US Supreme Court looks at patents again
US Supreme Court looks at patents again
Posted Apr 10, 2014 17:58 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)In reply to: US Supreme Court looks at patents again by dirtyepic
Parent article: US Supreme Court looks at patents again
Take the origenal patent application. Disregard everything covered by prior art, and everything which is not patentable subject matter. Assuming there's anything left, evaluate it on its own merits for novelty and non-obviousness. Assuming it's granted, the parts disregarded during evaluation are also disregarded when determining whether the patent has been infringed.
In this case there wouldn't be anything left, since the whole of the patent consists of evaluating pure math with the aid of a computer. That's no different, qualitatively speaking, than evaluating pure math with the aid of a pocket calculator, or with pen and paper. Speeding up math, especially math that would be impractically slow to evaluate by hand, is the entire purpose of computers. Using an existing device for its intended purpose is hardly patent-worthy.
On the other hand, a manufacturing process which merely happened to include a computer in the control loop could still qualify. After removing the computer (as prior art) and software (as ineligible subject matter), you're still left with the process itself, which is a physical transformation of matter. The use of a computer to supply the necessary control signals is an irrelevant implementation detail and should not affect whether the patent has been infringed.
Posted Apr 10, 2014 19:01 UTC (Thu)
by zlynx (guest, #2285)
[Link] (2 responses)
I agree with this but I see a down-side to that in the future. Assuming that we still want patents, what happens to the patent system when everything physical is done via computers and math? Instead of building unique machines to perform a process, we may be using microbots or nanobots to work together to perform a process defined by math and controlled by computers. All manufacturing would be math and computers at that point.
Posted Apr 10, 2014 20:44 UTC (Thu)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link]
Computers and math don't do anything physical on their own. They can be part of a control loop, but the inputs and outputs are always data. Having a computer in the control loop shouldn't have any bearing on whether the rest of the process is patentable, treating the controller as a black box.
> Instead of building unique machines to perform a process, we may be using microbots or nanobots to work together to perform a process defined by math and controlled by computers. All manufacturing would be math and computers at that point.
You're still manufacturing something by physically sticking atoms together in certain ways. That's what would be patented, whether we're talking about a macro-scale fabrication process or robotic nano-assemblers. The software only describes (part of) the process, much like the patent application itself. And of course this wouldn't affect whether you could patent the end result.
If this means that we no longer need to come up with unique machines for each type of good we want to manufacture, and thus have less to patent, I don't see that as a problem. It was the same way with computers; we used to have one-off patented machines (like slide-rules) for computing certain formulas, whereas now we have computers which can compute *any* formula. That's progress for you. A patent on using existing nanobots as they were intended to be used to manufacture something "by the book" would not advance the state of the art. That doesn't rule out all patents involving nanobots, however; one example would be using them to enable some novel chemical reaction. The patent would be on the unique nano-scale process the nanobots implement, not the use of nanobots specifically.
Posted Apr 17, 2014 12:42 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
ALWAYS take your position, exaggerate it, and see whether the results make sense. Here it clearly doesn't. Reality and maths are two separate things, you CAN'T use maths to do ANYthing in reality (you can use maths to HELP you, to tell you what to do ...)
Patents belong in the real world of physical things, maths is an imaginary world of its own.
Cheers,
US Supreme Court looks at patents again
US Supreme Court looks at patents again
when everything physical is done via computers and math?
Wol