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BGonline.org Forums
copyrighting @ T. Keith
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: copyrighting @ T. Keith (Casper van der Tak)
Date: Wednesday, 15 August 2012, at 12:54 a.m.
My point is that there is no simple summary (such as the one you just proposed) that will cleanly and accurately describe the conditions for patentability of an algorithm (at least in the U.S.).
Patent law was originally formulated primarily with physical machines in mind. The intent was that you couldn't patent the idea of, say, a toaster. You had to "reduce it to practice," i.e., build a working toaster. The philosophy was that ideas are cheap and should be free, but someone who goes to the trouble of actually producing something useful should be rewarded.
In today's age, we know that some algorithms are highly non-obvious, and what is most useful is the algorithm itself rather than the implementation. Not that the implementation isn't necessary and useful, but it's the underlying mathematical algorithm that has the greatest power and versatility and usefulness, and that you would most like to patent. Unfortunately, this state of affairs just doesn't mesh very well with patent law. Depending on what examiner or judge you have to deal with, they may agree with you that a complete description of the algorithm constitutes "reducing it to practice," or they may insist that you can only patent some kind of implementation of the algorithm that manipulates actual stuff in a "useful" manner. But what kind of stuff needs to be manipulated? What is "useful"? It's basically a mess.
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