Comment by thyrsus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thyrsus | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, it is the most important statement, and I disagree with it.

Software expressions are a form of lambda calculus, i.e., mathematics, and ought to be outside the proper domain of patents, whereas the proper domain of patents is the material. 1+1 is always 2. One drop of water + another drop of water is sometimes one drop of water and sometimes two drops of water and sometimes something else. One ball-bearing + another ball bearing is usually two ball bearings, but one needs to be careful about their environment, or you end up with something that no longer constitutes two ball bearings - and that is the crux of the matter. If your patent is intrinsically implemented by 25 or more Schrödinger modelled actual entities (e.g., just about any molecule larger than H2O) you're now operating in the material world, the old rules apply, and good luck to you. The Platonic 0 and 1 and the finite (though arbitrarily large) operations on them should not be bound by those rules.

And yes, it is a religious belief - in mathematics.

Software is represented and conceptualized as math. But when you put fingers to keyboard you set in motion a bunch of electrons and magnetic domains; you're assembling mechanical objects into a complex physical machine, a computing system that's in a new physical state it never existed in before. Nothing about the process couldn't be done instead with hydraulics or gears and levers instead of electrons and magnetic domains, except it would be a lot bigger, slower, harder to ensure a precise 1:1 relationship with our mathematical abstraction of it, and harder to ignore its physical nature.

Granted. But surely the prior art on bits being transmitted through a general purpose computing machine, whether mechanical, magnetic, mental, musical, or magical, is now unassailable. What is novel is not physical, what is physical is not novel.

So every software implementation of anything is not novel? Are you really sure about that?

I am wrapping up a tremendously complex and awesome patent application today that my client is essentially implementing in hardware, but there is absolutely software involved, and I also drafted the claims so that a bunch of stuff my client happens to be implementing in custom ASICs is also covered if the same magic were also done by a general purpose computer running the same functionality in software. It's not a distinction almost anyone will ever be able to tell the difference with (except the custom silicon is going to function faster than a software-on-general-purpose-computer could do). Are you sure that difference would automatically make it not novel and undeserving of a patent?

Sorry I didn't see this earlier.

I believe there is no meaningful distinction between an algorithm running on general purpose hardware and the same algorithm running on custom hardware. If you'd enforce your patent by claiming that someone else was barred from implementing an algorithm you own, I'd say that "what is novel is not physical". Algorithms are not within the purview of the patent office (or I should say, should not be).

If you'd enforce your patent by saying that someone else was barred from inventing your custom hardware to run this fast algorithm, I guess I'd want to know if the leap from the algorithm to the specific ASIC is "obvious to one skilled in the art".

"you're now operating in the material world, the old rules apply, and good luck to you"

That's where patents and most of us live. Seeing a patent as bad is not logical. Seeing the potential to improve on someone else's idea and acquire your very own patent is logical.

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