Re: [Fsfe-uk] Software patent MEP response

[Alex Hudson]

On Mon, May 19, 2003 at 01:33:26PM +0100, Mike Taylor wrote:
> Me too -- I was pleased to meet everyone and to get a bit more insight
> into the wide range of things that are going on (including suing
> Microsoft!  Go, Ian!  :-)  Although the last couple of talks (DRM and
> Patents) were pretty damned scary.

Nothing to do with Ciaran and Martin, I trust ;) 

I think the last four or so speakers did very well to work within the 
time constraints we had, I'm also glad we got to hear from everyone.

> I don't see any way that this could get enshrined in a legal document,
> but I think you could come up with a sort of "Turing test" for whether
> a software patent is sufficiently innovative to be worthy of
> consideration by doing something like this.
> 
>       Pick a random half-decent hacker and give him the
>       patent application.  She has 24 hours in which to read
>       and understand it, and produce a working
>       implementation.  If she can do it, the patent is
>       deemed NP-Obvious and thrown out.

Him/she? Some hacker ;) (I believe 'he' is the neutral term, isn't it? 
Richard would probably know...)

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there any way such a test could get in the
document, because I suspect the test needs to be conducted by someone
who is not going to be 'versed in the state of the art'. 

The idea (as I understand it) is that the idea should be non-obvious 
before someone is shown the patent application. But to me, that doesn't
mean that it would be non-obvious if J Random Hacker wasn't able to 
conceive of it. I'm not sure how you could ever judge whether something
is 'obvious', which is probably part of the problem.

Cheers,

Alex.