decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
"at least you haven't shown" - Yes he has | 443 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
"at least you haven't shown" - Yes he has
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, January 01 2013 @ 12:42 AM EST

"Diamond v Diehr was about a process to transform rubber."

Sure. Including a software component.

"The patent was about transforming rubber. You cannot
transform rubber by thinking about it."

And you can't fly a space shuttle by thinking about it, or cause a bounce effect
on a screen that others can see by thinking about it, either.

"You can replicate every software algorithm in your head."

Including the ones that help to cure rubber. And the ones for the shuttle. And
the ones for bounceback. But you don't get useful results, except perhaps
debugging or understanding program flow, by doing any of those things.

"If you couldn't, then the algorithm would not have been able to have been
developed."

Perhaps you aren't familiar with neural net algorithms? Or genetic algorithms?
A lot of algorithms have been developed which perform useful tasks, which were
not even actually conceived of beforehand by humans. Instead, the machine is
constrained to find a solution in a space. So, as a blanket statement, this
doesn't work. In fact, some neural network algorithms are so poorly understood
that a technique called "sensitivity analysis" is used to attempt to
figure out why they reached particular results.

Yet these algorithms are also just computation, often just run on standard
computers (but sometimes run on specialized hardware to make them faster).

"It's how algorithms _are_ developed. We work them out in
our heads."

Usually, but not always, as I just showed.

"I've been writing software for over three decades. Others here have
similar levels of experience."

Yes. Me, for example. I wrote my first program 38 years ago. But argumentum
ad verecundiam is usually bogus, especially when it is being explicitly
attempted by someone who doesn't even know his audience.

"We are trying to help you understand a simple truth."

And yet, you have severe misconceptions about several things. Interesting.

I understood, well before you tried to "educate" me, that most
software patents were bad. I can even sympathize with the argument that all
software patents are bad. But if you are attempting to distinguish Diamond, you
are going to have to do a much better job, because following it closely shows
that it allows much software which does useful stuff to be patented -- at least
when it is doing that useful stuff. Just running the software in the computer
and not doing the useful stuff is much like running any other kind of simulator,
and almost certainly not patentable. But that distinction really doesn't help
anybody.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )