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| Authored by: mrisch on Monday, June 11 2012 @ 07:37 PM EDT |
I didn't say the purpose was to reward human ingenuity. As
you note, the goal is to promote the progress of the useful
arts. And if someone can make a computer do something to
solve a practical problem that it couldn't before, that is
promotion of the useful arts. Of course, we can debate
whether patents in general promote progress or impede it,
but that's not a subject matter issue.
And, quite frankly, if writing 1+1=2 on a chalkboard made
bread fall from the sky and feed the hungry, I would give a
patent to the person who figured that out, too. There is
nothing sacred about math - it is a tool like any other to
make the useful arts capable of things that they were not
capable of before. People used math to get patents on
measuring devices 200 years ago. No one complained that the
new navigational tools that kept boats from veering off
course or the new scales that allowed for weighing of large
objects were just implementing math. Some complained that
they weren't new, though - I guess that's always been a
problem.
I hear the arguments that software patents don't promote the
progress. Fair enough, but it's not because software is
math, it's because they protect too much while giving too
little.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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