🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <38007@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck) writes:

>Algorithms have a tendency to be rediscovered independently when the time
>is right for them.  My field is digital signal processing.  Imagine what
>a horrible world we'd live in if AT&T held a monopoly on the use of the
>Fast Fourier Transform.

Well, I dabble in digital signal processing also and I thing there are a few
things wrong with your position here.

1)  There was prior art for the Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm, so AT&T
    could not have patented it.

2)  Had the FFT been patented, there would have been a lot more
    investment in the whole field of fast transforms.  As it stands, it
    took another 20 years for new fast orthogonal transforms to be discovered.
    In the intervening time, people just copied the same algorithm over and
    over again.

3)  AT&T has patents on UNIX and that has not prevented its widespread
    adoption and it may have even encouraged it.

4)  Had the original inventor of the FFT obtained a patent, then his invention
    would not have languished in obscurity for so long.

>  For some reason, the authors published the paper
>anyway, despite the vast commercial and industrial use of this algorithm.

There are a lot of DSP algorithms which are currently being kept very
secret.  Companies which depend on the competitive advantage that these
proprietary techniques give them are keeping them trade secrets because
they don't believe that patents are yet a secure enough protection.

>Had Cooley and Tukey not published, the algorithm would have been
>independently rediscovered soon later; it exists in the properties of
>the transform itself, it was not a creation of Cooley and Tukey.

This is perhaps true for any invention.  But how long would it be before
the next rediscovery?  And who'd invest in the invention if there's no
patent on it?

>If you discover an algorithm and hide it, others in your field will
>discover it a year later.

There's simply no evidence for this.  Simultaneous discovery does occur,
but it's just not that common.  The existence of trade secrets is another
reason to believe that your statement is simply false.

>  That's because algorithms, for the most part,
>are discovered rather than invented.  This distinction was established
>in law by the founders of the country (you can't patent mathematical
>relationships or laws of nature)

This is clearly nonsense.  Patents weren't even invented in the US.

> and algorithms more closely resemble
>these than they do, say, the invention of the phonograph.  It was on this
>basis that patenting algorithms was long held illegal.

What?  The phonograph is just a cantillevered mass system coupled with a
rotary resonance.  That's just a mathematical formula than an invention to me.

			Bruce Karsh
			karsh@sgi.com