The Supreme Court doesn't understand software

Post by interg12 » Fri, Jun 20, 2014, 11:15 PM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #10

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…

I see that it's a vox.com article. I'm betting it's a Timothy B Lee article. * checks * Yep, Timothy B Lee. He's the Rush Limbaugh of Hacker News, telling us exactly what we want to hear, and the incredibly bad things that are possible, where "possible" means "doesn't defy the laws of physics."

Post by shizzy0 » Sat, Jun 21, 2014, 12:07 AM UTC

scrumper wrote: post #4

> The problem is that "software" and "mathematical algorithm" are two terms for the same thing. The Knuth quotation in the article, used in support of this position, actually seems to invalidate it in my view. "Algorithms are exactly as basic to programmers as words are to writers." The key being words . The value in a piece of literature has little to do with the individual words it's made from, just as a piece of s…

Post by svachalek » Sat, Jun 21, 2014, 12:24 AM UTC

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…

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sat, Jun 21, 2014, 12:40 AM UTC

tempestn wrote: post #30

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 purpos…

Post by lotsofmangos » Sat, Jun 21, 2014, 12:50 AM UTC

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…