A software patent without source code (or at least psuedo code) is effectively patenting "all possible implementions of this idea". That should be considered too broad.
That's what a patent is though. Protection for the idea, not the implementation.
You can disagree that software concepts can be patented (I tend towards this view), but you can't have a patent that only protects a particular implementation. That would be copyright.
>In Diamond v. Chakrabarty, the Supreme Court found that Congress intended patentable subject matter to "include anything under the sun that is made by man." ... However, the Court also stated that this broad definition has limits and does not embrace every discovery. According to the Court, the laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas are not patentable.
>"something that makes light from electricity"
So yeah probably too abstract to be patentable. However something like "something that makes light from electricity by passing it through a filament" might be enough to make it not abstract.
> That's what a patent is though. Protection for the idea, not the implementation.
No, you can't patent "drug that alleviates headaches", you can only patent a specific formulation, and a competitor is still free to create any other formulation that achieves the same result.
Patents are supposed to cover non-obvious invented ideas - "drug that alleviates [condition]" doesn't sound like it can be invented, since drugs are commonly used to treat conditions, so there's no new invention here. The ideas you can patent are the use of a molecule for a purpose and the method of producing it. That's already pretty broad.
> "drug that alleviates [condition]" doesn't sound like it can be invented, since drugs are commonly used to treat conditions, so there's no new invention here
It's been attempted. They invent and patent X as a "method to do Y", and then try to sue others who do Y via some means other than X.
My point was that the original description of patents was not precise enough and implied that you could patent Y rather than X.
I have never heard of people using method patents to sue over methods other than things similar to methods in the claims. Usually, the claims are as general as you can get away with, and cover a lot more than just the actual "X" that they are introducing to the market. When someone does something similar to "X" without reading the patent, they can easily be walking in one of the claim sets that has been patented in the "method to do Y" patent. Most people who want to copy something do it in a fairly unoriginal way.
Still, patent claims are never as broad as "drug to alleviate headaches" or anything similar.
Do you mean that if I had invented a "machine for airborne transportation", such as, say, a hot-air balloon, I could collect royalties on jet airplanes?
If your claims were sufficiently written and not obvious in light of the prior art, yes. In this case, your claims would have to contend with literally millennia of prior art up to the story of Icarus, and including the drawings of Leonardo Da Vinci.
This kind of super-broad patent enforcement happened with 3D printing, and is still happening with e-ink technology. In both cases, the patents didn't have centuries of prior art covering what would otherwise have been entire industries, and could protect their monopolies for 20 years.
But you can patent your formulation in a way that will encompass many other formulations that might be distinct from your preferred implementing formulation... this is a basic tenet of patent law.
Wouldn't I be able to patent the idea of landing a rocket using a reverse launch process and stabilization fins and jets, even if I'm not even capable of landing a stone? If the implementation doesn't matter than I just locked everyone else out of landing rockets for decades.
The idea is worth something but so is the implementation because ideas are generic and the more specific you make them, the more you actually define an implementation, in the physical world at least.
Your patent has to fully describe how the invention works. And if it doesn't work at all, then who cares if you own a patent for it, it's a useless invention anyway.
If your rocket does work, then yes being able to lock everyone else out of it for decades is the entire point.
But once those decades are over, anyone else can copy your idea, which has been documented for all of eternity. There's an almost endless list of inventions before patents that were never made public, and nobody knows how they worked.
Unfortunately, that's the idea for how patents are supposed to work. In the real world what we have is patent trolls.
> Your patent has to fully describe how the invention works.
Exactly, a patent can't be just for "an idea" which is intrinsically generic but rather for the actual implementation with details. Patenting ideas would probably be the very definition of an overly broad patent.
> even if I'm not even capable of landing a stone?
No, because the disclosure has to enable a person of ordinary skill in the art to practice the full scope of the invention. This is called the “enablement” requirement.
Law is about word-smithing, so apologies for this:
You patent an invention, not an idea. Section 112 says you have to identify the Best Mode of making your invention. Patents are also careful to say "in one embodiment, the invention..."
> you can't have a patent that only protects a particular implementation. That would be copyright.
Yes, you can. Claims are drafted to not be limiting, but it can happen.
“ That's what a patent is though. Protection for the idea, not the implementation.”
So in theory an evil corporation could patent popular design patterns? Can a company patent the decorator pattern?
In concept you cannot (enforce) patented sky castles.
But you may patent them.
A patent becomes worthless when it is invalidated after you try to enforce it. The enforcement proceedings are the real legal test of a patent. The mere granting of a patent doesn't prove validty. Contrary to what lay people usually expect.
The reasons for having this sort of system are mostly diplomatic, economic, and administrative, so far as a I understand.
A) The patent system is an international patchwork
B) For obvious reasons testing all inventions comprehensively is extremely time consuming. It would increase the cost to register patents.
C) It's far more efficient to let the market sort it out by invalidating patents on sky castles when someone tries to enforce them.
> For obvious reasons testing all inventions comprehensively is extremely time consuming
that's true, but the 112 section of the statute says you have to prove that you "have" the invention, with a Written Description and an Enabling specification. Examiners do make 112 rejections all the time. This merely implements the intentions of 112.
I think it's worth pointing out that 112 (and other common rejections like 101) may have more public writing about them than almost any other part of the law since every patent rejection is public record, but it's still pretty subjective at the examination stage.
One of the more interesting documents that accompany some patents is the examiners opinion as to the novelty, inventiveness and applicability of the patent.
And this was what tripped up my team for years as we tried to patent a process we used to control a machine. No matter how we tried to narrow the claims, the examiner was always able to find some obscure prior art somewhere that they could use to reject the application.
Finally, after about 3 years of trying, our IP attorney suggested we drop it.
It was probably this more than anyone else that made me realize that Patent Examiners are really, really good at their jobs and not just rubber stamps, as the software community seems to think.
