Supreme Court To Review Whether Business Models And Software Are Patentable
from the this-should-be-interesting dept
While not a huge surprise, it's worth noting that the Supreme Court has agreed to take the Bilski case, which has received plenty of attention. If you don't recall, last year, the appeals court tried to further define what was patentable when it came to things like business models and software -- which many had considered to be a wide open field for patenting since 1998 and the State Street ruling. Of course, there's been a lot of controversy (and plenty of confusion) over the Bilski ruling, with some insisting that it really wouldn't impact software and business method patents, and others arguing that it will help kill off many such patents. However, pretty much everyone expected that the Supreme Court (with its recent interest in patent law) would weigh in. So, now we get to go through this battle all over again. Expect a lot of different parties to weigh in on how the Supreme Court should rule. Back when all the amici briefs were filed for the Bilski case, I put up a detailed post about the arguments for and against software patents, and I imagine that what we're about to see will be even more heated. Hopefully, the Supreme Court doesn't make things worse.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: bilski, business method patents, business model patents, patents, software patents, supreme court
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Hope
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What is "software patent", punks ?
Freaking idiots are ruining this country
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Re: What is "software patent", punks ?
Something must be wrong with me...
I think I agree with you.
***I trolled with Angry Dude***
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"Software" patents
http://www.ipjur.com/01.php3
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Re: "Software" patents
I've worked in the software industry for 17 years and have never once seen a company spend any resources carefully considering the risk of patent infringement during the design phase. Is this guy from this planet? Does he recognize the speed that software development proceeds at? I can see it now: Me: Boss, I'm about to design a piece of software. I think I'll spend the next six weeks investigating thousands of patents that it could conceivably infringe upon before I start development. Boss: WTF are you talking about? Get it done in a week. I guess we're all 'negligent'.
I have, on the other hand, seen software companies spend lots of resources on creating patents on bogus terms to build up a war chest to use in case a competitor hit the company with an infringement claim. Then you respond with a counterclaim. Fun, highly productive work there.
I hate to break it to you, but good developers *always* try to reuse other people's ideas. Truly novel solutions that are also *necessary* are very rare in the industry. Bad programmers develop novel solutions when there are existing, well thought out, tried and true solutions out there. These types of solutions are what leads to overcomplicated, poor quality software. This is a big reason why OSS is so valuable to software developers today.
Too funny.
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Re: Re: "Software" patents
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Re: Re: "Software" patents
Open Source is the way to go. We all help each other.
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Re: Re: "Software" patents
Patents are for inventions, like RSA encryption
Code monkeys like you just need copyrights
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Re: Re: What is "software patent", punks ?
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Re: Re: "Software" patents
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Re: Re: "Software" patents
Breathing. You're not allowed to do that, someone else already thought of that. Walking? That's patented too. Were practically reaching the point where almost everything we do is someone elses intellectual property. It's ridiculous and things were advancing just fine before intellectual property started interfering with every aspect of our lives. The more intellectual property interferes with our lives, the less advancement occurs.
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So if I independently come up with an idea and someone else coincidentally has a patent on that idea then I'm not allowed to advance that idea. How does this advance innovation? It only hinders it. Practically every thinkable idea is someone elses intellectual property. This only harms innovation.
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Re: Re: "Software" patents
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WTF?!? So because the PERL interpreter doesn't compile C++ that makes software patentable?
As for this part: "The run-time behaviour of a certain computer program cannot be deduced from its text ("code") alone." Only if you're doing things really wrong. The whole point of good readable code is that you can read the code to know what happens.
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Re: Re: "Software" patents
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Re: Re: Re: What is "software patent", punks ?
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Re: Re: Re: "Software" patents
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Re: Re: Re: "Software" patents
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Re: Re: Re: "Software" patents
Maybe you're right, none of these places deserve patents because they're staffed by code monkeys. These are software applications written to solve business problems. The business solution needs to be innovative, but the software itself rarely needs to be, and probably shouldn't be in most cases.
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Simple answer for this issue
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Clueless techdirt punks as usual
What if I implement my "software patent" in FPGA or betetr yet as an ASIC design ?
Is ASIC software ? Certanly not, it is hardware
So if you want to leave silicon hardware patentable but make software that runs on it unpatentable you are creating a huge conceptual problem without solution
It's just not doable - there is no clear line between software and hardware implementation
The only solution would be to make all silicon hardware unpatentable but it's not gonna happen, my dear little patentless punky friends
Have a nice night, fellas
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Maybe it is Angry Dude who is Clueless.
As for ASIC's the persistent problem of ASIC's is that they are not reprogrammable. If Angry Dude makes a coding error, and defective parts ship, his company will probably not be able to afford to make good on them. The company will probably "stonewall" and eventually go bankrupt. Intel had the assets to ride out things like the Pentium Math Bug, but Intel is a real semiconductor manufacturer, not one of these "fabless" impersonations. It is notable that the leadership of Intel, people like Andy Grove, has traditionally come from the "process" side, not the circuit design side. Even if you look back to Marcian "Ted "Hoff and the first microprocessor, that was an exercise in getting Intel out of the applications design business.
The whole virtue of FPGA's is that, between a FPGA and a conventional processor, there are very few things which still have to be done in hardware. That is probably what Angry Dude is so upset about.
For a real chipmaker, as distinct from these ersatz "fabless" operations, Open Source and Open Standards are a good idea. They lower the cost of development, and encourage the development of new applications, which means that the chipmaker can sell more chips.
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Re: Clueless techdirt punks as usual
Similarly, you do not patent a book - you can patent how you make a book. Cut the pages, bind them together, etc. And you do not patent the words within the book. That is what copyright is for. It may be a bad analogy, but its all I got this morning.
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I know this is going to sound strange . . .
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Re: Maybe it is Angry Dude who is Clueless.
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Re: Maybe it is Angry Dude who is Clueless.
Shilling for andy pandy grove and co. ?
Why do you hate fabless semiconductor companies so much ???
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Maybe it is Angry Dude who is Clueless.
I'm a historian, and I used to be an anthropologist, and I'm a philosopher of sorts by family osmosis, and an engineer and programmer besides. Before 9/11 and the advent of the internet, I was clearly an academic scholar-- now, things have changed so much, and I'm not quite sure.
I don't work for Intel-- or any other semiconductor company. It is just that I prefer to buy a computer which can be programmed to do anything, rather than an electronic device which is locked down to only do certain things. You seem to be going in the opposite direction.
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Re: Maybe it is Angry Dude who is Clueless.
I don't care
I, as well as everybody else who has a stake in this game, will go in any direction which will allow me to get paid for my patented invention
Whether it's gonna be a programmable DSP chip or ASIC is anyones guess: ask our Supremes - they seem to know everything about programmable DSPs as well as FPGAs and ASICs
Have a nice night
"The fate of all mankind I see is in the hands of fools"
King Crimson
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Maybe it is Angry Dude who is Clueless.
Here is a rather brutal fact. My year of maximum computer expenditure in absolute dollars was 1989, and in inflation-adjusted dollars, it was 1985. Since then, computers have gotten cheaper, faster than I could find new uses. I am writing this on my old computer, my legacy computer, my "don't-fix-it-if-it-isn't-broken" computer, which I would estimate has a fair market value of fifty dollars, exclusive of the screen. Word processing and websurfing are not high-data-rate applications. The new computer is for experimenting with things, starting with Linux. I've got Blender on the new computer, but Blender is extremely complicated to learn, and I haven't been able to find the time to really _study_ it, and memorize a couple of hundred different keycodes. I was ahead of the vast majority of the population, but they will catch up, and reach their own level of computer saturation.
The Supreme Court knows who George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628), was, and, apparently, you do not. He was an approximate contemporary of Michael Romanov, if that puts him in your framework. As the prime minister of England, Buckingham induced the king to grant all kinds of monopolies on the making of common articles to Buckingham and his friends. The first English patent law was a response to Buckingham's abuses. The evolved consensus of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence is that special legal privileges should not be granted if there is a reasonable alternative, and that, the broader the legal privilege, the more caution is indicated. You are arguing against four hundred years of constitutional history. Those four hundred years represent the difference between America and Russia. The Justices of the Supreme Court cannot ignore the reality of Open-Source Software, of the fact that very large numbers of people are writing programs and giving them away. There is also an "Open Cores" movement, building up a corpus of Verilog code, development tools, etc. You may say that these are not very good at present, but of course they will get better, just as Open Source Software grew from modest beginnings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Villiers,_1st_Duke_of_Buckingham
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Re: Maybe it is Angry Dude who is Clueless.
You are worse than I thought, dude
So many words, so little sense...
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Re: Re: Re: "Software" patents
You have no way of quantifying that or proving that without simple anecdotal evidence. It's just worthless conjecture.
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