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I can't speak to the patentability of the rest of the process... | 709 comments | Create New Account

Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.

I can't speak to the patentability of the rest of the process...

Authored by: Wol on Saturday, May 11 2013 @ 10:14 AM EDT

Which is why I believe the ruling explicitly says that "the software falls
within the prior art". It's the machine as a whole which is patentable.

And, thinking about it, I believe that's right. Let's go to someone else's plane
example, where all of a sudden we have computers powerful enough to "fly by
wire" and our fighter aircraft can suddenly be unstable (ie highly
manoevrable) and still flyable. The software is a *necessary* part of a *new*
*machine* that couldn't be built before.

So you can get a patent on your new unstable aircraft, that will list the
software as a necessary component of the design. But that component is not
itself patentable, despite the aircraft (and to some extent the idea of a
computer-controlled aircraft) being patentable.

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

So what happens when somebody else ... - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, May 12 2013 @ 01:26 AM EDT
- So what happens when somebody else ... - Authored by: ThrPilgrim on Tuesday, May 14 2013 @ 08:39 AM EDT
Central heating feedback - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 13 2013 @ 09:45 AM EDT

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