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| Authored by: IANALitj on Monday, March 11 2013 @ 04:04 PM EDT |
I think that this may be the problem in a nutshell.
The anonymous previous poster opined "No, its not. Changing a configuration
of a printing press from one that out puts the Bible to one that outputs 50
Shades of Gray is nothing like adding a particular kind of spell checking
function or adding a particular English to Mongolian translating function or
adding a voice to text function to a computer."
What about all the intermediate cases? Some computer software is not
patentable. If any is patentable as such, where is the line to be drawn?
If adding spell checking is patentable, the line might be drawn so that adding
new dictionaries is not patentable. Spell checking also presumably implicates
rules as well as dictionaries, so let's look at the related problem of patenting
grammar checking, for which dictionaries would be less significant, and rules
would predominate.
Adding grammar checking is presumably patentable, on the same grounds that
adding spell checking is asserted obviously to be patentable. I cannot imagine
that there is a distinction such that spell checking would be patentable, but
grammar checking would not.
Let's exclude the possibility of prior art, and assume that a patent issues for
grammar checking.
Would the first person to patent grammar checking who gave examples of a few
trivial grammar rules (e.g. all sentences start with capital letters and all
sentences end with one of a few special characters) then be able to exclude all
other grammar-checking programs with more sophisticated rules? I personally
think that this would be unacceptable, but claims of this magnitude have been
asserted.
Alternatively -- and still assuming that the first grammar checker is patentable
-- would separate patents issue for each rule of English grammar? I personally
think that this would perhaps be an even worse path to follow. Not even the
first inventor could produce a workable grammar checker without infringing on
other people's patents.
In either case -- yet again assuming that the first grammar checker is
patentable and is patented -- Would it then be a patent violation if one were
manually to apply a patented rule? This is no more far-fetched than the effort
to prevent physicians from applying medical principles first devised on a
patented basis.
If patenting grammar checking is unpalatable, how can one justify issuing a
patent for adding spell checking? (Incidentally, patented spell checking, just
like grammar checking, raises the specter of infringement by manual correction
of errors that parallels a patented computerized process.)
The lines are just too hard to draw, once one allows patenting adding any new
software to a computer system. What is the line between patentable and
unpatentable software?[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 12 2013 @ 10:38 AM EDT |
First of all, software is not patentable. Methods or processes are patentable.
However, not to be pedantic and to use your wording, we distinguish between
patentable and non patentable software by comparing the claimed invention to
what was publicly known prior to the filing of the patent application and
evaluating whether the claimed invention is new and not obvious.
This is a human, and worse then that, a government endeavor, carried out by the
lowest bidders, and therefore the results are imperfect. But that is the test.
Where it is flawed in the area of software, it is flawed equally in the area of
mouse traps, airplanes, light bulbs and radios.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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