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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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You've all gone totally mad... except for jbb | 393 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Nope - we haven't gone mad
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, July 11 2013 @ 09:31 AM EDT

A lot of us including myself still believe software - via a reasonable reading of the Law - is not patentable subject matter.

However, the reality is that the patent does exist and the conversation is in the context of how a patent claim construction at trial could differentiate between a patent claim construction which the USPTO accepted in order to validate the patent claim.

To reiterate: Software Patents Simply Should Not Exist and so Apple's "rubber-banding patent" should never have been issued in the first place.

If Samsung were to focus on that - instead of the actual application of Law - then they'd be sticking their heads in the sand and would automatically loose fully. They might as well pay the Billion and be done with it.

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

You've all gone totally mad... except for jbb
Authored by: PolR on Thursday, July 11 2013 @ 12:49 PM EDT
This is a good point. I think it touches on a more fundamental issue.

Computers don't have instructions for totaling counts of apples. They have
instructions to add numbers. They don't care whether the numbers are counts of
apples or counts of peppercorns.

When a computer has "instructions for displaying a first portion of an
electronic document" this is done by an algorithm working on raw numbers
and boolean values.

Patents are full of language refering to what the bits mean, in terms of how the
data must be interpreted. They use this to describe the software functions, but
also the algorithms by means of flow chart etc. Patent law rely of this notion
that the algorithm describe the "individualized circuitry" the Federal
Circuit imagine is made by programming a computer.

But when programmers implement the algorithm, they must strip the data from this
meaning and transform the data into the underlying numerical and boolean values.
The algorithm that is actually implemented doesn't depend on the meaning of the
data. So even one someone works from the "individualized circuitry"
theory, he still doesn't have a description of the circuit structure.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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