Re:Abstract Ideas Don’t Deserve Patents
by sliverstorm on Sunday March 30, 2014 @01:30PM
(#7496979)
Is it fundamentally different from diagrams and drawings in mechanical patent apps? To me, the diagram (or source code) is just another way of describing the patent. Firstly to help better illustrate what it is for, secondly to show you have a working implementation.
A working implementation is, and never will be, a requirement got the grant of a patent. The figures show an example of one or several implementations of an idea, but have no baring in the defining the scope of the invention. There's no reason for parents related to software could not include source/pseudo code, it's just usually not very helpful.
If there is a different way of implementing it than described in the patent, did the patent owner really invent the other method?
Re:Abstract Ideas Don’t Deserve Patents
by jandrewrogers on Sunday March 30, 2014 @05:42PM
(#7498069)
Yes. If an algorithm requires a "sort" step you are not required to enumerate all possible implementations of a sorting operation because it is not material to the algorithm being described. It is sufficient that each operation is clearly specified; the novel arrangement of those myriad operations is the patentable subject matter. In the same way, novel chemical synthesis processes are eminently patentable but the individual synthesis steps are not in themselves novel and could be often be implemented in several different ways.
Most (all?) patentable subject matters work this way; the abstract process is patentable and the reduction to a specific implementation is protected by copyright because they are unrelated bodies of work. It is not uncommon, for example, to license a chemical process (read: algorithm) patent from one company and license a copyrighted implementation design from another company. Computer algorithm patents work the same way.
For example, in spatial indexing you can implement some widely used algorithms as either traversing the obvious space decomposition tree or doing lookups using projections onto higher dimensionality space-filling curves. The former is "obvious" but all good implementations use the latter code design because it is much more scalable in real systems even though the algorithms are equivalent.
Most algorithm patents with code go for "matches the high-level description of the algorithm" rather than "is an optimal representation of the algorithm given current computer science". That said, in my experience people are pretty good at reconstructing an algorithm implementation from patent descriptions that do not include code, assuming they have some domain expertise (i.e. in the above example, it should not be necessary to explain the representational equivalency of literal space decomposition and projections onto space-filling curves).