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From: dricejb@drilex.UUCP (Craig Jackson drilex1)
Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss,comp.org.usenix
Subject: Re: How come include file patent isn't mentioned in position paper?
Message-ID: <27477@drilex.UUCP>
Date: 13 May 91 18:14:37 GMT
References: <NIX.91Apr29140634@valis.asd.sgi.com> <14730@ulysses.att.com> <27383@drilex.UUCP> <740@rufus.UUCP>
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In article <740@rufus.UUCP> drake@drake.almaden.ibm.com writes:
>In article <27383@drilex.UUCP> dricejb@drilex.UUCP (Me) writes:
>>                                   If somebody really comes up with a way
>>to do it in 10 lines of code, maybe they should get a 7-year patent on it or so.
>>However, if a large company merely throws programmer time at something
>>and implements something brute-force that should not be patentable.
>
>Hmm, I disagree with this on 2 levels.
>
>First, what you said seems to boil down to:
>
>	If I invest $20.00 in an idea, I should get fully exclusive 
>	use of it for 7 years.
>	If I invest $1,000,000 in an idea, I should get nothing in return.
>
>Come again?  

That is one possible interpretation.  My meaning was:

If I invest $20.00 in a really new idea, I should have the priviledge
of spending some more money to patent it, so as to get fully exclusive use
of it for 7 years.

If I invest $1,000,000 to do finally implement an idea that was thought of years
ago, that doesn't make it a new, patentable idea.

Example: A number of {people, governments} would love to have a way of
of factoring the product of large primes.  I've got an idea of how to do it:
you try each possible factor by division, until you reject all possible numbers.
This isn't a very good idea; it would take a lot of computing power to
use this idea on large primes.  It is also an idea that is taught in
every algebra textbook.  I hereby dedicate this idea to the public domain.

Now say that IBM develops (at presumably large expense) a general-purpose
computer that is 1,000,000 times faster than it has today.
Assume, for the moment, that this increase of speed makes my idea
feasible for a given set of candidates.  This fact, in and of itself,
should not be grounds for patenting trial-and-error as a method for
factoring large numbers.

>If what you really meant was that short, elegant algorithms should get
>preferential treatment over expensive, ugly ones, well, they do.  If I
>figure out an expensive way to do something, I can patent it.  If you
>then come out with an elegant and cheap way to do it, you can patent THAT.
>My guess is that your patent will be more in demand than mine.
>
>Second, I don't see how programmer time relates to whether something's
>patentable.  To get a patent I don't have to have a working (coded)
>system...just a new idea.

The emphasis here is should be on *new*.

The "obvious to one practiced in the art" should be a major exclusion.
Certainly, this argument is overused in the software patent controversy:
in software, like many other fields, new ideas seem obvious once they've
been thought up.  However, my point is that merely implementing something
that hasn't been implemented before does me that you've thought of something
that hasn't been thought of before.

>Sam Drake / IBM Almaden Research Center 
-- 
Craig Jackson
dricejb@drilex.dri.mgh.com
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