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| Authored by: Ian Al on Wednesday, September 26 2012 @ 04:03 AM EDT |
What this means is a device can be on sale for centuries, but if
there isn't written documentation of exactly how it works, a patent will
issue.
If a patent has proprietary software as prior art, it can
never be challenged because there is no written description of how it works,
only user manuals on how it operates.
For open and free software, there
is always written descriptions of how it works. If any allegedly infringing
software can be shown to have the same sort of code construction as free and
open claimed prior art, the USPTO (or litigator) must show why software that is
just the same in most respects as all prior art infringes on all the claims in a
way that the prior art software does not.
Thinking back to Oracle v.
Google, Cockburn should have been forced to show that the source code for the
functional descriptions given by Android that he considered infringing was not
essentially the same as prior art examples of free and open, commented
software.
Remember that a coder can explain what a code fragment does,
but that is a very long way from showing that the code fragment infringes on a
claim to an abstract idea in a patent when a similar code fragment from earlier
free and open software, does not. It does not even have to be software that does
the same thing.
Put yourself in his position. Could you show that the
'infringing' code in a word processor was not practically the same as code to be
found in an internet browser from an earlier date? Isn't that the point about
computer languages? Can you imagine how difficult it would be to show that a
block of code in C was exactly the same as the claimed abstract 'function' in a
Java patent?
We forget that what software 'does' is a figment of our
imagination. Looking at the code does not reveal software 'doing' anything, any
more than a processor 'understands' an instruction or the 'meaning' of
data.
Any claim about software 'doing' something in a computer or
'being' something in a computer is, similarly, an abstract idea and a figment of
the patenter's imagination.---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid! [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Software patents - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, September 26 2012 @ 10:46 AM EDT
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, September 26 2012 @ 01:06 PM EDT |
>For both foreign patents/patent applications and non-patent literature
you will need an English language translation that you can attach to the
submission.
I hope the USPTO can accept documents that are 5,000 pages long.
Becuase that is how many pages it takes to translate the relevant
German literature in English, in my field. The relevant French literature
requires roughly 3,000 pages, and the relevant Latin literature takes
about 2,000 pages. (The Latin literature is important, because most of
the prior art is derived from books written when Latin was the lingua
franca of the civilized world.)[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- This is a joke - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, September 26 2012 @ 04:10 PM EDT
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