🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991May19.200750.25020@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> gsh7w@astsun9.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Hennessy) writes:

   Michael H. Riddle writes:
   #Excuse me?  I thought that was the whole idea behind a patent.  To reward
   #the inventor.

   Not in the United Stated at least. The purpose of a patent is to
   benifit society, by encouraging inventors to publish their inventions.
   Without patents, inventors would keep the details of what they do
   secret. The inventor is given a monopoly for a certain period of time
   to provide encouragement to release the details of their invention.

Agreed.  Which is why I don't think any interface, per se, should be
patentable, i.e. any interface where the existence of the interface in a
product by definition means it is "published".

If Hayes had packaged their modems together with software to run them and
had NOT publised their command set or interface, and had used their silly
timing technique, then on that basis alone, I would say it might be
patentable (of course, use of the same timing technique prior to Hayes
"invention" of it is still a valid reason for it to not be patentable).

But as soon as they said "here's our modem's interface" and expected people
or other people's software to deal with it, that should inherently make it
unpatentable, because it placed that interface into a class of "inventions"
that was it was never the purpose of our patent system to protect.
--

James Craig Burley, Software Craftsperson    burley@gnu.ai.mit.edu