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| Authored by: AntiFUD on Wednesday, March 13 2013 @ 02:32 PM EDT |
Life would be so much easier if ... the section 101 definition of patentable
contained the word 'physical' before the word 'process', where physical is tied
to the real world actual material(s) being processed. Likewise, in order to be
patentable an invention must produce a physically tangible product, such that
one can mail (or transport) it from one place to another.
I am not sure how to exclude the presence of data on a CD/DVD being perceived as
a physical manifestation of output from a machine (computer).
PolR, thanks for all you busy work, on this article and all your previous
contributions. I think that the four topics are well chosen, but I would like
to take this opportunity to add my endorsement to Tkilgore's and IANALitj's
contributions/posts.
I still have trouble ascertaining exactly where the 'range' of software patents
begins and ends. It appears to me that 'all software is maths and/or logic'
brigade carefully avoid trying to define exactly what falls under the software
umbrella. I actually had to stop and learn about proximity sensors, who makes
them and how they work (light, infrared, electromagnetic, etc.). But, I came to
no firm conclusion as to whether utilizing a sensor of whatever nature, on my
Android smartphone or tablet, and the software that makes the physical
(patentable) sensor work, is or even should be patentable. However, I am firmly
in the camp that believe that, for example, Apple's bouncy screen/window/frame
of a document does not have a physical manifestation, because try as you may you
could never mail it to me in the post.
Please don't feel that you have to respond to my quandary, but I would love to
know if and how semiotics might be used to define the bounds of software and/or
be applied in such a way to definitively determine that Apple's bouncy
rubber-band patent can be reduced to unpatentable mathematics and/or logic.
Perhaps, through explaining what the 'software' between a) the physical hardware
(touch-screen and/or sensors), b) the underlying OS, CPU, GPU and memory, and c)
what the user actually sees on the screen, actually does and how this (software
doings) can be described in terms of semiotics. If it is easier, and bearing in
mind the time constraints on getting the topics to the USPTO, I would even
welcome, and greatly appreciate, a future article that addresses this breakdown
of a simpler example, such as going from keystrokes on a keyboard, through a
programming language compiler to cpu to gpu to display "Hello World' on a
computer screen - all described in semiotic terminology.
Thanks for bothering to read this to the very end, this very day!
---
IANAL - Free to Fight FUD - "to this very day"
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