Topic: No more patenting abstract concepts

[Nemesis]

Link to full article

The patent system is intended to protect and promote advances in science and technology, not ideas about how to structure commercial transactions....

Affording patent protection to business methods lacks constitutional and statutory support, serves to hinder rather than promote innovation and usurps that which rightfully belongs in the public domain....

State Street has launched a legal tsunami....Patents granted in the wake of State Street have ranged from the somewhat ridiculous to the truly absurd.

I haven't read the whole thing but apparently they are going back towards patenting implementations not concepts.  Patent a method of trapping mice not the whole concept of trapping mice for example.  Most software patents may be out the window. 

[Wraith 413]

 One case that comes to mind is of someone who applied for a patent based on the Star Trek Transporter. They were  trying to obtain a patent strictly on the concept, not the actual technology/ machines to "teleport" something.  Software is something that is tangible, so I don't see any of those patents being thrown out. It appears to me that someone is actually applying some common sense to the whole patent process.

[Nemesis]

A lot of software patents fall into the "Software that accomplishes this" style without any logic of how it is done let alone example code.  They design the patent application to be as vague as possible to cover as many implementations as possible. 

Personally I think that software patents should go back to requiring a working model and source code to be acceptable along with logic diagrams to explain how it is implemented.  After all storage of computer programs and data don't take that much physical space.  Also the patent examiners ought to be programmers to evaluate (and compile source) the code and program to see if it does what the patent application says.

I think that just a few years ago a patent was issued on the "bubble sort".  That is so obvious that I reinvented it myself way back when I was trying to teach myself PC Basic on a PCJr.  So a lot of software patents are bogus.

This really brings a lot of doubt on Microsofts periodic claims that Linux distributions violate some (unspecified) patents that they hold.