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Police raid not about software patentsPolice raid not about software patentsPosted Mar 14, 2008 0:38 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)In reply to: Police raid not about software patents by wookey Parent article: Some topics related to MP3 players
I've always hated the term "software patent," because hardware vs software has little to do with patents. (In fact, I find about 90% of the use of the terms "hardware" and "software" in general are in sentences that aren't really about hardware and software). "Software patent" is usually used to refer to a patent on an invention which would typically be implemented with software. It doesn't matter if that software is integrated into a physical device which is the unit of distribution. The distinction between this and other kinds of inventions seems to be mostly related to the relatively cheap engineering process that creates the invention. I believe this is the first time I've seen someone refer to the software patent issue as stuart_hc does: the idea of patent rights covering the distribution of an invention via information transmission as opposed to movement of matter.
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Police raid not about software patents Posted Mar 14, 2008 1:12 UTC (Fri) by stuart_hc (guest, #9737) [Link] I believe this is the first time I've seen someone refer to the software patent issue as stuart_hc does: the idea of patent rights covering the distribution of an invention via information transmission as opposed to movement of matter.Personally I see no difference between an algorithm implemented in a general purpose programming language and the same algorithm burnt into a custom chip. Having spoken to patent examiners from a the UK patent office it is clear that they do see a difference. They will not grant a patent on an algorithm (unlike in the US) but they will grant a patent on a device which uses that algorithm for a particular area of industry e.g. video compression. When I asked whether I could distribute video compression software which implemented a heavily patented video compression codec, they grudgingly admitted that I could. But if I distributed a physical device, even a general purpose computer with the software installed, I would be infringing the patents. See this article for more detail on how European courts deal with software patents for two actual court cases.
Police raid not about software patents Posted Mar 14, 2008 18:45 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] I'm way out of my area of expertise, but from the articles about UK software patenting, it sounds to me like the same rule that you can't patent a computer program would apply to a physical device that runs (and is packaged with) the program. I.e. if there's nothing novel about the CPU and the only thing invented was a new sequence of instructions for it to execute, it falls under the computer program exclusion. I also notice that the articles distinguish UK from Europe, so at least under that terminology, I shouldn't consider these cases to be examples of how "European" courts deal with software patents.
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