Right. Drama and prose are the same. Law and Science are the same. [LWN.net]

Right. Drama and prose are the same. Law and Science are the same.

Posted Jan 20, 2012 17:42 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Hardware vs software by giraffedata
Parent article: LCA: Addressing the failure of open source

And all of that applies equally (except in degree) to one-click web ordering and to ibuprofen.

You may as well decree that all texts are the same. Law and science, prose and verses, patents and computer programs - they all use the same 26 letters and occasional punctuation and few foreign words. There are no difference between them (except in degree)!

Which is why I say there isn't a distinction, for the purposes of this discussion, between hardware and software.

If there are no difference then why US5960411 talks mostly about client system, server system, HTML documents and other things which have no relation to the physiology of humans at all while US5288507 talks about advatages of analgetic/antacid combination over the combination of racematic ibuprofen with an analgesic? If the patent indeed is all about how human which should react on 1-click web design then surely observations of human reactions should fill the bulk of patent? And surely "novelity" and "non-obviousness" should be related to this aspect? In particular you should concentrate on the idea that less clicks will lead to larger sales and this observation (tested in real world) should be checked for novelity and non-obviousness and computer-side architecture can be confined to non-protected examples?

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Right. Drama and prose are the same. Law and Science are the same.

Posted Jan 21, 2012 19:10 UTC (Sat) by java_developer (guest, #82469) [Link]

"You may as well decree that all texts are the same. Law and science, prose and verses, patents and computer programs - they all use the same 26 letters and occasional punctuation and few foreign words. There are no difference between them (except in degree)!

You're hiding. You're driving your opponent's argument into a reductio ad absurdum while hoping no one notices that for your own argument the road to absurdum is the briefest of brief, straight shots.

For the one-click patent, no part and no combination of parts exists at a level which is not purely abstract. It's not about single clicks. It's not about clicks at all. It's about a unitary intention emanating from the user.

It doesn't require mice. It doesn't require a specific input device at all. It's about any human computer interface device which transmits a humans intention to the computer whatsoever.

It's not about the specific steps executed by the javascript code. It doesn't require any language to execute any specific instructions of any machine at all.

It's about the abstract resulting end state of a set of abstract entities irrespective of the individual steps through which that ends state was achieved or what the embodiment of the abstract entities are.