is where the imprecision really bites. My computer
is *capable* of displaying birds crashing into pigs' houses,
the minute I connect the monitor.
To take advantage of that capability requires a bit of
work (writing a program). The question is whether that work
is patentable. To talk about "capability" doesn't add
anything to the discussion.
>The computer won't do the work we want
until we tell it to. And that's a different kind of
capability.
I think we agree.
>And that's different from an on/off switch,
which assumes that the machine already has the instructions
sufficient to do the work, if only the right button is
pushed.
This is where you fail to see the point of view of the
experts in the field. Software fundamentally *IS* a bunch
of on-off switches, completely analagous to pushing a lot of
the right buttons in the right order.
It's not unreasonable for you to think that when the
number of buttons gets this large, the work of figuring out
which buttons to push, in what order, is inventive and
therefore that one should consider patent protection for it.
But you need to be a lot clearer about what your view
actually is, and not pretend that software is something it
isn't.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 12 2012 @ 03:59 PM EDT |
In one sense, anything is capable of anything. And so a
general
computer is capable of anything. But in another
sense, the capability is not
present until the proper
software is written. The computer won't do the work we
want
until we tell it to. And that's a different kind of
capability. And that's
different from an on/off switch,
which assumes that the machine already has the
instructions
sufficient to do the work, if only the right button
is
pushed.
Please show us patents that actually have claims
that depend on this difference. Your trouble is of course that the difference is
entirely philosophical and not connected to the actual operation of the general
purpose computer so your task is hopeless. For the computer everything is on/off
switches.
As for problem specification - yes, in other areas,
defining
the problem is half the battle and can be considered the
non-obvious
inventive aspect.
The thing you miss here is that in the branch
of math called software science the whole battle is defining the problem. A
patent on the result must by necessity preempt the whole field because there is
nothing besides the math itself.
Lots of people spend effort looking
into the study of what computer problems that are truly hard to solve. Trouble
is just that the lawyers refuse to ask people with this expertise when they
evaluate if a patent is obvious to the ones skilled in the art.
If the
justice system accepted the requirement that software patents should only be
possible if there is a proof of the problem at hand being NP-hard then we could
have a middle ground worthy of discussion. I don't believe that the realm of
approximation of NP-hard problems would benefit from patents, but at least we
would then be speaking about an area that the computer scientists agree is
hard.
As a final notice...you bring many weak claims about no evidence
that software should be different than any other creative activity by man. The
thing you miss here are that
areas like circuit design and medical drugs are
areas that by nature are the equivalent of NP-hard problems. You can't know if a
new CPU design works without testing it and there are no good ways to anticipate
if it will work without doing costly simulation. The same doesn't hold true for
software development, here it is very much possible to test your design in
advance since it is all math. Of course it is also a fact that brilliant
programmers don't need to do this most of the time since they have a talent
enough to make things work without using the full analysis box, but that is kind
of beside the point. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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