Well, it seems to me that the CAFC seem totally muddled with regard to
subject matter. As far as I know, the validity of Beauregard claims has
not been tested in court. (In Re Beauregard became moot at the CAFC
before trial because the PTO withdrew their objection to
patent-eligibility.)
Beauregard claims are illogical. If one is
claiming a manufacture, then surely the claimed properties should be claimed as
intrinsic properties of the manufacture. Whereas how a computer reads a
computer-readable medium depends on all sorts of conventions and properties like
what operating system is running, whether the stuff read off the
computer-readable medium is machine code, byte code, executable script of
whatever.
Similarly, consider the CAFC hangups in CLS v. Alice.
Judge Moore in particular is insistent that claims that superficially appear to
be drawn to a machine (involving computing devices communicating over networks)
obviously are drawn to a machine, and thus are without doubt patentable under
101. But how can a machine manufacture irrevocable time-invariant
obligations. Surely claim limitations on what purports to be a machine
should be limitations on physical operation, outputs and inputs that affect
their physical properties. But the fact that a value stored on a data-storage
medium is an obligation, is irrevocable, is time-invariant, etc. surely concerns
how people, legal systems etc. interpret the output of the machine, limit how
the machine is to be used, and have nothing whatsoever to do with the
machine considered as a device in the physical world. (This distinguishes
Alappat from later horrors: at least the smoother-seeming anti-aliased
curve on the oscilloscope display was a manifestation of the physical quality of
the output. Consider a digital camera. Should improvements to the camera that
come about through improvements to the digital image-processing operation be
patentable improvements in the art of making cameras?) [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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