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Authored by: PolR on Sunday, October 14 2012 @ 04:41 PM EDT |
By that logic you could patent an instruction manual because the text is
narrowly defined and a manual is an article of manufacture.
Or you can patent an equation because the equation is narrowly defined.
How do you reconcile this with Supreme Court precedents like Mayo? This patent
was narrowly defined.
Another issue is how broad must it be to be too broad? Do you have a test?
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 15 2012 @ 03:36 AM EDT |
that patents on ANYTHING abstract are too broad an exclusion. The courts
decided that centuries ago.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Ian Al on Monday, October 15 2012 @ 07:00 AM EDT |
From the Supreme Court decision in Bilski:
The Court’s
precedents provide three specific exceptions to §101’s broad patent-eligibility
principles: “laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas.”
(Chakrabarty). While these exceptions are not required by the statutory text,
they are consistent with the notion that a patentable process must be “new and
useful.”
Math may be new and useful, but it is abstract ideas.
Patents are only legally awarded for a 'new and useful process, machine,
manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement
thereof'. The Supreme Court treats mathematical algorithms as prior art. Again,
from Bilski:
The Court concluded that the process at issue there
was “unpatentable under §101, not because it contain[ed] a mathematical
algorithm as one component, but because once that algorithm [wa]s
assumed to be
within the prior art, the application, considered as a whole, contain[ed] no
patentable invention.
Laws of Nature and physical phenomena can
never be new and are non-patentable, by law, for this reason. Folk often confuse
newly discovered with new. The Supreme Court does not make this error. So,
PolR's example of E=mc2 is not patentable because the 'discovered'
equation is math and an abstract idea and the underlying meaning is a law of
nature. --- Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid! [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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