On Friday 07 November 2008 18:13, Venkatesh Hariharan wrote:
On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 5:54 PM, Arun Khan knura@yahoo.com wrote:
On Friday 07 Nov 2008, jtd wrote:
http://www.pli.edu/patentcenter/blog.asp?view=plink&id=368 http://www.pli.edu/patentcenter/blog.asp?view=plink&id=371
Software patents are no more in the USA, even if linked to general purpose hardware. Probably even those linked to special purpose hardware.
Seen a similar posting on another LUG list. This is good news.
JTD, one clarification. The Bilski ruling pertains to Business Method Patents and not software patents (don't ask me what the difference is, I am not a lawyer, nor a judge :-) This ruling merely said that pure business methods, untethered to hardware cannot be patented.It did not clarify whether merely adding the business method to a general purpose computer renders it patentable. For more on this, check out Groklaw:
True. Which is why i posted the other links. The lawyer who wrote that piece is one who is defending clients patents (afaik). Business methods completely fails the patent obviousness test. But software too fails this test, once you seperate the hardware and software and reimplement one or both of them. In the case of PCs (because of it's standard interfaces) this is trivial. In the case of other hardware (custom FPGA / controller + software) it gets only a little more complex. The complexity is not in breaking down the bundle but making clueless law types understand the irrelevance of the bundle used in subversion of patent law. To the courts it seems that bundling trivial hardware and software amounts to inventiveness. My understanding is that the current ruling, even if we accept the inventiveness, would force such patents to be restricted to this and only this particular combo of hardware and software. Any reimplementation as i have pointed above, would make the patent holder unable to defend as it would then fail it's own inventiveness. Other than under the table deals by clueless companies, I see litigation as digging the patent holders grave, making it useless.