🚀 go-pugleaf

Terry Ritter:
    5. Selecting particular bad examples of patents is not
       particularly helpful because we would naturally be forced into
       examining only the *worst* of the patents, and never even find
       the rest.  We would "never see the forest for the trees."

This would seem to imply that there are examples of software patents
which are not "particularly bad".  It has yet to be established that
there are good software patents.  [Which is, I believe, the essence of
this subject thread.]

The one patent which the courts have upheld, and which is taken as a
precedent for software patents in general has to do with the
fabrication of rubber.  As it happens, fabrication of rubber is not a
process which a programmer can cause to occur on an unmodified general
purpose computer.

Also, considering the present "state of the art" for computer aided
manufactoring [numerically controlled machine tools use paper tape for
memory, and are considerably slower computers than a PC] it might
appear that any significant use of computers for manufactoring is
"non-obvious" [and thus patentable].  In other words, it might be
worthwhile to state that that rubber processing patent, while
innovative for the rubber industry, did not introduce any new
computer methodologies.  Then again, the rubber patent might be a
good one -- I haven't researched it.

    6. If particular patents *are* to be examined, then it is
       necessary to *examine* the *specific claims* of that patent (in
       the context of the body), rather than hand-waving generalities
       around.  A "casual" discussion of a patent is pretty much a
       waste of time.  Copies of the patent from the PTO would take a
       month or two.  So expect this to be tedious and contentious,
       and far less exciting than simply branding the patent as
       ridiculous.

And here I thought that these patents were supposed to be a "useful
tool" for the design of software.  Yet time from conception to
completion of a simple software project (which may infringe on
hundreds of patents) may be significantly less than the time to get
copies of a single patent from the PTO.  Golly gee, just think how
useful these patent abstracts are going to be.

-- 
Raul <rockwell@socrates.umd.edu>