Comment on the USPTO guidelines restoring software patents | Hacker News Reader

Comment on the USPTO guidelines restoring software patents

uspto.gov

67 pointszoobab22 comments

Ugh, the USPTO is getting really nasty here. If you actually read the proposed rules, they amount to saying "if the Supreme Court hasn't specifically ruled that the matter is patent-ineligible, then we should assume it is patent-eligible," which is a very myopic view of how SCOTUS has consistently ruled on patentability in the past decade.

Of course, the real problem here isn't the USPTO, it's the Federal Circuit. The Federal Circuit's decisions are binding precedent unless overruled by the Supreme Court, and the Federal Circuit has pretty consistently followed the test being cited in the guidelines, so USPTO has to follow. This is despite SCOTUS constantly telling the Federal Circuit that they have it utterly wrong on patentability; they just haven't gotten the message yet.

>This is despite SCOTUS constantly telling the Federal Circuit that they have it utterly wrong on patentability; they just haven't gotten the message yet.

The remedy there is for SCOTUS to make definitive rulings, is it not?

The ideal remedy is for Congress to update the patent law.

My understanding is that the Fed Circuit rulings were very inconsistent, so that for every patent claim there was a ruling saying it was eligible and another saying it was ineligible, with the eligibility possibly changing every time a new ruling came out. The new guidelines are intended to establish a clear procedure that can be applied consistently.

Today is the last day to submit your opinion in the Patent Office's efforts to re-empower software patents contrary to the supreme court's finds. Please consider using the EFF form to submit an opposition letter. https://act.eff.org/action/save-alice-tell-the-patent-office...

A fully expect this administration's agency executives to do whatever it takes to take profit over people. We saw what another agency head in the FCC did for net neutrality at the behest of companies desire for profit over people. The administrations policies here will be similar. Comments to the USPTO will be ignored unless they favor of the position the politics demand.

I opened 3 of the comments at random and they were all word-for-word identical.

Now up to 10 comments and still they are all identical.

Yep. Looks like a coordinated campaign... maybe involving one of those forms you click on that dumps boilerplate into an email so the commentator can be as passive as possible.

Looks like it may have been from the EFF based on this comment:

https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/eligibli...

Yep... here is it...

https://act.eff.org/action/save-alice-tell-the-patent-office...

Those are from a call to action campaign from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

https://act.eff.org/action/save-alice-tell-the-patent-office...

Is there any point to these campaigns? It's not a vote, right? The idea is that they're supposed to collect diverse arguments and get as many informed perspectives as they can. "Lots of people pushed a button to post this comment" is not going to be a very powerful perspective.

Sheer volume is worth something. Perhaps only a little after the fiasco at the FCC with the forged net neutrality comments.

Isn't the FCC process actually explicit about the fact that number-of-votes isn't a factor? I don't know where I read this, but I feel like I read something about the regulatory feedback process and thought to myself "this is exactly how AfD at Wikipedia work" (where voting is also useless and actually counterproductive).

If volume isn't expressly ruled out as a factor it probably ought to be.

For the unfamiliar, AfD is "Articles for Deletion"

Copy&Paste 'comments' on something like this just get binned anyway, same as when the FCC opened comments on the net neutrality issue.

Why are only responses from “Individuals” listed?

Nobody else has submitted their comments yet. The submission window is set to close today.

These were mostly submitted somewhat automatically via the EFF

ALICE is a garbage decision.

SCOTUS should focus on enablement rather than subject matter. https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2164.html

Is there some particular issue with enablement? At least as far as business method software patents go, enablement is often easily satisfied because they're commonly a combination of entirely well understood features.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com