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You're right. The trick is getting the courts to agree. | 267 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
I would love to see a patent of this type enforced.
Authored by: OpenSourceFTW on Sunday, February 10 2013 @ 01:55 PM EST
Your honor, the defendant produced a free, open source application which
calculated the trajectory of a soccer ball and got the same answer we did when
we entered the same parameters.

This has caused us irreparable harm, therefore, we ask for a permanent
injunction and reparations totaling $3 million plus legal fees.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

You're right. The trick is getting the courts to agree.
Authored by: Tolerance on Sunday, February 10 2013 @ 02:16 PM EST
Absolutely the idea of number, or functions say, is abstract
and the idea of software should be too. I'm not actually
disagreeing with you.

Yet in the European Patent Convention and UK law we see
patentable subject matter doesn't exclude abstract ideas
provided they're combined to result in an technical and
novel invention of industry.

In the US the picture is more confused because law there
allows for process patents, which are abstract, so long as
they produce something real. SCOTUS recently said (in
Bilski) that's no longer good law, but Congress set up a
special federal court for patents to who regularly end-run
around the Supreme Court on that point. So far it has worked
quite well to allow abstract ideas into patentable subject
matter.

So that man Schafly for example got a patent on two large
numbers because the claim involved an (abstract) process in
cryptography.

Moral: it doesn't do any good to persuade SCOTUS to ban
abstract number from patents. Congress will establish a
theoretically lower court which will subvert SCOTUS, who
won't grant certiorari if they don't want to pick a fight
with Congress. Result: the Federal appeals court for
patents, not SCOTUS, has effectively set the law.


---
Grumpy old man

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

    numbers are NOT human constructs
    Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 10 2013 @ 03:41 PM EST
    "I agree that numbers are human constructs, but I disagree that they can be
    patentable."

    There are a number of animals with a very very good grasp of low numbers, up to
    perhaps half a dozen or so.

    [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

    Still Abstract
    Authored by: cjk fossman on Sunday, February 10 2013 @ 11:13 PM EST

    There is a chapter in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat that describes a pair of twins who can recite large prime numbers.

    The twins are entirely without math skills. Their mental abilities, as you and I understand them, are limited in the extreme.

    The author of the book asked the twins how they were able to find these numbers. The best explanation they could provide was that they could see them.

    This raises the question: what were they seeing?

    How were they able to "see" these abstractions? Are they really abstractions?

    Or is it just this?

    [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

    This is a difficult one
    Authored by: Tolerance on Monday, February 11 2013 @ 12:30 AM EST
    If it's not been clear in earlier posts, numbers can't by
    themselves be patented, though some have given it a jolly
    good try. What has been patented, in the US, are particular
    numbers with an algorithm for doing something supposedly
    useful.

    To address another point you mention, most mathematicians
    wouldn't agree that the number 2 is the creation of the
    human (or any other) mind. And yet they also say that
    mathematics is a human creation. Obviously there is a
    mystery there, or at least a tension.

    So the intellectual structures for manipulating the number 2
    spring from a human mind, but the number 2 does not. The
    idea that theories have always been around and humans merely
    discover them is, like the notion that God made math, or
    that math existed before the big bang, impossible to
    demonstrate.

    Which doesn't make it wrong, necessarily. It just means we
    can't prove it either way, always an uncomfortable position
    for mathematicians.


    ---
    Grumpy old man

    [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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