🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <873@nddsun1.sps.mot.com> waters@nddsun1.sps.mot.com (Mike Waters) writes:
>I remain to be convinced on the backing store and XOR patents. Certainly
>the concepts wern't well known in 1970 even though there was a lot of
>experimentation with graphics then.

The backing-store patent was applied for in 1982, according to some other
postings.  By then there were a number of fully-working window systems,
some using backing store.

>I don't know why the amount of effort it took you is relevant to whether
>or not the thing is a "law of nature". The test is "obviousness" which
>seems perfectly reasonable to me. If I add to "the store of human
>knowledge" then I deserve some reward for it. If the "invention" is
>something "useful" and you want to use it then you should expect to pay
>me to teach you.

The effort has nothing to do with whether it is a law of nature.  It has to
do with the underlying goal of the patent system.  Patents exist to
encourage invention and disclosure by giving the inventor exclusive rights
to the invention.  Underlying this is the belief that manufacturing the
device is expensive, so the inventor isn't likely to undertake this expense
without some hope of payback.  Software devices, on the other hand, are
relatively easy to build; you don't need lots of expensive factory
equipment, just a personal computer and a compiler.

>>Software is uniquely vulnerable because the patent office refuses to use
>>computer science people to assess the patentability of software patents,
>I assume that you have personal knowledge of this? 
>Sounds like the problem is easily fixable though, hire some CS types.

He didn't say that they don't have CS types, he said that they *refuse* to
hire CS types.  I don't have personal knowledge of it, but several articles
I've read on the subject of software patents have made this claim.
Apparently the USPTO doesn't consider this a problem.

>>Certainly they have no idea what can be derived by machine
>>simply by entering various general descriptions of a problem, as proved by
>>backing store and XORing cursors and such becoming patents.  
>
>I don't think that shows anything of the sort. It shows that the patents
>took a long time to issue and the ideas became widespread during that
>time. In hardware areas it is quite common to publish an article on a
>new idea at the same time as a patent is being filed.

This may be true for the XOR patent, but the backing store patent was
applied for in 1982, several years after the development of the MIT Lisp
Machine, which implements backing store in its window system.
--
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
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