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Something? | 335 comments | Create New Account
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Something?
Authored by: Ian Al on Wednesday, July 11 2012 @ 01:58 AM EDT
I know what you mean, but that has been abused and misused by patent lawyers
with mirroring (which is an obscene abuse of the law).

Patented processes and methods are only infringed when people use them. Things
are things used by people to carry out the process or method.

An example of an outrageously egregious misuse of patent law is Microsoft v.
AT&T. The codec at issue is a process of uncompressing a mathematically
compressed audio file using a specific algorithm.

The Supreme Court opined that the process was infringed by placing the computer
program that, when loaded into memory and executed by a general purpose computer
processor by a person had the potential for that person to carry out the process
by applying the computer program tool to a file previously encoded using the
mathematical algorithm.

It's like finding the manufacture of a screwdriver is an infringement on my
patented method of building an auto using a screwdriver.

No, it's worse than that! It is like finding that the loading of the CNC program
in the CNC machine for the production of the screwdriver infringes on my
patented auto-building method.

I despair of the Federal Circuit. They consider that a process patent is
infringed by making a tool to carry out part of the process. How they can get
this so wrong is impossible to understand.

---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid!

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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