[hcarvalhoalves]

Regarding patents, people always complain a particular patent couldn't have been granted because it's not novel enough, anyone could have thought it, or that it's math.

Patent law is a black-on-white subject, either you support it or not. It's impossible to grant some patents under subjective premises and be fair at the same time.

[rayiner]

Patent law is not a black-and-white subject, and you certainly don't have to support all of it to support some of it. All law necessarily involves line drawing, and line drawing is subjective. Welcome to the wonderful world of being human and dealing with human society.

[jlgreco]

> It's impossible to grant some patents under subjective premises and be fair at the same time.

Is that not the job of patent examiners?

[hcarvalhoalves]

Blaming it on the examiner is not the point.

The idea behind patents is protecting the innovator. How does patent law protect anyone when it's trivial to argue a patent shouldn't have been granted in the first place (because it's not novel, or it's just math, blah blah)? You could say that about all patents ever filled.

It defeats the whole purpose behind patents. Whoever has the biggest patent pool and deepest pocket wins, not the little guy on the sweatshop. The only people to benefit from patents are lawyers.

[munchbunny]

Be careful. The idea behind patents and IP law in general isn't protecting the innovator. It's incentivizing the innovator to advance society through new ideas. The subtle difference is that, when society no longer benefits from protecting the "innovator", that person shouldn't get protection from IP law.

Unfortunately, IP law today is a perversion of this original principle.

[jlgreco]

I am not "blaming" anything on patent examiners. I am saying that they exist for their ability to interpret and decide. Were patent law black and white as you suggest, they would have no purpose.

[wheaties]

As others have said, it is not black and white. You can support patents on "things" and not patents on "ideas." There's a big difference.

I can tell you mathematically how a windmill grinds corn but that does not make my description into a windmill. On the other hand, laying down the mathematical description of a Judy Array IS the array itself!

[hexagonc]

Well, I'm against software patents pretty much as much as anyone here, as you can verify from my comment history, but describing the mathematics of an array isn't the same as the array itself. The patent isn't violated until you start executing that mathematics of a Judy Array on a running computer. Otherwise, you could violate a patent by just talking about it.

[hcarvalhoalves]

You're saying the description of how a windmill works is not a description of a windmill, while the description of how the array works is a array.

How is that true? Isn't a description a model [1], never the thing itself?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_model