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Stites is just plain wrong... | 443 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
The Pro-Se brief
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, December 30 2012 @ 01:26 PM EST
Stites has offered a blinding flash of light and clarity. Too bright I fear.
The court will turn its eyes away, not wishing to see the facts.
The court has a huge problem if it accepts Stites. What to do
with the mountain of software patents it has already
erroneously supported.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Mr. Stites side-stepped the confusion, laid out the situation clearly, and provided an obvious
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, December 31 2012 @ 11:56 AM EST
Agreed, but he didn't do something important: point out why
his solution was (legally) correct.

I can imagine a good argument that gets from current case
law to "programs are ineligible as algorithms", but he
hasn't presented it.

From there I could also reach his conclusion that a good
test for whether a program could be something more than an
algorithm is whether it alters the hardware instruction set,
but there is no chance that the appeals court will make that
further leap.

Now here's an exercise in thinking like a lawyer. Imagine
that the court adopts a test that says that a program is
patentable if it alters "the instruction set". I create a
piece of software which is a virtual machine - providing a
new instruction set. Is my software patentable?

(I think I know what Stites' answer would be, though I'm
only guessing. If you're going to play the game of "beat
the lawyers", you need to consider your choice of words as
constituting a system that will be subjected to sustained
attack, and must be designed for robustness.)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

I disagree
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, January 01 2013 @ 02:34 AM EST
You could quite easily paraphrase most of Stites's paper to say that, since
everybody uses the same periodic table with only 118 elements in it, and simply
rearranges the atoms to suit himself (using math to help figure out which
combinations of atoms are useful), nobody using the atoms described in the
periodic table is ever doing anything worthy of a patent.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • I disagree - Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, January 01 2013 @ 02:36 AM EST
  • The table.. - Authored by: jesse on Thursday, January 03 2013 @ 05:31 AM EST
Stites is just plain wrong...
Authored by: mtew on Thursday, January 03 2013 @ 09:21 AM EST

He argues about instructions and states that instructions can not be either added or deleted from the hardware. This is incorrect on at least two levels.

An instruction can effectively be deleted simply by not using it.

Sub-routines are effectively new instructions that are added to the machines repertoire.


The other level is that the hardware instruction set can be used to build a 'virtual machine' with an arbitrary instruction set.

---
MTEW

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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