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Ah, but... | 115 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Ah, but...
Authored by: PJ on Saturday, March 02 2013 @ 04:28 PM EST
Good point.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Ah, but...
Authored by: macliam on Saturday, March 02 2013 @ 06:37 PM EST

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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