Re: what does a patent restrict?

On Fri, 08 Oct 1999, Bruce E. Hayden <bhayden[_at_]ieee.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Lynn Winebarger <owinebar[_at_]free-expression.org> wrote:
> >
> > The truth is exactly what I wrote. Software is a written
> > description of an algorithm(s), generally designed so that a machine
> > will be able to follow it. (Don't know of any cases where descriptions
> > that machines can't follow are considered software, but I wouldn't rule
> > it out).
>
> But such would be much less likely patentable, though I suspect
> that their protection under copyright would not suffer that much.

They might be unpatentable on a utility theory. I can see an amusing body of law analogous to the treatment of inventions directed to perpetual motion machines:

A method of analyzing computer programs, comprising the steps of:

     obtaining a representation of a computer program;

     optaining a representation of a dataset;

     determining whether a given computer processing the computer 
     program with the dataset as input would eventually terminate; and

     storing the result.

While I suppose someday someone may build a machine with an oracle for a first-order turing machine, the PTO would probably adopt the practice of requiring the person to "demonstrate that the program works," as a precondition of issuing the patent.

Andrew C. Greenberg
<werdna[_at_]gate.net> Received on Wed Oct 13 1999 - 12:41:06 GMT