|
|
|
| Authored by: Ian Al on Sunday, October 21 2012 @ 07:02 AM EDT |
At first I thought I had been caught in lazy writing. It happens to me often
enough. I went back to what I wrote and found that both words are equally apt in
each case.
converse
adj 1: of words so related that one
reverses the relation denoted by the other; "`parental' and `filial' are
converse terms"
corollary
n 1: a practical consequence that
follows naturally; "blind jealousy is a frequent corollary of passionate love"
2: (logic) an inference that follows directly from the proof of another
proposition
As the Court later explained, Flook stands
for the proposition that the prohibition against patenting abstract ideas
“cannot be circumvented by attempting to limit the use of the formula to a
particular technological environment”
This patent application does
the converse. The abstract idea does not exist in isolation without the
technological environment. There is no method or process to be computerised
because, when you take away the computer system, there is no method or
process.
I could added that 'narrowing the technology to the use
of the algorithm' is the converse of 'narrowing the use of the algorithm to the
technology': they are converse terms. I used the word to emphasise that Apple
were not using the same relationship between abstract idea and technology that
was used in Flook. Thus the legal thinking needed to be different.
I
could have said that it is a legal corollary in that 'narrowing the technology
to the use of the algorithm leads to an unpatentable invention' naturally leads
to the consequence that 'narrowing the technology to the use of the algorithm'
also leads to an unpatentable invention. I should have said something like that,
but I would have needed to justify it, further.
In Flook, it was the
abstract idea (the math) that they wanted to patent by narrowing it to a niche
process control method on a computer. In the Apple patent, they said they were
narrowing a method ('A computerized method') to a networked computer system.
However, rather than being the converse, the claims state no
discernible 'orderly procedure or process' or 'regular way or manner of doing'
something and neither do they claim any post-solution activity as a result of
things going on in the computer system.
There are no rubber components
produced, no alarms reset, no decimals converted to BCD. no more apt search
results given. It's like describing the motion of wheels in a perpetual motion
machine without saying that it produces perpetual motion. Apple have given an
outline description of some workings of a computer system, but have not claimed
a novel method and have not declared the useful result of using a
method.
For these reasons, it is untrue, therefore, that they have
narrowed the use of a computer system to a new and useful method.
My
use of the word 'corollary' later in the comment could also have been replaced
with use of the word 'converse', although that did not occur to me at the time
of writing:
If there is no useful and novel process or method, then
the corollary to 35 USC § 101 applies:
Whoever does not
invent or discover any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or
composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may not
obtain a patent therefor.
The terms I had
emboldened in the text were the converse of the terms used at the same points in
the section text. However, it was more the logical and legal inference that I
thought was most important.
You were quite right to castigate me for
relying on the descriptive material. I had hoped that I had made it clear that
one had to rely on that material to even attempt to find a method in the claims.
I hoped that folk here knew that if the claims did not claim a useful and new
method invention then the rest of the patent text would not make any difference:
there was no invention to protected by the patent. Perhaps that was an
unreasonable assumption.
---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid! [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
|
|
|
|
