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FSF says: USPTO should publish guidelines excluding software patentsFSF says: USPTO should publish guidelines excluding software patentsPosted Sep 28, 2010 14:42 UTC (Tue) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270)In reply to: FSF says: USPTO should publish guidelines excluding software patents by bojan Parent article: FSF says: USPTO should publish guidelines excluding software patents
Well, IANAL as noted. The formula is clearly in the patent, but the question is what a court would find to be an infringement of the patent (whether the formula is statutory or informative). If you used the mathematical formula from the patent in a non-communications context (say for storing files), I'm not sure that use would violate that particular patent (which covers a communication system). Of course, they may have other patents covering other uses.
On the other hand, they're not describing just the algorithm, they're describing a process implementing that algorithm, so perhaps the scope is broader.
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FSF says: USPTO should publish guidelines excluding software patents Posted Sep 29, 2010 1:55 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
> On the other hand, they're not describing just the algorithm, they're describing a process implementing that algorithm, so perhaps the scope is broader.
Yeah, that's how they disguise the fact that they are patenting maths. The point is that without that piece of maths, that patent is worthless. Even if just one implementation of a piece of maths is being patented, it's still patenting maths.
If you watch that video from here http://patentabsurdity.com/, you'll see exactly the same thing being done with eHarmony patent.
This is precisely what software does. It is an application of some algorithm (maths) on a particular problem. And we happily give people monopolies for that. Wonderful.
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