Re: Attribution... Patents and Ideas

On Sun, 22 Jun 2003, Andrew <mylists[_at_]cool-mac.com> wrote:

>

I suggest that Plato's philosophy puts this discussion in the proper context. According to him, what we see are only imperfect images of more purer, higher forms.

As an example, the purest form could be this: To send a lot of information in the shortest time.

An imperfect image of that form could be this: To transmit as much data as possible over a network.

Then, the more imperfect image of that first imperfect image is this: To compress data before transmitting it over a network and uncompress the said compressed data at the end of line.

The third lower imperfect image can be any computer compression algorithm.

What the Supreme Court said (as indicated by the quotes in my previous message) is that you cannot patent the highest, purest form known as "abstract idea" or an "idea of itself".

The example of chemical formula that you used is actually an image of a higher level of idea. An idea could be to make things saltier. But, you cannot patent that idea. You need to show things that will make other things saltier, namely, chemicals.

Likewise, business methods are images of the higher ideas.

For each idea, there are different ways to embody it as seen by many different compression algorithms or different chemical formulae.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo[_at_]voicenet.com>
http://www.boycottcopyright.com

Number of days left until 1-1-2019 when all knowledge of 1923 in the land of the U.S.A. will be freed from their copyright owners' prisons: 5,668

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain. Received on Thu Jun 26 2003 - 23:42:39 GMT