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| Authored by: knala on Monday, June 11 2012 @ 03:55 PM EDT |
"But patents have
always protected bright ideas that are relatively
easy to
implement once you have the bright idea. So, the question is
whether
the bright idea is obvious. Maybe this one is."
Surely the idea in
itself is not patentable.
It is the implementation of that idea which may be
eligible
for patent protection, provided that the description of the
implementation is sufficient to teach someone skilled in the
art something
novel and useful.
This is the main area where software patents are failing.
They are often written to protect an idea, rather than a
well-described
specific implementation.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 11 2012 @ 05:52 PM EDT |
The Wright brothers did not and could not patent the concept of flight or even
the concept of an airplane. They patented specific features of their airplane.
If software is to be patentable, the same principle must apply. Just as the
concept of flight could not be patented, the concept of doing something in
software should not be patentable. Only specific innovative methods of doing
something should be patentable.
For the example given in the article, the concept of reading the motion of a
finger on a touch screen keyboard as an ideograph representing a word should not
be patentable. Only specific innovative methods of doing so should be
patentable. In this case, prior art for handwriting recognition, spell checking,
etc. would limit patent options.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: JonCB on Tuesday, June 12 2012 @ 10:29 AM EDT |
Why that would probably be lack of novelty since this idea
is probably done to death in the IT field of "gestural
recognition". It's not like they studied anything else! So
we have Shorthand and (after a quick search of google
scholar) at least half a dozen papers on recognition of sign
language saying that this bright idea is actually fairly
well taught in the literature.
Given that everything else is basically going through the
motions to any engineer "skilled in the art", your example
actually does look a little lame. On the plus side at least
I couldn't think of half a dozen relatively close examples
(certainly potentially infringing examples) that predated it
by 5-10 years... so for software patents that IS pretty
good.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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