Posted on 06/02/2009 11:42:22 PM PDT by Swordmaker
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide what sorts of business methods might be patented, an issue with the potential to reshape significant parts of the economy.
“This is the most important patent case in 50 years, in particular because there is so much damage and so much good the court could do,” said John F. Duffy, a law professor at George Washington University who submitted a brief in the appeals court in support of neither side.
“The newest areas of technology are most threatened by the issues at stake here,” Professor Duffy said. “The court taking this is likely to make a lot of people nervous, including software manufacturers and biotechnology companies.”
In October, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington significantly narrowed the processes eligible for patent protection, ruling that only those “tied to a particular machine or apparatus” or transforming “a particular article into a different state or thing” qualified.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“...ruling that only those “tied to a particular machine or apparatus” or transforming “a particular article into a different state or thing” qualified.”
ACORN ®
The idea of patenting business methods is idiotic.
So are software patents.
Many believe that prior to this appeals court decision the scope of patentability was much too wide, fundamentally covering any use of any general purpose computer to automate any business logic or calculation that could also be done manually. The forefathers, could they have foreseen this, would definitely have wanted that the computer should be patented, but once it fell out of patent, would have wanted that every manual act in the public domain which could be computerized should fall out of patent too.
Because software engineering requires no innovative creativity, and even if it did the expression of that innovation is in procedural code, so it doesn't count.
Right?
Article 1 Section 8The Congress shall have power . . .To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
The initial question would seem to be whether a business plan is a "science" or a "useful art" in the meaning of those terms as intended. Anything which facilitates commerce is a useful art, but you can't patent "money" or "auctions" if for no other reason than they go back to time immemorial. What kinds of things are we talking about?
With their "invention," you buy electronic "tokens" on line from a company which sells products or services—the company retains your tokens in virtual form on their records. You can then use the virtual tokens credited to your account to buy their merchandise in future transactions without using cash, check or credit card at time of sale. This somehow facilitates these future sales.
My lodge dinners cannot sell liquor since they don't have a liquor license... so they sell "drink tokens' which are exchangeable for drinks. For convenience purposes, so that the "bar tender" doesn't have to make change and keep cash, they use a different colored token for soft drinks. It is merely a different form a specie. Almost every non-profit uses this form of "sale" in some form or another when they want to sell something that is problematic at one of these dinners. This is what this bozo company claims to have invented for use on the internet. Buy tokens instead of product, exchange tokens for product.
Apple sued over methods for repeat iTunes, App Store sales
There are over a dozen additional defendants including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart...
And frankly, I make my living writing the stuff. Imagine a patent on a do loop? Uh, programming would have ended before it began. Lame and stupid.
>Patent #4,197,590 covers the concept of an "XOR cursor". In the early days of windowing systems (especially with bitonal displays), it was common to represent your cursor as a small bitonal bitmap. When you want to display the cursor, you exclusive-or (XOR) it into the pixels of the desktop. This insures that the cursor is always visible: the cursor is black on white, or white on black. And when you wish to hide or move the cursor, you XOR it again, and the original image is restored. Fairly obvious. But if you write the code, you are in violation of patent #4,197,590.This has also been interpreted to include using Exlusive-Or (XOR) to invert any text character for highlighting purposes, such as marking text for deletion, copying, or moving. It's patented. Gee... wasn't that the technique used on most monochrome computer monitors to highlight text?
Quite fortunately, nobody would trust such a closely held encryption system.
AbstractIf you use your laser pointer to play with your cat, you are infringing this Patent Granted on August 22, 1995. I was playing with my cats with a laser pointer at least five years before this patent was applied for... talk about prior art.
A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.
Then, there's this 2002 Patent: No: 6368227 "Method of Swinging on a Swing," which must have been issued by a patent examiner who never had kids or was a kid or never sat on a swing...
Abstract
A method of swing on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other.
The US patent system is in need of changing.
I second that! I would like to add that patents on things found in nature are also idiotic. (e.g. gene/DNA patents, etc)
I would also point out that a patent was issued for RSA encryption (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA) that is widely used in the market place so history has shown that your straw man argument is false.
Perhaps you would care to address the originally proposed question - If someone invents a new means of encryption (implemented in software), should that receive the same protection as a person who invents a 100 MPG carburetor.
And a generous license had to be issued for research application of RSA; as it stands patent law is marvelously evenhanded in forbidding both commercial and research uses.
The popular fate of a would-be patented item is, quite contrary to your assertion and quite consonantly with the Constitution, fundamentally essential to patenting. If progress bogs down, then the system is working against its own raison d’tre.
I have filed several patent applications and have been awarded a couple as well. Never in any of my dealings with the patent lawyers who were writing up the formal discription and filing the application with the patent office did I ever see a consideration as to the overall economic viability of the invention.
Perhaps you can educate me as to the form number and question required by the patent office that addresses the market success of the proposed invention?
Perhaps this is new policy? I seem to recall that there are literaly THOUSANDS of patents for physical devices that never showed a single dollar of profit.
But this does not address the original question of “software” vs “hardware” patents. There are those that believe that software should not be patented. To those individuals, I ask a simple question. “If a person invents a new encryption method (done in software) should that invention receive the same protections as a person who invents a 100 mpg carburator?” Most who oppose software patents have a hard time answering that question.
The behavior of the whole, outlyers notwithstanding, is at the Constitutional heart of the matter.
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