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The Supreme Court doesn't understand software

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Re: The Supreme Court doesn't understand software

#21

Post by adestefan »

magicalist wrote: post #17
phkahler wrote: post #9

I was with him until: "The idea behind patents is to create a financial incentive to promote innovation: patents ensure that the inventor of a new idea can get compensated for it, rather than seeing her idea immediately ripped off by copycats." The purpose of patents had nothing to do with compensation. It was already presumed that an inventor could sell an invention. The real purpose was to promote disclosure of how…

No, the constitution is quite clear on this point: 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. It's clear from the historical record that this was about ensuring monetary compensation for invention, as knock-off devices were just as common then as they are now. In fact, public access to pat…

Did you just decide to blatantly ignore the first 6 words of your quote?

Re: The Supreme Court doesn't understand software

#22

Post by anigbrowl »

The problem is that "software" and "mathematical algorithm" are two terms for the same thing.

No they're not, at all. Software, as the name implies, is a commodity, which typically includes textual and graphical elements for human interaction and which interacts with multiple different mechanical and electronic subsystems. You might as well argue that mechanisms involving gears are not patentable because their behavior is expressible as a set of mathematical ratios. I'm certainly not in favor of all software patents or even software patents in general, but this notion that program = mathematical algorithm needs to die off.

Some hackers are always going on about how the judiciary fails to understand software, while assuming erroneously that they themselves have a perfect understanding of law.

Re: The Supreme Court doesn't understand software

#23

Post by harshreality »

rayiner wrote: post #20
btreecat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now the court has to decided about how complex said algo is and weather or not it is simple enough to not deserve a patent. Basic Lossless compression can function like this: Imagine a string of 1's and 0's e.g. 10010000011000101111001 This string can be trivially compressed in a losses manor using this algo, every time the bit changes to a one or zeor, record the previous run of bits. So we would compress this st…

At what point do you go from fundamental electronic gates to a Snapdragon CPU? The line drawing involved isn't unique to software. But life is full of line drawing. There's a good argument to be made that the cost of the line drawing exceeds the benefits. I don't think it does, generally, but maybe it does for software. That said, I think you should make some money if you invent LZW. I don't like the idea of an econo…

Snapdragon is a flawed example. No one person or organization goes from gates to a Snapdragon CPU. It took a large community many decades to do that. But that's a side point.

I think the second example provides a great illustration of the divide between software patent proponents and detractors. Some people think a thing like LZW should be patentable, because they imagine inventing something on that scale of ingenuity and want to be able to make money off of it. Other people, in the scope of a larger project, usually, come up with things on the scale of ingenuity of LZW compression and are exasperated to discover that someone else patented it a few years prior and wants prohibitively large licensing fees, rendering the technology unusable; they don't think such things should be patentable because from their perspective it reduces innovation.

Re: The Supreme Court doesn't understand software

#24

Post by schoen »

btreecat wrote: post #15
rayiner wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key phrase in your comment is: "an abstract idea, it seems to me." The phrase "abstract idea" is, in this context, a legal term of art. It means what the Supreme Court wants it to mean. If you look at CLS Bank v. Alice, the Court concludes that intermediated settlement is an abstract idea because it is "a fundamental economic principle." So to use your example, data compression (replacing frequently-repeated sequ…

So now the court has to decided about how complex said algo is and weather or not it is simple enough to not deserve a patent. Basic Lossless compression can function like this: Imagine a string of 1's and 0's e.g. 10010000011000101111001 This string can be trivially compressed in a losses manor using this algo, every time the bit changes to a one or zeor, record the previous run of bits. So we would compress this st…

I think you've confused copyrights and patents; the document you linked to is from the U.S. Copyright Office and refers to the copyrightability of game rules (not their patentability).

I've often heard the claim that game rules are uncopyrightable but that they might possibly be patentable.

Re: The Supreme Court doesn't understand software

#25

Post by kahirsch »

adestefan wrote: post #21
magicalist wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the constitution is quite clear on this point: 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. It's clear from the historical record that this was about ensuring monetary compensation for invention, as knock-off devices were just as common then as they are now. In fact, public access to pat…

Did you just decide to blatantly ignore the first 6 words of your quote?

I think the sentence is pretty clear. It's using a limited-time monopoly in order to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. There is nothing here about promoting "disclosure of how to make things". That notion doesn't even make sense when it comes to "authors".

What historical evidence is there that the "real purpose was to promote disclosure of how to make things"?

Re: The Supreme Court doesn't understand software

#26

Post by Yen »

magicalist wrote: post #17
phkahler wrote: post #9

I was with him until: "The idea behind patents is to create a financial incentive to promote innovation: patents ensure that the inventor of a new idea can get compensated for it, rather than seeing her idea immediately ripped off by copycats." The purpose of patents had nothing to do with compensation. It was already presumed that an inventor could sell an invention. The real purpose was to promote disclosure of how…

No, the constitution is quite clear on this point: 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. It's clear from the historical record that this was about ensuring monetary compensation for invention, as knock-off devices were just as common then as they are now. In fact, public access to pat…

That exact quote disagrees with you and agrees with the parent comment, though.

The purpose is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". This is achieved by "securing for limited Times..the exclusive Right".

Monopoly and financial compensation are not the aim of constitutional patent law, merely the means to an end.

Knock-off devices were common then as they are now, and in the absence of patent law, the best protection for so-called intellectual property is to just keep it secret. This, of course, has a negative impact on society, as research effort gets duplicated, and the state of the art advances more slowly than it otherwise could.

So, the balance is - share with the world the details of making your invention (i.e., progress the science or useful art), and in exchange, we'll guarantee that your openness doesn't bite you by aiding your competitors (we'll give you a time-limited exclusive right).

Re: The Supreme Court doesn't understand software

#27

Post by Yen »

kahirsch wrote: post #25
adestefan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you just decide to blatantly ignore the first 6 words of your quote?

I think the sentence is pretty clear. It's using a limited-time monopoly in order to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. There is nothing here about promoting "disclosure of how to make things". That notion doesn't even make sense when it comes to "authors". What historical evidence is there that the "real purpose was to promote disclosure of how to make things"?

What exactly is the state of the Sciences and Useful Arts, except the accumulated knowledge of how things work, and how things are made?

Re: The Supreme Court doesn't understand software

#28

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #6

The author misses the gist of the Supreme Court's opinion in CLS Bank v. Alice: > In Thursday's ruling, the court rejected a patent that claimed the concept of using a computer to hedge against "counterparty risk" — the risk of making a bargain and then having the other guy not pay up. The Supreme Court complained that in the process described in the patent, "each step does no more than require a generic computer to…

[deleted]

Re: The Supreme Court doesn't understand software

#29

Post by techaeon »

btreecat wrote: post #15
rayiner wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key phrase in your comment is: "an abstract idea, it seems to me." The phrase "abstract idea" is, in this context, a legal term of art. It means what the Supreme Court wants it to mean. If you look at CLS Bank v. Alice, the Court concludes that intermediated settlement is an abstract idea because it is "a fundamental economic principle." So to use your example, data compression (replacing frequently-repeated sequ…

So now the court has to decided about how complex said algo is and weather or not it is simple enough to not deserve a patent. Basic Lossless compression can function like this: Imagine a string of 1's and 0's e.g. 10010000011000101111001 This string can be trivially compressed in a losses manor using this algo, every time the bit changes to a one or zeor, record the previous run of bits. So we would compress this st…

Sorry but I think your premise is flawed here. You can patent rules for board games (http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2011/12/22/patenting-board-games-1...) afterall they're just processes. It's copyright (which you linked to) which precludes getting protection over game rules.

Re: The Supreme Court doesn't understand software

#30

Post by tempestn »

While I'm not a fan of most software patents, I don't agree with this statement, except in the most pedantic sense: 'The problem is that "software" and "mathematical algorithm" are two terms for the same thing.'

You could say that anything at its root is simply a mathematical algorithm. These days it is possible to do a great many specialized tasks with either dedicated hardware, or software running on general purpose hardware. Should you be able to patent an asic design, but not a piece of software that does exactly the same job? Should incredibly complex and novel pieces of software not be eligible for patents simply because they're made out of 1s and 0s instead of nuts and bolts? Doesn't make sense to me.

What does make sense to me is to reform the entire patent system, in many cases drastically increasing the threshold for what is considered novel and non-obvious, and decreasing - again sometimes drastically - the time periods of monopolies offered. I don't, however, believe that this is solely an issue of software vs. not-software.

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