| If a technical solution is not obvious to a person skilled in the arts... i.e.
Required someone to burn the midnight oil night after night to expend the
'effort' on R&D (and all the trial and error that, that involves) to come up
with a solution. Then surely isn't that is the same as an engineer, biologist,
etc., creating a novel non-software solution by the same process?
I am
personally against US 'type' software patent where doing it simply “with a
computer” warrants a patent. Yet for 'real time' applications where doing it on
paper with a pencil and paper would not have real world application -(thus
needing an economic incentive) then that -I think- keeps with the spirit of
patents. However, many and most, of the important break throughs in the past
had been originated in universities; financed by tax- payers money. Only then
to be snapped up by commercial enterprises: who then went on to pattern them.
If a technical solution is not obvious to a person skilled in the arts...
That is an invention.
Will give a real world example: As a youth, I was
amazed at NASA's development of software that could pull out of the background
noise, a signal from deep-space probes. Just billionths of a watt AND the
Sun's radio out-put swamped it. Not obvious, and in today’s dollars, it must
have cost a few billion to develop that technology (thanks tax-payers). Who now
remembers Irving S. Reed and Gustave Solomon that help to make deep-space-probes
communicate more efficiently? Yet, don't we now benefit from that pioneering
technology every day. What if microsoft or apple was up and running at that
time and patented it as their own?
Due, where credit is due. If it ain't
'obvious' it should be considered as a bona fide invention.
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