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| Authored by: PolR on Monday, June 11 2012 @ 06:41 PM EDT |
No we are not on the same page. This reads like you are telling me that what I
think is nonsense happens to be how the law should work.
> As for plows, someone got a patent on the first plow with
> interchangeable parts - what's that do to the argument?
It does nothing.
You don't change the parts of the plow millions of times per second as you use
the plow. But you can have a program that changes its own code millions of time
per second as it runs. A programming technique to do just that are known and are
part of some implementations of some programming languages.
Also writing information in memory doesn't change parts in the computer. The two
scenario don't compare.
> the existing capabilities of the machine are important -
> that's the prior art
Why only prior art in the legal sense counts as the computer existing
capabilities? The dispute is not just whether the machine is new. It is whether
the invention is a machine in the first place. The latter point has nothing to
do with prior art.
I have this nasty feeling that we don't have the same understanding of what the
capabilities of a computer are. I feel like you are attributing to the machine
what is actually a semantical property of the symbols. Neither the symbol nor
its meaning are part of the machine structure. Why is that the capabilities of
the machine? This is like saying a novel is a physical property of a book.
And you discount the capabilities of the instruction cycle because the
semantical relationships yet to be discovered are not part of it. But as I have
explained in another comment semantics is abstracted away when a program is
written. Semantics plays no part in the computation. But this is the element of
the claim which distinguishes a given program from the instruction cycle. So why
would this provides a finding that a new machine is made? The contention here is
that the invention is not a machine at all.
> because processes are patentable, new functionality is
> paramount
The heart of the disagreement is that I think the law is calling a machine
something which is not a machine. And there is no way to understand what is the
process that is claimed when we have in our mind the notion that a machine is
invented.
> And you are right that the fact that the capability could
> go away if RAM is emptied is irrelevant.
I am puzzled. I have not made that point. Did you misread something?
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 11 2012 @ 07:30 PM EDT |
All general-purpose computers have the capability to execute instructions.
That's basically all that they do.
They also have assorted hardware attached to them (RAM, hard drives, displays,
etc.) which has specific capabilities. And they can only execute so many
instructions per second. These form two types of practical limitations on what
you might be able to get done (in the real world) by executing some software on
the computer.
Loading software into a computer does not, and never has, changed the
capabilities of the machine. In fact that's one of the things that makes
writing software so difficult! Your software must do computations which let you
accomplish something useful, using only the "existing capabilities"
that the machine already had. Discovering the best way to use those
capabilities to accomplish a specific thing, is what makes programming so fun.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: TemporalBeing on Monday, June 11 2012 @ 11:24 PM EDT |
I think where you are trying to go is not quite possible.
That is, the hardware is the hardware, and when you add software that takes two
aspects of the hardware and makes a use of them then you have a new machine. Add
more software, and another new machine.
The problem you run into is that if you take something that is non-patentable
and add it to something that is patentable that does not change the
patent-ability of what is non-patentable.
In this case, the software function combining the two hardware pieces is
non-patentable even though the separate hardware pieces are, or that the
combined hardware pieces are (the manufacturer certainly has patents on the
hardware for it already both separately and combined, without software). So
adding the non-patentable software to the equation does not change the equation
- it does not make the unpatentable software all of a sudden patentable.
So, if you take away the hardware, does the software by itself quality as being
patentable? If the hardware is only inputs to the software (in the abstract
sense), is the software patentable? If not, then no matter what you do to the
software it cannot be made patentable.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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