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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, January 23 2013 @ 03:47 PM EST |
When they are explicitly designed to work together and some
features just won't
work without that combination.
I remove the
features of displayed output in Linux and the computer can certainly run. But
the feature of being able to see what's happening and what I'm doing is no
longer functional.
How does that not fit into a hardware/software feature
combination that is "explicitly designed to work together or they just won't
work"?
The point:
Once something is software changeable, any
definition you attempt to apply to that particular hardware/software combination
applies equally to any software applied to any hardware including to general
purpose computers.
So why doesn't your definition apply to the general
purpose computers?
RAS[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, January 23 2013 @ 07:18 PM EST |
Imagine that I have my nifty ray-tracer that is implemented in software. It's
not patentable because it's an algorithm.
But instead, I implement it as a graphics accelerator card, with a custom
driver. Now I have a hardware/software combination, and now it's patentable.
But wait! The graphics accelerator is just a board holding a custom ASIC or
FPGA, which implements THE SAME ALGORITHM, just expressed in terms of gates
instead of in terms of source code. (Or, if you prefer, the source code was
VHDL instead of C.)
IANAL, but my understanding is that, under the current state of affairs, the
same algorithm is patentable if implemented in an FPGA and not patentable if it
is implemented purely in software. I do not think that it is possible for this
to be a reasonable state of affairs. If the Supreme Court really understood
this, I don't think they could consider it reasonable, either.
MSS2[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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