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The Philosophical Perspective | 756 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
The Philosophical Perspective
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, July 23 2012 @ 05:38 PM EDT
Replying to my own objection about "facts aren't patentable":

*Discoveries* are patentable. That's why you can have
pharmaceutical patents. To the extent that the data in a
program consists of previously-known facts, those data would
not be patentable. (I pity the jury who has to sort through
and decide which bits of data were previously known!)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The Philosophical Perspective
Authored by: PolR on Monday, July 23 2012 @ 05:41 PM EDT
I will clarify a few things.

There is in patent law precedents that says "mental steps" executed by
a human being are abstract ides and not patentable. But algorithmic steps
executed by a machine are not mental steps according to some other case law.
This distinction seems to me logically inconsistent and I was wondering whether
the Chinese room experiment could be used to illustrate the point.

There is in patent law something called the printed matter doctrine which says
printed content and similar material (databases, video or music recording etc)
never distinguish from the prior art unless it is functionally related to the
underlying physical substrate. You may never infringe on a patent with printed
matter alone. I was wondering whether we could use the Chinese room experiment
to show the functional relationship between the symbols and the human mind is
identical to the functional relationship between computers and data.

And yes, there are policy implications in the interactions between Free Speech
and patent law. This is one of the justifications of the prohibition on patents
on abstract ideas if I understand correctly.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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