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| Authored by: PolR on Sunday, October 14 2012 @ 11:31 PM EDT |
You can patent a printing press without patenting a book.
You can patent a calculating machine without patenting the calculations.
This leaves plenty of room for improving technology. What you can't do is patent
a calculation and pretend it is a claim on a machine.
But your example is claiming all possible fluid computers for all possible
computations and this is overly broad. IIRC there is case law that says you can
patent a specific cotton gin but you can't patent the principle of a cotton gin.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 15 2012 @ 02:33 PM EDT |
You seem to be implying that patenting broad swathes of mathematics is not
harmful or dangerous.
My direct experience is that it retards progress, sometimes for decades. How
many patents were there on arithmetic coding for example, and how long was the
field of data compression retarded by those patents? (answers: dozens, and
about ten to fifteen years).
Because they were patents on _simple mathematical algorithms_, there was no
possible way to work around them. The patents were dressed up in the proper
"A machine that ..." language but they were really patents on a
mathematical algorithm masquerading as patents on a machine. In practice, the
claims covered _all possible implementations_ of the algorithms, not just one
concrete piece of hardware. This is harmful. It's bad for society and its bad
for innovators, who can't use certain patented parts of mathematics to make
better products for you.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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