Hacker News Reader

Comment by petegrif | Hacker News Reader

"... and that's the reason you have to have a patent lawyer because the language makes no sense. In US it’s technically English but it’s not really English. It’s like using English words but there are different meanings to them. There is a whole different set of rules about what things mean when they do a patent application."

Well guess what - that is not unusual when everyday words migrate into a technical area and the law is such an area. To complain about words having specialist meanings in a specific subject area strikes me as naive.

View on HN

While I certainly agree that it can seem naive, when it comes to law it is taken to such an extreme that it's almost to the point that definition of "is" isn't "is" anymore.

In patents 'a' is plural.

Just try and write a patent in Word - it grammar highlights the whole document!

Yes, it's naive. They're naively believing the legal fiction that patents are supposedly required to enable a reasonably skilled practitioner in the field of the patent to be able to reduce the invention to practice in a straightforward way from reading the patent.

But you're right, patents are for lawyers, not software practitioners. We should expect them to use a technical language that they, not we, understand.

Bear in mind that a patent consists of several sections and these sections vary a great deal in how intuitive the use of language is.

The section which Linus is almost certainly referring to is the claims. These are indeed expressed in a technical vocabulary which is tricky for a lay person to penetrate.

But the section which is supposed to enable a person ordinarily skilled in the art to be able to make the invention is not written in such vocabulary. On the contrary, it typically written in language which is perfectly comprehensible. The difficulty if any is in having the patience to read a tediously long description with endless references to diagrams.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com